Sacha wrote:
I suppose, to be fair, that teachers have to follow a curriculum. Are they
allowed - or were they - to go off onto their own chosen path of interest?

Up until about 1988 it was easier for teachers to divert or involve
other facets, however, even then, it took strength of character to speak
of the heroism of those who fought and lived through the war for there
was that other powerful stricture about: peer-pressure amongst teachers
and from the sixties onwards it has been fashionable, hasn't it, to
avoid any acclamation of war efforts.

If you don't learn from history,
you learn nothing and IMO, every single child in every single country in the
world should be taken to see the sites of war graves or e.g. Auschwitz so
that they learn what man can do to man if *they* don't put a stop to it in
each successive generation.

Absolutely, Sacha.

Eddy mentions the Channel Islands where my parents, grandparents, aunts and
uncles, were living under Nazi rule. They - and we - are lucky that rule
didn't prevail because from them I learned enough about how bad it was while
it lasted.

Fascinating. My grandparents and uncle endured two years in the Channel
Islands under the Nazis, losing their farm and spending those two years
cooped in a rented room in town. They watched as the Germans closed
down the businesses of Jewish residents and rounded them up. And then
in 1942 Hitler ordered my grandparents and uncle, and all other
English-born residents, to be imprisoned in southern Germany. The toll
that those three years of "internment" took on my grandparents destroyed
them mentally. (And by the way, no compensation has ever been paid to
those particular prisoners, as it has to Japanese POWs for example, and,
also, there has never been any enquiry into the degree to which Channel
Island authorities collaborated with the Nazis for the five years of the
occupation. I believe that to this day certain papers have never been
declassified.)

In our Parish magazine there was a short piece about young people in the sea
cadets collecting money during the Poppy Appeal in Totnes. Some equally
young drop out type came up to one young girl and told her she was
supporting 'murdering scum'. I do so wish I'd been there. I wonder if he
realises what would have happened to him if he'd said that to someone
collecting money for the Nazi party, from which fate he was saved by what
his ignorance describes as 'murdering scum'.

I think this one example you give, Sacha, states the situation
perfectly. That "young drop-out type" and thousands of other
non-drop-out types too would continue in the same attitude while lapping
up an extra public holiday.

Eddy.