[true history] not some milksop concoction

Melanie Phillips addresses a very simple issue:

[A] report funded by the Department for Education and Skills said:

‘Teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned. Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.’

This is the multi-cultural do-goodism which has a noble basis but an impossible implementation. Let's face it, any normal, reasonable citizen is going to be friendly, rather than antagonistic to another person he meets.

Would you seriously refuse to shake a black man's hand or talk to a Chinese?

However, there is a simple principle involved here. Britain is Britain, with a Judaeo-Christian tradition and that's that. Therefore, schools should reflect that, using the texts which have been built up over the centuries, warts and all. It's our true history. How can I put it more simply?

It happened.

Therefore, no amount of revisionist rewriting to make it more feminine, homosexual or ethnic friendly is going to alter one jot of what happened. Christmas is Christmas, Easter is Easter and that's that. If we want to celebrate Ramadan or Hanukah in schools, which we did when I was teaching, then these were additional celebrations.

Additional.

What they in no way comprised was some sort of hotch-potch winterval construction with neither basis nor authenticity beyond the vaguely altruistic feeling of school teachers. This lukewarm all-inclusive nonsense is total balderdash.

Particularly when it is not all-inclusive at all but very strongly excludes the Christian tradition and pushes homosexuality as equal in status and value to the norm. This is a serious case of induced curricular imbalance.

As a former head, parents from overseas sent their children to our school [and many others, of course] precisely because we were British and that image they had in their minds had absolutely zero to do with some sort of Brito-Nigerian-Jamaican-Feministic-Homosexual Federation.

I mean - seriously, what is this insanity? Do you really think people visit, seeking some watered-down pseudo-post-modernist Britain?

Yes, be accepting of other ethnicities and by so doing, show the heights our own has reached.

Yes, frown sternly at those who would vilify others but don't damn well try to legislate for it.

Yes, realize there will be homosexuals who have their own lives but don't shove it down our throats or our children's.

Yes, get a bit of reason, a bit of common sense back into what's going on in schools and classrooms.

For goodness sake, let's wake up from this madness and honour our roots, our achievements and create a future which honours our past but looks forward at the same time.