We must break down the Berlin Wall in schools

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever.

Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present.

One of the grim everyday realities of life before the Berlin Wall came down was the grossly unjust way in which two parallel economies operated within one political system. For the masses, the state ran a rouble economy in which there were queues for the best goods, massive shortages of quality produce and widespread dissatisfaction. But for the elite of the nomenklatura there was always guaranteed access to hard currency, closed shops stuffed with exotic international goodies and an assured path to the best jobs for their children.

In the British education system today a similar gulf exists between the opportunities a privileged elite enjoy and the options open to the rest of us. In particular, there is an increasing divergence between the advantages the wealthy can buy for their children through the independent system, and the constrained opportunities the state system currently provides.

We saw that divide widen earlier this week when the government published its plans for the primary curriculum. Geography, history and hard subject disciplines were going to be ditched in favour of the sort of ‘topic’-based learning that became discredited in the Seventies. Knowledge and facts were going to be further sidelined to make way for the sort of free-form learning that leaves weaker students fending for themselves.