The latest initiative by our "Children's Secretary", Ed Balls, is to abolish what remains of fact-based teaching of history and geography in our schools. He plans to "roll them together into themed lessons on social issues such as global warming" (funny how that seems to seep into everything nowadays).
The ruthless drive of educational progressives to eliminate history-teaching from schools has been under way since the 1960s. The aim is to ensure that children know nothing about their country's past or how the world came to be as it is, leaving their minds blankly open to whatever vacuous progressive claptrap is fed to them.
In his desire to chuck history onto what Lenin called "the scrapheap of history", Mr Balls may have to make an exception, however. A campaign is now being mounted in the European Parliament to make it compulsory for children to be taught the history of the EU. According to Mário David, the Portuguese MEP leading the campaign and a former chief of staff to the Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso, it Is vital to counter all the "lying, cheating and mistrust" that surrounds the EU in the minds of the peoples of Europe. Our children must therefore be indoctrinated accordingly.
A year or two back, when Richard North and I were writing a comprehensive history of "the European project", The Great Deception, we were astonished to find just how horrendously misleading is the account of that history peddled by the EU itself on its Europa website. From laying claim to Churchill as father of the EU to consistently obscuring the nature of the key role played by Jean Monnet, they have come up with an official version of the origins of their "project" which bears virtually no relation to the facts. Doubtless this is just the sort of history which Mr Balls will be happy to allow in our schools – because "fact-based" it isn't.