Do the youth of today know about world history and events like the battle of britain?
The Second World War is as remote to the boys I teach, as the Crimean War of 1854 was to me when I was their age. It has no resonance because their parents were not in it, or their role models. The films made about it in the 1950s and ’60s also seem very stilted and old-fashioned to the young. Paradoxically, during the Iraq Nastiness, the Government was trying to instill more of a martial spirit into the British people by investing more in the One Minute’s Silence on November 11th (Armistice Day) at 11am. I think there is a wider issue here. For lots of European peoples, the two world wars were so horrible that people have ingrained, instinctive dislike of warfare in the wider sense, or even the private use of firearms in many cases. It is not often realised that the widely criticised Neville Chamberlain was negotiating with Hitler on behalf of a British Empire which had left 936,000 dead in France during the 1914-18 War, only twenty years earlier. The First World War is popular in man
