I find the Conservative Woman blog an interesting, if sometimes challenging read. It’s well written and even when I don’t personally agree with their writers, as I don’t on the issues of abortion(1) and reproductive technology(2), the quality of the articles more than makes up for the fact that I may disagree with some points. It’s also good to see a social conservative viewpoint put in an engaging way. Sometimes I find social conservatives considerably more tolerant of alternative views than Leftists are tolerant of social conservative views.
Where the Conservative Woman really stands out, at least for me, is in its pieces on education. They’ve consistently called for higher standards in teaching and for vigorous competitive exams. Conservative Woman has also highlighted some of the growing number of instances of Left wing propaganda being inserted into curricula.
In this piece from CW, we see one of their education specialists, Chris McGovern speaking about how the Leftist have managed to corrupt the history curriculum with a large dollop of pro-immigration propaganda.
Chris McGovern in the Conservative Woman (with Fahrenheit211’s comments in plain text) said:
“Two of the three major exam boards have included ‘immigration’ in the new exam to be taught from 2016. Currently, the specifications are awaiting final approval by the exam regulator, Ofqual. The version to be offered by the OCR Board – “Immigration to Britain c1000 to 2010”- is illustrative.
The board is very clear about its aim for the new history exam:
“We have updated traditional and popular topics at GCSE and combined them with new and innovative options that aim to address comments in the wider historical community regarding the prevalence of white, male dominated history.
“One of the ways that we have are addressing this is by working with BASA [“The Black and Asian Studies Association”] on our new migration options in paper 2 and paper 3 (J410/08 and J410/11).”
It’s worrying enough that Leftists have created a self-perpetuating oligarchy in the world of education, but now that exam boards are working with, and being influenced by special interest groups, then it can only be seen as an attack on academic truthfulness. Yes, there were allegedly African soldiers at Hardknot Castle in Cumbria and there has been a history of small numbers of immigrants coming to these Islands, and it’s good to learn about such things, but what is being thrown out to make way for this ‘newspeak’ version of history? It seems like the exam boards are revolting against reality as British history has, like that of other countries in Europe, been more often than not been white and male dominated. I’d like to know what this ‘wider historical community’ is and whether or not it is really only a bunch of leftist historians punching above their weight and elbowing out traditionalist historical views?
Mr McGovern added:
“As Education Secretary, Michael Gove called on schools to stop the trashing of our past. Disastrously, he lost his battle to require the teaching of the landmark personalities and events of British history as part of the national curriculum. Now, we can see that GCSE history, too, is being subverted to provide a vehicle for a politically correct views on history in general and on immigration, in particular.
Mr McGovern is correct, this is an example of the downgrading of the teaching of core British history and its replacement with a leftist politically correct narrative, that may often bear very little in common with historical truth.
Turning history lessons from a timeline of the events that have ultimately created us does not only impoverish our children who deserve to be told the history of the UK, but it also have worrying political implications especially as Mr McGovern said, at a time when Britain is reassessing its relationship with the European Union.
Mr McGovern continued:
This new syllabus will ensure that, at the same time as the EU referendum campaign and debates on border controls, pupils will be given some strong and seductive arguments in favour of seeing current immigration as a natural evolution of a long historical process. According to campaigning think-tank MigrationWatch UK, however, current levels of immigration, resulting from ‘free movement’ within the EU, are at levels unprecedented in the history of Britain and are far from being a natural evolution:
“There have always been episodes of migration to Britain but…those episodes were small and demographically insignificant until the Second World War… In the late 1990s the pace and scale of migration increased to a level without historical precedent… This massive increase dwarfs the scale of any previous inflow in our history.”
This crucial numerical aspect of the immigration narrative is missing from the syllabus. The EU receives a passing ‘fag end’ reference at the end of the syllabus -“issues raised by EU ‘open borders’” – but there is no requirement specifically to consider the issue of numbers raised by MigrationWatch UK.”
Read the rest of this excellent article here:
I’ve said many times on here that Britain has always had some immigration, but the levels of these immigration waves were tiny in comparison with the sort of immigration that occurred from the mid 1990’s onwards.
To give you an idea of the numbers issue, that the exam boards are not seemingly addressing: During the great migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom at its peak was 150,000 and that was between 1881 and 1914. It took 33 years for 150,000 to move to Britain, which is ample time for that community to find their feet, integrate and in some cases fashion new forms of worship and religious observance that fitted in with British life. Fast forward to 2014 and the Office of National Statistics have stated that 231,000 long term migrants arrived in the United Kingdom, between March 2013 and March 2014 and this was an increase from 175,000 immigrants between March 2012 and March 2013.
