99% of Schools Teach Slave Trade. 11% Teach Trafalgar and Waterloo

John Sydenham

The role of government is to produce a society that is optimal for its children both now and as they develop from childhood to being adults. This does not just involve supporting parents, it also involves a way of life and security for that way of life. Children are central to the purpose of government and education has, historically, been used to bring the next generation into alignment with the purpose of society.

Given this role for education, why do British schools emphasize British involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade 15 generations ago?

(Source: Policy Exchange: Lessons from the Past)

Ninety nine percent of schools teach about the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Notice that only 11% of schools teach children about Waterloo! The pivotal role of the Glorious Revolution (1688 Bill of Rights) is also missed by over half of schools.

The most important thing to notice about the Transatlantic Slave Trade is that it was not about Britain, it was about an accepted, global system.

Any country with a merchant navy could have ferried slaves across the Atlantic Ocean and many countries were involved. The UK was dominant on this shipping route because in 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht ceded control of the West African slave trade to the French and English. (Treaty of Utrecht). This meant that the UK was over-represented in the Transatlantic Slave Trade until 1807 when the British abolished it for themselves and fought slave trading globally. Selecting the Transatlantic Trade is in itself bias against Britain. Over a million slaves were also shipped across the Indian Ocean and millions across the Sahara during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, largely by Arabs, Indians and Omanis, but the Indian Ocean Slave Trade is not taught. The Transatlantic Trade continued despite British efforts to stop it:

Given that slavery and slave trading were globally accepted there is little to be learnt from its occurrence except the fact that it was globally accepted, and by modern standards, appalling. Whilst it should be mentioned it should not be given any special priority in British history lessons. Slave trading was not a peculiarly British activity and was considered legal and widely thought to be moral in 1713.

The truly exceptional, historical detail of the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is that the British abolished the slave trade and slavery for all nations and the invasion of Nigeria almost completely stopped the trade. The British ushered in the modern world. This is the important lesson from history. (See Slavery, the Slave Trade and Reparations). Abolition was a truly exceptional achievement, it was an important and unusual event in history where morality triumphed over economics.

Why are British schoolteachers keen to teach the Transatlantic Slave Trade as the most important lesson in British history?

The historical sources about the Slave Trade have been systematically altered to indoctrinate children with the idea that the industrial Revolution was built on slavery. The BBC offers a KS3 primer that says:

“The exploitation of enslaved people made many Europeans, including the British, extremely wealthy. It is estimated that British slave ships made around 10,000 voyages across the Atlantic, transporting approximately 3.4 million people, of whom only 2.6 million survived the journey. British port cities such as London, Liverpool and Bristol, rapidly expanded due to the wealth acquired by their involvement with the slave trade.”

Above is a ‘grand house’ in Bristol before renovation. The fact that places like Bristol have now renovated the few hundred large houses that were built in the 18th century should not lead us to conclude that slavery was the source of British wealth. Instead we should conclude from these restorations that the English liked their history before the Postmarxism of the 21st century taught them to hate their country.

The British actually became wealthy from coal mining, metal refining, ceramics and manufacturing in the UK. It was their domestic economy that was the source of wealth for the whole country. International trade was relatively unimportant, at less than 5% of GDP before 1800, and international trade was strongest with Europe. (See The Role of Slavery in British Economic Growth).

If the truth was that the slave trade was globally accepted in the 18th century and of greatest benefit to the colonists, not to the British economy, why are schools and the BBC etc. stressing its importance? Why are they indoctrinating children with half truths and failing to provide context? As the truth is that Britain ceased its involvement with slavery 200 years ago, why are schools and historians elevating the Slave Trade to the status of the most important event in British history? Especially given that the British abolition of slavery is possibly the most important event in World history.

The answer is straightforward. The teaching profession has been subverted by Postmarxist ideology. They desire the polarisation of people into black and white. This is obvious when voting patterns in teachers are explored:

(Source: Teacher Tapp)

The purpose of postmodernists/postmarxists such as the Labour Party is to create a state of perpetual change, the change itself becoming the ideology of society. Change is stimulated through polarisation. The postmodern goal is to remove nations and dominant cultures. This philosophy is diametrically opposite to the needs of children but if it is taught at an early age it turns children into putty in the hands of ideologists.

Teachers vote for the Far Left Labour Party. They reflect the ideas of the academics who trained them and are Far Left Internationalists who dislike the idea of nation states. Remain voting in the EU Referendum was a clear marker of Internationalism (Remainers were not simply pro-EU, they are Internationalists):

However, the changes in British universities and teacher training colleges have been evident for decades. Labour has targeted education since 1997. The people who should be blamed for this are the Conservative politicians of the past 30 years. It was their role to oppose and reverse the changes made by Labour. They ignored what was happening in schools and universities and did nothing to correct it. The (mostly) young women who become teachers are groomed into the Far Left and nothing has been done to stop this.

Teachers have a very poor record when it comes to supporting authoritarian socialism. The profession enthusiastically supported National Socialism in Germany and Marxist Socialism in Soviet Russia. In view of the pivotal position of teachers in these disasters should the role of teachers in supporting the Third Reich and Stalin be a compulsory part of the school syllabus? How many millions did teachers kill indirectly by spreading indoctrination and propaganda in totalitarian socialist states? At least 10 times the number who died in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Few other professions support the Far Left as much as teachers. Something must be done about this because they are indoctrinating and damaging our children. What can you do? Re-Stack and publicise this post.

See: Forget Gender, Polarisation is the Objective which explains how ID politics is the tool of choice for destroying democracies.

Postscript: Almost half of the children in English schools are children of recent migrants. Teaching that the ‘British’ were oppressors and torturers as the most important fact in British history cannot be a constructive approach for the country. Especially when only a tiny fraction of these migrants are derived from freed slaves 15-20 generations ago. The choice of curriculum is obviously postmodern/postmarxist ie: Far Left. Teachers face a class of 50% migrants and 50% English and delight in telling the class the lie that the English children are evil.

The teachers, by focusing on the Slave Trade do not even have the decency to point out that most of the black children in the room are not descendants of slaves or solely descendants of slaves. They are children whose ancestors systematically raped, pillaged and enslaved their neighbours and had been doing this for centuries. Even many of the freed slaves had this background 200 years ago. But of course, this is all ancient history from 15-20 generations ago, the only reason for teaching it would be to polarise people for political purposes today.

They will not teach this: “Captain Mansel, of Her Majesty's ship Actœon, informed the Secretary of the Admiralty by a letter dated "Ascension, Oct. 2, 1846," that the native chief of Lagos, finding he could not dispose of the numerous slaves on his hands, had caused upwards of 2,000 of them to be slaughtered, and their heads to be stuck on stakes round the town of Lagos;” (Hansard)