A lesson in self-censorship

According to my former colleagues, history teachers in an urban English state school, anyone who votes for the Conservative party is ‘thick’, the British Empire was ‘unambiguously evil’ and capitalism leads to ‘mass inequality and misery for the vast majority of working people’. The only answer was, you guessed it, socialism. Yes, the cliché of the Little Red Book-carrying schoolteacher is alive and well.

As the only right-of-centre teacher in the history department, I found lunchtime particularly galling. My colleagues would sit around denouncing the British empire, Michael Gove’s changes to the national curriculum and the government’s ‘ideologically driven’ attempts to cut the nation’s deficit. But what worried me more was their willingness to indoctrinate their pupils with the same world-view. On one occasion, I overheard three of them discussing the delivery of a unit provocatively titled ‘Should we be proud of the British empire?’ As you can probably imagine, there was one answer they considered right: ‘No! We should be ashamed.