According to a recent survey, pride in British history is at an all-time low, especially among 18 to 24 year-olds.
This worrying trend doesn’t surprise me. Indeed, a revealing and sadly not uncommon conversation I had with a Year 10 class last term goes some way to explaining it. They asked me what I thought about the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles. “Should they be sent back to Greece?” one asked. Initially surprised by an unexpected foray into current affairs, I demurred from committing to a position, concerned that the wrong answer could land me in hot water with my woke colleagues, and aware of my professional obligation to remain neutral.
My pupils’ awareness of such an important issue was encouraging, but a closer examination exposed a troubling ignorance. Every student willing to express an opinion, many with a worrying degree of certitude, said that the marbles should be returned because the “British stole them”. You must also return the Benin Bronzes for the same reason, they collectively opined.
Their use of the words “British” and “you” to address the country responsible for these so-called injustices was striking. I was standing in front of a group of mainly Asian-Brits (I work in a diverse school with a large percentage of Muslim students) who do not feel British. The week before, pupils in the same class decried the fact that we don’t have enough Muslim history on the curriculum. “It’s all about blacks and whites,” they said.
But where are they picking up this one-sided take on the Elgin Marbles and Benin Bronzes, facilitating their estrangement from their home country? Well, notwithstanding the suspicion that ignorant and ideologically driven parents are influencing their kids, anti-British disinformation is everywhere. It is therefore no surprise that they are absorbing a simple, dualistic, good-versus-evil interpretation of history disseminated by many of our self-loathing cultural institutions.
Just look at the BBC’s recent coverage of the spat between Rishi Sunak and the Greek Prime Minister. The corporation has taken to referring to the marbles as the Parthenon Marbles rather than the Elgin Marbles – a transparent, politically motivated nod to the Guardian line (remember, the most-read newspaper in BBC studios) that they belong in Greece.
When it comes to the Benin Bronzes, moreover, the Charity Commission has also drunk the Guardian Kool-Aid, concurring with the paper’s misleading claim that “they [the bronzes] were looted in 1897, when British forces sacked the Benin kingdom, in modern-day Nigeria, burning down the royal palace, exiling the Oba and seizing all royal treasures”. Indeed, in a statement, the commission said that the University of Cambridge is “under a moral obligation” to return the artefacts. It’s amazing that such a little-read newspaper has such prodigious cultural reach.
However, despite the self-loathing milieu that presents Britain as uniquely evil and refuses to consider the context in which the acquisition of these treasures took place – providing much-needed nuance and objectivity – their previous teacher is perhaps most to blame for feeding them misinformation. And she’s no exception, believe me.
She forced the pupils to write to the University of Cambridge, urging the rector to hand the Benin Bronzes back to the Nigerian Government.
In such circumstances, I decided to provide some much-needed balance. Handing back the Bronzes is not quite as straightforward as it first appears. First, their acquisition was not a simple case of colonial theft. According to the historian Andrew Roberts, the expedition involved was in response to the massacre of a peaceful British delegation. The Oba (King) of Benin was a violent, slave-holding monarch who often raided his neighbours to enslave their inhabitants. Furthermore, when the British arrived in Benin, they “found hundreds of dead and dying slaves, some beheaded, crucified or disembowelled”. The expedition saved lives and liberated many of the slaves. It also led to the Oba’s exile and the acquisition of the Bronzes, many soaked in the blood of the sacrificed slaves.
Sending the Bronzes back is understandably opposed by the descendants of those enslaved by the Oba – their ancestors, after all, paid in blood for the purchase of the bronze used to make the sculptures. They do not want the descendants of slave-holders – particularly the current Oba (who’s been promised restitution by the Nigerian Government) – to benefit from the suffering of their ancestors. They want them to be kept in Cambridge and elsewhere.
They had clearly not heard this part of the story before writing their letters.
The acquisition of the Elgin Marbles also deserves some context. They were not ‘stolen’ by the Earl of Elgin, as claimed. The British Ambassador to Constantinople legally purchased them from the Ottoman authorities in Greece. Furthermore, Elgin saved the marbles from probable destruction. The Parthenon was being used as an ammunition dump, had been badly damaged by explosions and was in the process of being “cannibalised by Turkish dragomen selling off bits as souvenirs to tourists”. Without Elgin they could and probably would have been lost for ever.
Why was my predecessor so reluctant to explore these fascinating complexities? Did she not have time to research them? Is she so ideologically wedded to postcolonialism that she deliberately ignored them? Or has she been so completely brainwashed by the predominance of anti-British propaganda that she had lost the ability to seek and recognise nuance?
Whatever the reason (and, for what it’s worth, I suspect the latter) it’s had a deleterious impact on my pupils. They are full of resentment and anti-British sentiment. More worrying, however, is the fact that my school is no exception. Brainwashed teachers are brainwashing our children. No wonder pride in British history has plummeted to a record low.
