We must break down the Berlin Wall in schools

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever.

Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present.

One of the grim everyday realities of life before the Berlin Wall came down was the grossly unjust way in which two parallel economies operated within one political system. For the masses, the state ran a rouble economy in which there were queues for the best goods, massive shortages of quality produce and widespread dissatisfaction.