As a non-practising historian I’ve been following the
developments of Mr Gove’s History Wars with interest. I’ve also been
reading The War That Ended Peace, Margaret MacMillan’s brilliant history
of Europe in the run up to the outbreak of war, and was intrigued to find the
following comment about Prussian educational policy in the 1890s:
“In 1890, the Prussian Ministry of Education decreed that
the history taught in schools show the greatness of the Prussian state and its
rulers: ‘One of the most essential purposes of the Volksschule
[elementary schools] is to point out to the children the blessings which come
to them through the regained national unity, independence, and culture which
were restored by the hard and self-sacrificing struggle of the Hohenzollern
rulers’. Wilhelm thoroughly approved: ‘We must’, he told a conference of
headmasters, ‘bring up nationalistic young Germans, and not young Greeks or
Romans’.”
As another historian said about a sequence of events in
another European country “History repeats itself, first as tragedy,
second as farce”.
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