25 February, 2013

Apologising for Amritsar is pointless. Better redress is to never forget | William Dalrymple | Comment is free | The Guardian

Apologising for Amritsar is pointless. Better redress is to never forget | William Dalrymple | Comment is free | The Guardian: What Cameron can do, however, if he feels real contrition for Britain's past, is to make the teaching of the British empire a compulsory part of the GCSE history syllabus. The empire was, for better or worse, the most important thing the British ever did: it completely changed the shape of the modern world. Yet most British people are by and large completely unaware of the details of their imperial history. My own children learned Tudors and the Nazis over and again in history class, but never came across a whiff of Indian history. This means that they, like most people who go through the British education system, are wholly ill-equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world.