Glimpses of Britain. Reader - стр. 7
The figures, released to mark the start tomorrow of BBC2’s Battlefield Britain series on landmark conflicts, prompted calls for history to be made more prominent in the school curriculum.
Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “The survey clearly shows that our state education system has got a lot to answer for.
A grounding in national history is essential for all young people in order to understand the present. This is extremely shocking. Last month, education watchdog Ofsted said secondary schools spent too little time teaching teenagers about the British Empire and too much on Nazi Germany.
Time spent on the Empire as a topic could amount to one lesson a year for 11 to 14-year-olds and almost nothing for GCSE pupils.”
Peter Snow, who presents Battlefield Britain with his son Dan, said: “It’s at once a shock and a challenge that so many people can be so wrong about some of the key moments in Britain’s past.”
How I see it
by Robert Hardman
Daily Mail, August 4, 2004
They all thought it was going to be a bit of a lark on the other side of the Channel. No one expected to see their best mate liquidised by a shell or choke to death on mud and gas in a rat-infested quagmire. As far as Fred Lloyd and his pals were concerned, they were just going to give the Kaiser a bloody nose.
Back then, it was simple. Germany had rejected Britain’s ultimatum to uninvade Belgium and so mighty Britain was at war with silly Germany. It would all be over by Christmas, of course.
Today, Mr Lloyd and an extraordinary little band will bring Whitehall to a halt as they gather to recall how horribly wrong the world got it that fateful day – August 4, 1914.
It seems incredible that there is anyone alive with a first-hand story of World War I. But Britain still boasts 23 veterans of that monstrous conflict.
And at 11 this morning, four of George V’s men will be at the Cenotaph to mark the day the world changed.
“We never thought it would last long. No one thought of it as the Great War then. It was just going to be a skirmish,” says Mr Lloyd, 106, still shuddering at the naivety of it all. “All those boys. Thousands of young boys dying in an hour. It’s just so stupid.”
It certainly did not seem stupid to 16-year-old Fred Lloyd, then a gardener on a country estate at Uckfield, Sussex. Nor did it seem stupid to William Stone, then a 14-year-old farmhand at Sherford Down Farm in Devon.
“I was working with the cows at the time. The postman came up and told us: ‘We are at war with Germany,’ ” says Mr Stone, now 103. “We were all anxious to join as soon as we could.”