A lesson in self-censorship

According to my former colleagues, history teachers in an urban English state school, anyone who votes for the Conservative party is ‘thick’, the British Empire was ‘unambiguously evil’ and capitalism leads to ‘mass inequality and misery for the vast majority of working people’. The only answer was, you guessed it, socialism. Yes, the cliché of the Little Red Book-carrying schoolteacher is alive and well.

As the only right-of-centre teacher in the history department, I found lunchtime particularly galling. My colleagues would sit around denouncing the British empire, Michael Gove’s changes to the national curriculum and the government’s ‘ideologically driven’ attempts to cut the nation’s deficit. But what worried me more was their willingness to indoctrinate their pupils with the same world-view. On one occasion, I overheard three of them discussing the delivery of a unit provocatively titled ‘Should we be proud of the British empire?’ As you can probably imagine, there was one answer they considered right: ‘No! We should be ashamed. Look at Amritsar, what we did to the Native American Indians and our involvement in the Middle East,’ said one, shaking his head.

In history class, pupils discussed a litany of British atrocities, from forcing widespread opium addiction upon a benighted, infantilised Chinese population to massacres in India and Africa and ethnic cleansing in North America and Australia. There was only one task asking pupils to consider the question: ‘How did the British Empire improve lives?’ and this was homework. There was no classroom discussion about the spread of capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law; the propagation of ideas, literature, technological and medical advances; or even the abolition of the slave trade.

Mostly, on this subject, I held my tongue. I was a supply teacher on a zero-hours contract and was worried about being sacked.