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Originally posted by Daryus Aden:

My only memories of RE are from getting into trouble for mocking the good lord. But shit happens. I can't remember a single person taking that class even slightly seriously.

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The lessons of Empire
(Filed: 15/07/2004)


Few teenagers today learn about the British Empire, says Andrew Cunningham

Fifty years ago, their names tripped off the tongue: Clive of India, Wolfe of Quebec, Captain Cook, Mungo Park, Livingstone and Stanley, Baden-Powell of Mafeking, Kitchener of Khartoum. Every schoolchild grew up knowing these imperial greats. On the wall of most classrooms was a map of the world, one-third coloured pink, as a reminder.

Now, 50 years of 'progressive' education and misguided history teaching have done what these figures' opponents never quite managed � killed them off. Ask any teenager today about the illustrious names on this list and you'll meet with a complete blank. As far as history teaching in schools is concerned, the British Empire may as well not have happened. Our children are never taught about it.

These are the unsurprising findings of Ofsted, which complained this week that schools spend "insufficient time" learning about the Empire. "Insufficient time"? Surely, the understatement of the year. Ofsted's inspectors found that pupils aged 11 to 16 receive a mere three or four lessons on the subject in five full years at school.

The Empire barely features on the GCSE syllabuses, which devote most of their attention to trendy topics, such as Hitler, Stalin, the General Strike and Cold War. Our teenagers know all about the Nazis and trade unionism, but nothing about the Empire upon which the sun, once so famously, never set.

What little information does filter through tends to be sickeningly one-sided: condemning the British Empire as some brutal aberration. One BBC website aimed at schoolchildren came up with this analysis: "The Empire came into greatness by killing lots of people... and stealing their countries." The reality, of course, is that the British Empire was special largely because it was based on commerce, not conquest.

As Ofsted argues: "Pupils should know about the Empire." Why not put it more strongly? It should be top of the syllabus. Yes, of course the Empire can be a sensitive subject (though not, perhaps, as sensitive as its detractors would have us believe) and should be taught in the context of its own, vastly different world order.

Pupils should be aware that its legacy can be interpreted differently, according to beliefs and background. They should also realise (as if they need reminding) that imperialism � whether British, French or American � is no longer acceptable. But, in addition to being the biggest Empire the world has ever seen, ours was also the most benign. It deserves better than to be consigned to oblivion, 100 years after its Edwardian heyday.

One fact is certain: the British Empire won't be so easily forgotten around the globe. From Canada to Calcutta, the West Indies to Gibraltar, the Empire has left a permanent legacy: the English language, a strong sense of liberty, an impartial legal system and stable parliamentary government.

To this day, India remains the world's largest democracy. From Calais down to the Cape of Good Hope lie the graves of the men and women who died building that Empire: who died believing in a cause that, a century on, seems so politically incorrect and flawed. In superb poems, such as Thomas Hardy's Drummer Hodge (dedicated to the British dead at Spion Kop, South Africa, 1900), their memory lives on.

Rudyard Kipling, of course, was the chief writer of Empire. It's easy to sneer today at some of his sayings � "the White Man's burden", "East is East, and West is West", "Come you back to Mandalay". We conveniently forget the strong sense of sacrifice that underpinned his work and the ways of Empire. It was Kipling who wrote: "You're a better man than I am" of the native servant, Gunga Din � and meant it.

And we delude ourselves if we think the Empire can be quietly forgotten. So many of us are still bound to it. Not in the sense of grand ideals, events and achievements, maybe, but in the mementos and memories we inherit from our own pasts. Uncle Charlie's medals, Great Uncle Trev's pith helmet, Great Grandad's battered trunk that went all the way to Bombay and back. This is history brought to life. Nearly every UK citizen has relatives spread all over the world. Long-lost cousins living in places whose names alone evoke the imperial connection: British Columbia, New South Wales, Nova Scotia, New England.

Its legacy is all around us back home, too. In the names of our streets; in the time-stained statues in our squares; in our language, with its mix of imported words from former colonies (khaki, jodhpurs, bungalow, mufti). The imperial legacy lives on in the fact that Britain is now so ethnically diverse: with so many from the former colonies having, in turn, come to the "mother country". The Empire has brought people from Pakistan, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Jamaica to live together in Britain in relative harmony.

Now, more forward-thinking historians, such as Niall Ferguson, are at last giving the Empire credit for its many achievements. As Ferguson says in a recent book: "The Empire maintained a global peace, unmatched before or since."

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Originally posted by TSN:

"Just a grope and wnk..."

That was a rather inopportune time to demonstrate your inability to operate a keyboard...

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Yeah....I was bust cleaning up the house for your information though.

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Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.
-Aeschylus, Agamemnon