How well does the average English person know his country’s history? For example how much would he know about 17th century England?
How well does the average English person know his countrys history?
Falling into your wing while paragliding is called 'gift wrapping' and turns you into a dirt torpedo pic.twitter.com/oQFKsVISkI
— Mental Videos (@MentalVids) March 15, 2023
People here are probably more ignorant of their history than in any other country in Europe. What little the average person knows is often one or two dates of major battles, and then a few misleading factoids they've picked up from TV shows. The standard of history taught in schools is shocking. I learnt more about Rosa Parks and the US Civil Rights movement than I did Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans or Tudor England. Everything we were taught was through a warped socialist prism (slavery, but not the Empire; workhouses, but not the Industrial Revolution, etc)
I’m asking cause I’m an Assyrian who lives in Australia yet I’ve read much on English history. I know nearly everything about England. I know obscure figures from the earliest years of Anglo-Saxon history (King Oswald, Penda, Wulfhere, Wilfrid etc) to the political situation between dissenters and the Anglican Church in the early 18th century.
Reading lots of English history has made me a bit depressed about modern England though since now I feel so connected to it. I feel like it’s a crumbling nation with a dying identity. I think back on all the many historical English figures I’ve read about it from every century and I feel as if they will end up buried and forgotten in the future with not even its own people to remember them anymore. It’s really so sad to read about a nation’s long past while witnessing its death at the same time.
don't be so pessimistic. the future is bright my friend. the uk still has the greatest universities in the world
>I’m an Assyrian
lmao wut
are you trying to say you're from the country Syria?
No, he means he's from the Assyrian ethnic group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_people
I don't doubt there's a group of people who call themselves that, I doubt that they have a plausible connection to an empire from three thousand years ago.
Calling himself Iraqi might lead to saddam jokes.
It's like how Iranians call themselves "Persian"
Whether or not we are really Assyrian, I don’t know. We speak the Aramaic language so it’s probably just that.
>The standard of history taught in schools is shocking. I learnt more about Rosa Parks and the US Civil Rights movement than I did Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans or Tudor England.
>Everything we were taught was through a warped socialist prism (slavery, but not the Empire; workhouses, but not the Industrial Revolution, etc)
Same experience with history in my secondary school, especially on the overemphasis towards American slavery and civil rights. We managed to have two courses on civil rights, in Year 9 and then again in Year 10. First time round it focused on slavery and emancipation of American slaves (very little on our own abolitionist movement), then time-skipped to US civil rights. In Year 10, the curriculum re-tread the Civil Rights in more detail, a lot more focus now on the wacky offshoots like the Nation of Islam. Didn’t help that my teacher in Year 10 was a young US white women - this was in 2009 so she threw in some Obama dick-riding at the end of the course about how far America had come (obviously would be a very different tone now). By comparison our learning of British history throughout secondary school was very disjointed overall, often not focusing on a single time period for a whole term, and virtually no mention of the empire, or Acts of Union - in fact there was a massive gap between the Tudors and Victorian era that was not really covered beyond some reference to the English-Civil war. I think it wasn’t really until my A-levels in the same school that they began teaching an aspect of British history in detail; electoral reform and expansion of the franchise in the 19th century.
I kind of get your point about the curriculum being taught through a socialist view point, though my school’s teaching of British history was so weak it didn’t come up much. In English though we had to read an Inspector calls, which is out-and-out socialist propaganda.
>People here are probably more ignorant of their history than in any other country in Europe
Nah. I’d say we are relatively equally ignorant compared to the average country
Only major outlier is Germany but that’s because they get taught an extreme amount about the Nazi period specifically
When I was in secondary school and later sixth form the history we covered was
>tudors
>victorians
>British empire generally
>WW1 and WW2
Also politics module was basically an extra history one considering it was entirely centred around 70’s to 90’s Britain, Thatcherism to Blair
>Everything we were taught was through a warped socialist prism (slavery, but not the Empire; workhouses, but not the Industrial Revolution, etc)
nothing to do with socialism, stop equating different ideologies you utter spaz
Americans have English history taught to them extensively, so much that as an adult I have corrected English people about their own history. Not welsh or scottish though, oddly enough.
>How well does the average English person know his country’s history?
Not well at all.
>For example how much would he know about 17th century England?
Most people would struggle to give you a basic description of what happened in the Glorious Revolution.
>How well does the average English person know his country's history?
Not very well at all. People are clued into events like the Civil War, The Battle of Waterloo and the Norman Invasion, but outside of that? Not very much. Its not a massive part of the curriculum, and ultranationalists in England are generally too retarded to explore their countrys history.
>and ultranationalists in England are generally too retarded to explore their countrys history.
So I’ve noticed from all the bad history english nationalists have told me on /misc/
we know instragram and tiktok, history is for you incels .
besides, history and humanities are shit tier subjects.
Physics is broad as fuck. Not all are god tier.
likewise for... most of these subjects
someone studying music could be anyone from janacek (god tier) to jacob collier (shit); a computer scientist could be anyone from samson abramsky (god tier) to yann le cunn (shit); and so on and so forth
>statistics
>top tier
Kek, cringe fucking rank list.
>history and humanities
>incels
it's the opposite, the archetypal incel would be an engineer
Lots of world war one and two is all I remember doing in secondary school. In primary school we did romans, tudors and the world wars. Don't remember learning much about american shite. But maybe that changed in later years. I'm 30 for comparison.
fuck all
churchill was good and the battle of walterloo or something
I had to go to university, do a history degree and then pick a civil war module to be taught about that period. The average person has absolutely no exposure to it in mandatory education.
The average Londoner knows enough about Pakistan's history.
I get the joke but I doubt even pakistani's know much about their own history either.
We have too much history. Makes things difficult