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There are few things more dispiriting in 2026 than the state of Western classrooms. Literacy and numeracy are in freefall, identity politics, gender theory and race obsession have replaced actual education and small children are being traumatised with apocalyptic climate cultism. To adopt Thomas Sowell’s pithy phrase, Johnny can’t just read or write, she can’t think and she’s really a boy in a dress.
But the most insidious assault is on history itself.
The subject has been repurposed in recent years under the banner of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘social justice’. History is no longer taught as an attempt to understand the past on its own terms, but as a vehicle for present-day moral instruction, which results not in a broadening of perspective, but a narrowing of it.
Across the Anglosphere, a common pattern is emerging across our nations. History has been whacked over the head with the decolonisation stick and dragged into the world of presentism, identity politics, Critical Race Theory, post-colonialism, social justice, diversity, and equity and inclusion. This is the history that children are now being taught.
History is no longer taught as an honest attempt to understand the past. It has been hijacked as a vehicle for present-day moral instruction and ritual self-flagellation. Across the Anglosphere, the curriculum has been, Bella d’Abrera says, “whacked over the head with the decolonisation stick” and thoroughly white-anted by the Long March through the Institutions. Schools, public and private, are nothing so much as a vast network of Marxist re-education camps.
In Britain, the pattern is stark. Teachers proudly report “diversifying” the curriculum in response to George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. By 2021, 83 per cent of schools had added black and Asian British history, migration, women’s history and LGBTQ+ themes. The top reasons? ‘Social justice’ and virtue-signalling.
The teaching of the slave trade is a case in point. Among progressive educators, there is a marked reluctance to acknowledge that it was the British Empire and its much maligned ‘white saviours’ like William Wilberforce, that ultimately abolished this appalling practice. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the free classroom resource produced by Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum which leaves children with the distinct impression that Britain not only invented slavery, but that its eventual abolition came not from moral conviction or political courage, but from national shame.
Even worse is the deliberate erasure of indigenous Britons – that is, whites – from their own history by black fanatics who weren’t even born in Britain.
At present, the loudest and most persistent voices calling for a de-Europeanised curriculum are leading us into the realms of fantasy and nonsense […] In Brilliant Black British History, a book by Nigerian-born author Atinuke, that has won many awards including Children’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, primary school children are told: ‘The first migrants to Britain had black skin. Yes, that’s right! – the very first Britons were Black!’ The book goes on to assert that: ‘Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before the white people came – and during that time the most famous British monument was built: Stonehenge. Britain has been a mostly white country for a lot less time than it was a black country – only about 4,000 years.’ And the final blow for any white child reading: ‘Every single British person comes from a migrant.’
Australia is no better. Our progressive education blob long ago decided the nation’s story is primarily one of violence and genocide. From kindergarten, children are recruited into a lifelong “journey of reconciliation”, which means apologising for the sin of catapulting a culture mired in the Paleolithic 45,000 years into the future. Teachers are instructed to “decolonise early childhood education by reconsidering education spaces, acknowledging colonisation and its continued impacts”. This is what passes for pedagogy in the sandpit.
In primary and secondary schools, guilt runs through the National Curriculum like cracks in a facade, as Australian history is recast as a single, unbroken narrative of ‘frontier warfare, massacres, removal from land, and relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions.’ It is unrelenting and consistently negative. Everything is taught except the concept of nation-building.
The result is predictable. Young people are taught to see their own countries as shameful rather than complex, heroic or worthy of defence. Polling shows large chunks of Generation Z regard Britain as racist and backward. Similar patterns emerge here. Loyalty to country is recast as bigotry. Patriotism becomes suspect. Statues of long-dead merchants are toppled, Captain Cook memorials vandalised, all in the name of ‘decolonisation’.
This is not education. It is cultural self-harm by design. It’s quite literally Orwellian: ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’. These Marxist fanatics have used 1984 as their instruction manual.
None of this is happening by accident. Among the architects of this ideological shift are activist historians, post-colonial theorists, and critical race educators whose goal is, and always has been, to sever loyalty to country. This is because they are postmodernists who believe that national myths are lies, that patriotism is a mask for oppression, and that emotional attachment to country reinforces injustice.
The cruelty is comprehensive. White children are denied pride in their civilisation’s achievements. Minority children are fed myths that set them up for failure and perpetual victimhood. Neither group emerges with an honest understanding of the past or a secure sense of belonging.
Western civilisation isn’t perfect. No civilisation is. But it produced the prosperity, freedoms and institutions that allow such self-criticism in the first place. Teaching children to despise that inheritance isn’t progress: it is civilisational suicide with extra virtue-signalling.
Homeschool your children.
