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William Wilberforce?

ksbluesfan

Graduate Poster
ksbluesfan
Joined
Jan 13, 2007
Messages
1,376
I can understand the uproar over Churchill, Hitler, Gandhi, and others being cut from school curriculum, but is there a reason Wilberforce shouldn't be taught? I realize he's not as historically significant as the others, but Randi's commentary left me with the suspicion that Wilberforce was the British Samuel Hahnemann or something. After reading about Wilberforce on Wikipedia, I found that he was a great and important man.

I guess it's possible that Mr. Randi assumed everybody knows who William Wilberforce is and I'm showing the gaps in my education, in which case I should be embarrassed.
 
I don't know who Wlliam Wilberforce is either, and I haven't looked him up yet but I think that's the point. If someone asked me who I should cut from my curriculum, Wilberforce or Churchill, I would probably cut the person I had never heard of, knowing of course that Churchill was a great leader during hard times and that this should be taught.

With so many great (and infamous) men and women in history we can't possible teach our young about them all, so how do you choose?
 
Churchill et al aren't being cut out of history teaching. They're being made optional - teachers can still teach about them. In any case, the second World War still has to be taught and you can hardly not mention Churchill and Stalin in that context.
In case anybody hasn't noticed, the UK has rather a lot of history - not everything can be covered in detail, so some subjects have to be skimmed over. The latest guidelines are giving teachers more discretion over what they can teach, is all.
Mre info here
 
I don't think the problem is that Wilberforce is not being cut, or made optional, but rather that the other, more significant historical figures are. I think Randi is just pointing out the comparison.

Whether they are optional or being cut, I think it's the wrong way to go about it. They should focus on guidlines on what they want the students to learn, not what the teachers can leave out. It just seems like the wrong learning strategy to me.
 
Interesting about the uproar. I went to school in UK 30 plus years ago. We didn't cover the two World Wars or any British Monarch.
 
saraban said:
Interesting about the uproar. I went to school in UK 30 plus years ago. We didn't cover the two World Wars or any British Monarch.
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Same here, though we did cover all the Kings, which thoroughly bored me. There was nothing taught beyond Queen Victoria, as I recall. The entire 20th century just didn't seem to have happened.
Like I said, we have an ablsoutely humungous amount of history here, and something has to get glossed over; in my day, it was stuff like the World Wars and all the social revolutions of the 17th/18th/19th centuries.
 
sophia8 said:
Same here, though we did cover all the Kings, which thoroughly bored me. There was nothing taught beyond Queen Victoria, as I recall. The entire 20th century just didn't seem to have happened.
Like I said, we have an ablsoutely humungous amount of history here, and something has to get glossed over; in my day, it was stuff like the World Wars and all the social revolutions of the 17th/18th/19th centuries.
Click to expand...

Yes my school tended to go more for social history.
 
Starthinker said:
I don't know who Wlliam Wilberforce is either, and I haven't looked him up yet but I think that's the point. If someone asked me who I should cut from my curriculum, Wilberforce or Churchill, I would probably cut the person I had never heard of, knowing of course that Churchill was a great leader during hard times and that this should be taught.
Click to expand...

Churchill wasn't exactly great. Best you can say for him is that he didn't screw up as badly as some.
 
sophia8 said:
Churchill et al aren't being cut out of history teaching. They're being made optional - teachers can still teach about them. In any case, the second World War still has to be taught and you can hardly not mention Churchill and Stalin in that context.
In case anybody hasn't noticed, the UK has rather a lot of history - not everything can be covered in detail, so some subjects have to be skimmed over. The latest guidelines are giving teachers more discretion over what they can teach, is all.
Mre info here
Click to expand...

[Eddie Izzard] "I'm from Europe. That's where history comes from." [/Eddie Izzard]
 
sophia8 said:
Same here, though we did cover all the Kings, which thoroughly bored me. There was nothing taught beyond Queen Victoria, as I recall. The entire 20th century just didn't seem to have happened.
Click to expand...

Dave Barry once commented that his American history class in school consisted of an ENORMOUS amount of detail on the Colonial period, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War -- and then everything from the Civil War to the Present was taught in about 2 weeks because they ran out of time.
 
I distinctly remember in my own history classes 30+ years ago, when I asked about why we skimmed through World War II and learned essentially nothing about Korea, Eisenhower, baby boomers, or Vietnam, I was told that historians generally try to avoid writing about events less than 50 years past because there's no adequate perspective. Ever since, I've seen this logical position reconfirmed with every subsequent decade's crop of incredibly biased current-events books. I'm not even sure the modern American public, at least, is even able to consider history anymore from a relatively objective point of view. We're too well-trained to look at things from only one ideological side, whatever that may be.

Of course, stopping at Queen Victoria, the U.S. Civil War, or George III is perhaps a bit too cautious. :)
 
Wilberforce was incredibly important historically, and not just for Britain either. Slavery could've carried on for another half-century without him, with the inevitable knock-on effect for other territories. As other posters have noted, there's too much history to cover it all, but we shouldn't be too upset at Wilberforce's inclusion.
 
At my school the exam board's syllabus we followed was European history from 1714 to 1918, which was a lot of material. Fortunately we managed to skip some, as when it came to the Whigs and the Tories our teacher refused to teach us about the Tories.
 
Ian Osborne said:
Wilberforce was incredibly important historically, and not just for Britain either. Slavery could've carried on for another half-century without him,
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And it did! At least over here on the other side of the pond.
 
I left school 6 years ago and did History right up until the end. I did most of English and British history from 1066 up until the beginning of the Second World War, but we barely covered the empire at all. I suppose it's because it might be a bit too controversial, what with a lot of British students having family ties to former colonies, but I would have found it very interesting and it's a shame that side of our history tends to be glossed over.

As an aside, I know a high flying, well-educated lawyer who had never heard of 1066 or the battle of Hastings when it came up in a pub quiz last year. 1066! Hastings! Never Heard of it! :boggled::eek:
 
In 2006 a movie was made about Wilberforce, called "Amazing Grace." It was quite good, although I don't know how historically accurate it was.
 
I agree that Randi was criticising somewhat outside his area here, maybe even buying a bit of tabloid fluff. There have always been major swathes of British history left out of the curriculum, from which local authorities and schools could to some extent choose. All that's being done is giving those authorities more discretion in choosing what to focus upon - they aren't proscribing Churchill et al. Having said that, and bearing it mind as an apparent misunderstanding on his part, Randi wasn't saying Wilberforce shouldn't be taught, rather that if things are tight, the others should have been kept in (his) preference.

I would go as far to suggest that the various media sources reporting this in terms of "Churchill out, Wilberforce in" are trying to elicit the easy and perhaps even casually racist "it's political correctness gone mayyyyd" response from elements of the right-wing, and "hey, stop messing with the teaching of history!" from the rest of us.
 
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