It is plain to see that Britain has an immigration problem. It took over 30 years for Britain to absorb and integrate 150,000 successfully. Now we are taking more than that figure in only one year. On top of that far too many of these modern immigrants are either EU workers pulling down average wages because an oversupply of labour or the sort of third worlders and others who bring crime, welfare poncing and dangerous religio-political ideologies. Britain has had a very good deal out of some of those groups, such as Jews, Germans, Sikhs, Hindus etc, who have emigrated here and they have brought new businesses and industries as well as useful cultural and intellectual capital. I really don’t think I could say the same about those making up the current immigration invasion.
It is dishonest of educationalists and teachers to tell our children that the massive levels of immigration that are laying waste to our towns and cities and our public services, are normal, they are not normal, especially not when compared to those previous immigration waves.
This change to the GCSE History curriculum and the exams associated with it quite plainly a shift towards political indoctrination and away from the honest teaching of history. This debasement of the history examination shows just why it is so very important for parents to keep a very close eye on what their children are being taught at school. The line between truth and guff has been well and truly crossed with this and it is vital that parents monitor the content of curricula, challenge dishonest teachers and teaching and where necessary correct their children and give them proper information to counteract the pap and propaganda that their teachers are feeding them. If we as parents don’t make a fuss at the school gate over this there is no knowing what sort of evidence-free drivel our children’s heads will be filled with.
Links
Conservative Woman article on the politicisation of History examinations
Information on Jewish London with immigration figures from the Great Migration
http://www.visitjewishlondon.com/uk-jewish-life/history
Office of National Statistics figures on current immigration levels.
For the record, in case anybody is interested, my position on
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Abortion. I believe in a woman’s right to choose but I do believe that there is a case for reducing the time limit for abortion but this must be coupled with policies that encourage men and women to be more sexually and reproductively responsible.
Seeing my own child in the womb via ultrasound, made me reconsider whether abortion at 24 weeks was too late in a pregnancy and it made me wonder whether an earlier limit, say 10 to 12 weeks would be a better limit. For this lower limit to work termination services must be much more readily available to women but also men and women should take more responsibility about making better reproductive choices.
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Reproductive Technology. I don’t consider that there is anything inherently wrong with reproductive tech. It has helped those whose medical conditions have rendered them unable to conceive naturally, helped doctors to understand the reproductive system and technologies such as pre-implantation diagnoses have helped to prevent the birth of babies with horrendous congenital conditions. If you could use science to prevent a human suffering from cystic fibrosis, spina bifida Downs Syndrome or any one of the horrific congenital conditions that a baby could be born with, wouldn’t you do it?
why let the truth get in the way of a good story.
or in this cae
why let history get in the way of a good agenda.
left unchallenged I’d expect nothing less than a load of downplaying certain events and overplaying of others.
left wingers party of choice are just a joke party.
listening to them for years carping on about a double dip recession, threatening high unemployment , their sickening pandering to the islamists .
there ludicrously dangerous proposal to ban the imaginary islamiphobia.
now, they’re back tracking on an e u referendum.
harmen with her pink bus and millipede with his biblical style tablets.
but, as a recent survey suggests , todays youth seem more astute than they’re often given credit for.
and a good proportion wouldn’t touch these losers with a barge pole
“Immigration to Britain c1000 to 2010″
So that’s the high-water mark of the Viking invasion, followed by the Norman invasion of 1066, then bugger all else statistically important until the Windrush and Nulabour opened the floodgates. I’d say that the impact of the first two is qualitatively about the same as the last one; so spot on, Ofqual (or whatever they call themselves).
I’ve just been reading a review in the Spectator of a new biography of Dr Samuel Johnson’s black Jamaican ex-slave servant, to whom he left the bulk of his estate and who was apparently one of 3,000 blacks in London at the time. I suspect that figure must actually refer to England as a whole, but, given the smaller population at the time, a significant figure nonetheless.
A significant figure I agree but it could apply across England rather than be just London. I’ve seen a rough guestimate that puts London’s population in the mid 18th Cent at 650,000 +/- 50k. This would mean that the 3000 blacks in London would constitute roughly 0.5% of the city’s population, which I feel would not be unexpected in the capital city of a busy trading nation.
A similar thing is happening in France with the Socialist government.
http://galliawatch.blogspot.fr/2015/05/the-demolition-of-french-identity.html