Please! Not the Imperial guilt complex!

It has been announced that Britain is to have a revised national schools curriculum where children are to learn new exciting languages like Mandarin and Arabic plus topics such as global warming and the slave trade will be compulsory. New writers are to be encouraged who will be taught alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Chaucer.

All this is great. I have no problem with our children learning more current history and assimilating topics to which our multi-cultural society can all relate and I welcome innovation. I fear, however, that some of this stuff is driven by the urge to appease these disciples of multi-culturalism who think that we owe our minorities some concessions and that teaching arabic, for example, shows the Muslims that we care.

OK lets teach our kids Arabic. Certainly it will enable them to talk more readily to Mustapha and Abdulla who sit two desks away, but who should be learning English. However in the wide world outside, forgive me, but I still think a knowledge of French, German or Spanish would serve any child of mine in better stead.



I have no problem with kids learning about the slave trade. So they should. I did, along with learning about Trafalgar, Agincourt, the Black Death and the Norman Conquest. Ah but thats not good enough. Apparently the slave trade now has to be taught as some kind of speciality. Presumably we will get a lot of Afro Caribbean teachers only too keen to demonstrate their expertise in this area and explain to all Britain's black children how their birthright was sold out by the evil Brits. This is what worries me. That instead of us harmonising our society we are continually going to emphasise the negatives of our past and continue to allow this sense of imperial guilt to intrude into all our dealings with our ethnic minorities.

By all means lets broaden the curriculum. By all means lets bring it up to date. Let's understand a little more about other cultures. But let us never forget that the reason people are living in this country is because they presumably want to assimilate into our society - we should not be expected to have to assimilate into theirs - or carry too much of a burden for past political and social abuses.