The Spectator’s Notes | 10 February 2007

At the same time as it tries to loosen things up, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is told by the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, that schools must put more emphasis on ‘global warming, the British slave trade and the anti-slavery campaign, Britishness, the British Empire, racism and ethnicity, immigration, Commonwealth, cookery’. It would hardly have looked out of place in this semi-random list if Mr Johnson had added, in the manner of Private Eye, ‘grapefruit segments’. It may or may not be good to teach children about these things, though one notes that in the days when ‘Britishness’ was most clearly understood in our culture, the formal curriculum preferred to teach ‘Roman-ness’ and ‘Greek-ness’. But what good is done by government prescription? What qualifies Mr Johnson, amiable though he is, to work out that what our children need is more cake-baking or study of Olaudah Equiano or reading the Stern Report? One of the greatest mistakes — it was a Conservative one — was to legislate for what must be taught.