- Feb 5, 2002
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Educational institutions are warping our history to make political points in the present.
Schools, the BBC and practically every UK institution with an educational arm have become completely lost to identity politics. Just take the bizarre attempts to suggest that various historical figures were black, when in fact they were not.
The Telegraph reports that some schoolchildren are now being taught that St Hadrian of Canterbury, a Dark Age abbot from seventh-century England, was a black man. This claim appears in a presentation devised for pupils aged seven to 11. It is distributed by a company called Twinkl, which provides educational resources to teachers.
The slight problem here is that Hadrian was not black. He was born in what is now Libya and was possibly of Berber descent. Apparently, Hadrian’s historical significance or personal achievements are uninteresting unless he can (falsely) be presented as a black British trailblazer. Similar claims about him appear in resources by HFL Education and English Heritage.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. The BBC’s Horrible Histories series recently put out a song, called ‘Been Here From The Start’, which implies that black people have always lived in Britain in big numbers – a claim that doesn’t really survive contact with the evidence.
While we often don’t appreciate the relative diversity of Britain in earlier centuries, this song was clearly another crude – and nonsensical – attempt to make political points in the present. It seems that many people in education think rewriting history is the best way to promote diversity in the here and now.
Continued below.
www.spiked-online.com
Schools, the BBC and practically every UK institution with an educational arm have become completely lost to identity politics. Just take the bizarre attempts to suggest that various historical figures were black, when in fact they were not.
The Telegraph reports that some schoolchildren are now being taught that St Hadrian of Canterbury, a Dark Age abbot from seventh-century England, was a black man. This claim appears in a presentation devised for pupils aged seven to 11. It is distributed by a company called Twinkl, which provides educational resources to teachers.
The slight problem here is that Hadrian was not black. He was born in what is now Libya and was possibly of Berber descent. Apparently, Hadrian’s historical significance or personal achievements are uninteresting unless he can (falsely) be presented as a black British trailblazer. Similar claims about him appear in resources by HFL Education and English Heritage.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. The BBC’s Horrible Histories series recently put out a song, called ‘Been Here From The Start’, which implies that black people have always lived in Britain in big numbers – a claim that doesn’t really survive contact with the evidence.
While we often don’t appreciate the relative diversity of Britain in earlier centuries, this song was clearly another crude – and nonsensical – attempt to make political points in the present. It seems that many people in education think rewriting history is the best way to promote diversity in the here and now.
Continued below.
No, St Hadrian of Canterbury was not black
Educational institutions are warping our history to make political points in the present.
www.spiked-online.com
