A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 4th March 1988 and reproduced by arrangement with the Daily Mail.

While Simon Heffer (article, Feb 27th) is dead right to point out the way the GCSE syllabuses effectively pervert the teaching of history (and English too), he did not really indicate why this has happened.

The main drift of history teaching in state schools for some years has been to exclude as far as possible any reference to Britain’s, and specifically England’s, tremendous achievements in shaping the modern world.

Reference to the British Empire, from which one third of the countries of the United Nations derive their very existence, is hardly ever made, except to focus on some incident, wrenched out of context, from which in order to pass an examination English school children are invited to criticise and deplore their own country.

The fact is that the schools’ educational establishment – the inspectorate, the teachers’ unions, the colleges of education and the examining bodies – is heavily penetrated by people who can only be described as denaturalised – people, as W S Gilbert said, who “praise in enthusiastic tones all countries but their own”.

The bias against English children knowing their own history (Scottish children are mercifully largely preserved from this nonsense) is all too sharply pointed up by the regard being paid, in some quarters, to the alleged needs of ethnic minority children to know about the history of their countries of origin, a view now clearly influencing the history syllabuses for all children.

As an antidote, therefore, to the anti-British and indeed anti-Western tenor of the all too typical questions picked out by Mr Heffer, I offer the following as standard ingredients for future GCSE history examination:

a)  Describe what you regard as the three greatest achievements of the British Empire, 1600-1950;

b)  Identify the reasons why Britain became the first industrial nation and thus the progenitor of the modern world;

c)  Give your views on why English has developed from a language spoken by perhaps a million people at the time of Alfred the Great to being the most widely spoken language in the world today.