Re: OT: UK national curriculum

[Michael A Hamblin <michaelh@utdallas.edu>]

On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Doug Loss wrote:

>   I just heard that the UK national curriculum will be dropping all
> references to Winston Churchill.  Is that true?  If so, what are they
> thinking?

That's one of the things I hope that seul-edu (or, perhaps rather an
open-textbook project) would be able to prevent, rewriting of history. The
biggest example in the US I can think of is attempts to label Thomas
Jefferson a racist and sexist for penning the words "...we hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...". I don't
think history textbooks should be pandering to the latest social crisis of
the day, but should present the whole of history as it happened, both the
good, and the bad. In a simliar vain, there's a general dumbing-down of
the curriculum, which unfortunatly I was caught in the fore-front of when
I was in school (1983-1996).

I had been thinking of this as invaluable, keeping history telling history
and not leaving things out or trying to analyse their own conclusions in
the students brains, but I didn't want to talk about it on the list
because it's a topic I tend to get ranting about :) 

--
Michael Hamblin            http://www.utdallas.edu/~michaelh/
michaelh@utdallas.edu      http://www.ductape.net/
UTD Linux User Group       Engineering and Computer Science Support x2997
                           "Two, Four, Six, Eight - SMP is really great!"