A country hands itself on through the story it tells its young. The argument is stuck between a whitewash and a confession. The honest version is neither, and it's harder than both.
Crossbencher · 20 July 2026
Both sides of this are defending something real. The case for a critical history is sound. A country that teaches its children only its triumphs - that files the empire under adventure and leaves the slavery and the famines off the syllabus - is lying to them. It raises a generation that can't understand the present, because it was denied the past that produced it. The turn towards teaching the wrongs honestly corrected a real complacency. There's no going back to a nursery version of the national story without going back to the dishonesty it ran on.
The case on the other side is just as real, and usually meets a sneer it hasn't earned. A country whose young are taught their history mainly as a charge sheet - a run of crimes for which apology is the only fit response - gives them nothing to belong to. You can't ask people to sustain and defend and improve a country while teaching them its story is chiefly one of shame. Belonging runs on inheritance, and an inheritance presented as purely a debt is one any sensible heir would renounce. A people with no usable pride in where they come from don't become more just. They become detached. And a detached population maintains nothing.
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