Joe Baron is the pseudonym of a history teacher at a London secondary school.
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Just to do a ‘Captain Obvious’ here and point out that education, before we even include the disastrous mess that is higher ed, has changed dramatically since the decades mention above. So it seems a no-brainer to me that “education has zero causal effect on fertility” and it’s more to do with the woke ideological crapola kids are being brainwashed with these days. Kids should be attending school to get educated, not indoctrinated.
I would say that western civilisations have much more choice about having children or having a career than most poorer countries, this can be put down to a better education.
Not so much choice in places like Niger so they just do what is nessasary
They will probably never have a career to pay for a pension so children are their insurance policy for old age, the more the merrier as upto 50% of their children may not make it to adulthood.
I certainly agree with your ideological element though, just look at that self important little git Rachel Zegler!
Yes and you raise a good point which is the difference in *motivation* between cultures for having children. Women in some poor country in Africa won’t have any of the opportunities or resources of their counterparts in rich Western countries, therefore their motivation will be based more on necessity, as you say, plus cultural norms/pressure and gender stereotypes will be way more rigid. Over here, women can afford to wait and have kids later in life, have fewer kids or none at all, because they’re no longer deemed an “insurance policy”, unlike generations ago.
Let’s be honest, many in the so-called ‘rich West’ literally can’t ‘afford’ kids anyway because they’re unable to even get on the property ladder, which is the norm before putting down roots and starting a family. And people don’t typically live in multi-generational households, which is normal in other cultures, so childcare is presumably a non-issue compared with here.
Increased wealth.
More live births, lower infant/child mortality, children no longer required as a labour source for the family economy requires reduced birth rates to maintain the “stock”.
Plus sending children to school instead of to work = a cost, not a contributor to parental fortunes.
Parents work fewer hours, have more leisure time and disposable income which they prefer to spend on that rather than children.
Maybe has something to do with it?
Maybe material prosperity has led us to overthink things
I don’t think education is a primary cause of low fertility, though it may be a secondary cause. I think a primary cause of low fertility is little or no religious faith due to increasing wealth. Look at the chart of where high birth rates are found. This cause and effect are summed up by the bible phrase “you can’t worship God and mannon (money)”.
I don’t think it is education per se that makes a person rich. There are many examples that everyone knows of people who left school with few or no exams thar have become rich through hard work.
Increasing wealth includes many factors that would tend to increase birth rates such as improved nutrition and healthcare but the low birth rates in rich countries run counter to this.
Decreasing wealth does seem to encourage higher birth rates. My father’s parents in the 1930s had around 10 children but 3 or 4 died in childhood of diseases that are easily cured today. They were poor but had many children perhaps because unconsciously they knew some would die.
I agree with your point but it’s mammon not ‘mannon’.
Once upon a time, I grew up in an avenue of newly-built 1950’s semis, where at one time up to 30 of us played out in the street, offspring of married couples born before the Second World War.
Then along came “-isms,” “-ists” and “-ism-ist ism-isms,” and the old order changed – for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, but nowadays up to half the time certainly not until death us do part.
The increased cost of housing is also a practical deterrent. Meanwhile on another forum…
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/immigration-is-not-the-answer-to
“…What’s the solution to Britain’s fertility crisis? There are, broadly, three schools of thought:
One is that you can, through carefully structured incentives and social changes, encourage birth rates to rise to replacement levels.
Another is that the ageing population is, given the potential for automation, robotics and AI, actually not *that* much of an issue.
The final school of thought is that nothing can be done about the Western fertility crisis, and that the only solution is to supplement the working age-population with immigration. This, sadly, is the school which currently governs Great Britain.”
Take your pick – bad luck, the Party has already chosen for you.
No, but abortion does.
See this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?facet=entity&uniformYAxis=0&country=~GBR
1950 total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.22
1961 introduction of birth control pills on the NHS, TFR 2.79
1964 late post-war baby boom peak of TFR of 2.93
1967 Abortion Act, TFR 2.68
1974 introduction of birth control clinics, TFR 1.92
1977 a TFR low of 1.69
2001 a TFR low of 1.61
2010 TFR recovered to 1.92
2020 TFR dropped to 1.57 and leveling off through to 2023.
TFR seems to have stopped falling recently – perhaps it will rise again.
If fertility is reducing and climate change adaptation becomes the preferred policy then fewer people will make the social adjustments easier. We might need robot careers for the old, but even that issue will eventually reduce.
Picking one variable which happens to correlate with another from a whole variety of others which interact, is certain to lead to the wrong conclusion except by chance. See: Climageddon (Arctic disappearing, London, New York, submerged, annual droughts and scorching Summers, etc) perpetually being delayed; predicted 1970s world over-population by year 2 000.