Friday, January 9, 2009

Only English required to be British Citizens?

Sir David Watson, professor of higher education management at the Institute of Education, has criticised British Citizenship classes - compulsory in certain UK secondary schools since 2002:
a "clearer and more international" syllabus was needed instead of the narrow curriculum currently offered in schools.

And:
"A brittle, nationalistic, quite possibly politically slanted view of what it is to understand and project rights and responsibilities as a member of a democratic society is unpersuasive."

An ICM poll, commissioned by Ofsted in 2007, further stated that:

. 10% of secondary school pupils did not know what a citizenship class was, only
. 75 per cent couldn’t identify the power balance in Westminster and
. 45 per cent said they didn’t think it was important to know what the different parties stood for.

The bigger problem for me is, once again, Labour deciding that "Britishness" should be limited to only one part of the United Kingdom: these classes are, of course, only compulsory in English secondary schools.
Labour- The 85% Unionists.

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