Quote of the Day - Education Edition

From Theodore Dalrymple's speech at the Harvard Club, November 2001:

One of the things that has happened in Britain, as I said, is that people are radically disconnected from their past - from the past of the country in which they live. To such an extent, as I've suggested to you, that the vast majority of people don't even know when the Second World War was. Out of hundreds of sixteen to twenty year-old patients whom I've seen, very few - in fact, I think about three - have known with any degree of accuracy when the Second World War took place, and they're not even capable of deducing from the fact that there was a Second World War that there was a First World War.

And in the circumstances, I regard it as a triumph when they tell me that the Second World War took place in the eighteenth Century, because that means that they know that there was another century. And quite often if I ask them anything about history, not just of their own country, but of the entire world, what they say is, "I don't know because I wasn't born then." As if one could not be expected to know anything other than by personal acquaintance. And our educators, I think, have a lot to answer for because they have suggested that education should be of relevance to the children's lives as they are lived, and of course the whole point of education is to make the world beyond that relevant, and of course interesting and important to them, otherwise they are utterly enclosed in the indescribably miserable world in which they find themselves.