Tuesday, April 03, 2007

History is offensive! Let's stop teaching it!

A UK government-funded study by the Historical Association says that some schools avoid teaching the Holocaust to avoid causing offence and for fear of raising anti-semitic sentiment among Muslim pupils.

The same study also says that some schools also avoid teaching about slave trade (so as not to alienate white and/or black children) and Crusades ("because 'balanced treatment' of the topic would have challenged what some local mosques were teaching").

Yeah, I am sure that if schools stop teaching them anything that contradicts the teaching of the local mosque, they will totally integrate and achieve enlightenment and multicultural tolerance. They might even stop denying the Holocaust if they have never heard of it.

The article does not mention any actual complaints from actual Muslims.

I am wondering whether it is becoming a trend in the UK: try to avoid doing anything that might ever offend Muslims. Not that I blame people for assuming that the Religion of the Perpetually Offended would become offended at anything, but wouldn't it be wiser to wait and see? (I am thinking of the case a few weeks ago in the UK where organizers of a school show about three little pigs decided to remove the pigs in order to avoid offending the Muslims. The actual Muslims said "Huh? WTF? There are not actual pigs involved, so what's the problem?".)

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