It is as if the capricious gods of rhetoric and irony smiled upon me this morning when I opened the paper and read an article by the never boring (but only occasionally sensible) Peter Hitchens concerning education and the teaching of history. Entitled “So what was your child taught today, sympathy for Mr Hitler?“Hitchens laments the “slow-motion national suicide” that is taking place in the history classes of our childrens schools.

His ire is directed at a worksheet intended for 13 year olds being taught about the Spanish Armada, who are asked to mentally role-play being a Spanish sailor about to set sail, to explore the motivations for the would be invasion of England and to elucidate upon these said motives by drawing up an “anti-english” poster. Further to his already ludicrous outrage, apparently the poor children also had to draw a spider chart illustrating at least four reasons why Spain was angry enough with England that they invasion could have been considered.

What is wrong with this? What indeed is Hitchens question, which he then boldly expounds to us; it is because if we swap the words Spanish with German, the event Armada for the Blitz and then finally Spanish sailor for Luftwaffe pilot we shouldcatch his drift.

Leaving aside the fallacies of the average argumentum ad hitlerum not to mention the barely comparable circumstances of the these two historical threats to England, what else is wrong with Hitchen’s rant. Unable to better himself in presenting the absurdity of his own argument I shall simply leave you to read his words and insightful analysis.

Now, I have actually checked to see how Spanish children are taught the same subject, and I have established beyond doubt that they are not asked to draw an anti-Spanish poster.

Not so long ago, they were taught that Francis Drake, that hero of my youth, was a wicked pirate.

Good for the Spanish.

They at least understand that national history, taught to the young in schools, is the lore of the tribe, the basis of our identity and pride.

It is not a matter of seeing all sides of the argument or working out why other people might have wanted to occupy, plunder and enslave us, as if that wasn’t pretty obvious.

I am in awe at the breathtaking arrogance of the man (ad hominem aside) that history is the “lore of the tribe”, lest anyone need that to be translated for them, I believe he is saying that history is propaganda. That the “basis of our identity and pride” is the myth of our national history, and not actually an account (albeit subjective) of a series of events and motivations.

Pupils are exposed to conflicting scraps of information, grandly called “sources”, and asked to make up their own minds – which means they are robbed of pride in their nation, and left confused and vulnerable to the BBC’s anti-British propaganda and the Leftist monopoly that runs the universities.

Oh I see, so there is something wrong in allowing pupils to “make up their own minds” or in other words to think for themselves?

I’m afraid as Peter Hitchens is well aware (hence the vicious nature of this diatribe) the only propaganda that is taking place here is the notion that recieved historical accounts are fixed, accurate, unbiased, precise and in no need of deconstructive analysis. I guess the nature of his arguing is so vicious purely because the very myths that he extols are the ones used constantly to justify and uphold the status quo of this rotten country that he so admires.

In my previous post Renaissance musings I declare that the postmodern slant on history is one of its great gifts to modern scholarship although by no means does it deserve all the credit for the Scientific method also provides the noble tools of falsification and verification. Tools that when applied sensibly (and as a postmodernist may request sceptically too), allow for us to present history as a reasoned account of events, motives, and causal connections and not simply the self-justifying myths that the establishment wants us to hear and know and think to be true.