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The purpose of teaching history should be to inspire patriotism in the native English and make the foreigners feel unwelcome.
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Strength vs weakness. I agree with LBM in this aspect.
In regards to the English (or Scots/Welsh/Irish) inventing products and not improving them or being beaten by others. And this may apply to 5/ too. Might that be the fault of the wealthy who are happy to reap as much reward where they can rather than look to the future. And is this not reflected in the British electoral system and first past the post. Entrenched left or right, take it or leave it mentality.
What happened to all the British heavy industry of the past? Do we blame the unions or those too greedy to look to the future of UK full of proseprous people and instead followed a historic trend of dividing peoples, including their own by "class".
Nine out of ten concerns are completely unfounded.
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(1) Many European countries - most notably France, Germany and Spain - now have more advanced railway networks than we do. The US is overwhelmingly the global power in television. The English Premiership is by far the wealthiest football league in the world, yet for a long time it hadn't really translated into producing lots of quality players for the national team, in contrast to the Bundesliga and La Liga. Not to mention the dominance of the sport at global level by the likes of Argentina and Brazil. And see my OP point two about the failings of English rugby.
(2) My point is that, relative to their often exceptional wealth and/or player numbers in various sports, England do often underachieve. In rugby, the only Tier One nations who England do usually pussy-whip are Italy and Argentina. By contrast, England have a negative winning ratio against Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; a faintly positive winning ratio against Wales; and even their winning ratios against Ireland, Scotland and France are much less dominant than they potentially could be, at least once you take into account that England have more rugby players to choose from than most of those countries combined.
(3) Your answer is so risible and philistine it doesn't really merit a proper response.
(4) If other European nationalities were apparently as comfortable with themselves as you claim, then why the constant preposterous debates here and on other anthro websites as to who is more 'European' between Iberians, Italians and Greeks etc? (Funny how Brits, Dutch and Germans for the most part don't bicker about who is more 'European' between them in the same way).
(5) Britain was not any more socialist than was the norm for most of the post-war Western world (the US excepted, of course). Many of the policies pursued by both Tory and New Labour governments have been ideological and excessive in their own right, whatever the undoubted problems of the post-war consensus.
(6) Yes it is true that English History - both good and bad - is taught very badly and many people here are rather ignorant about it.
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America is England's fault
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3) Both your examples prove me correct. How many Dutch speak Spanish? How many French in the North? People learn languages because those languages are dominant or essential or extremely useful. For us, only English is essential or even particularly useful to the average person, and I have a degree in foreign languages. For Belarussians, Russian is (and btw the younger generation no longer learns Russian in most of Eastern Europe)
Closer to home, how many Welsh-speakers speak languages other than Welsh and English?
6) That's what Germany gets for losing and you're wrong about America.
Besides, again, these are simply not England-specific.
Who is rich? He who is happy with what he has - Simeon ben Zoma, Ethics of the Fathers, Talmud, Avot 4:1
I live here. I also live here.
Europeans worldwide * Longbowman's family on 23andme * Classify Longbowman * Ask Longbowman anything
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3. Having the luxury to speak only your own language is a sign of cultural supremacy. You have no argument because it's not a fault. Once Britons are speaking another language (say Arabic), you'll know they've been conquered and Anglo cultural dominance is over. That will be worthy of contempt.
4. Anthroforums are full of insecure people who are not representative of those countries. I'm fairly certain that people in Italy/Greece/Spain don't spend their days worrying about their whiteness, or thinking themselves peripheral people. If such people in Northern European countries or cultures have these insecurities, it's because they actually aren't as white and they're made aware of it everyday.
Spoiler!
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(3) I don't think the Welsh (whether Welsh-speaking or monolingual English-speaking) are much if at all worse than the English when it comes to foreign languages - at least when you control for certain factors such as age, social class and education, at any rate. And actually, I have met some strikingly multilingual native Welsh-speakers - if anything, they are often more outward-looking and internationalist than the Anglophone Welsh, believe it or not. Like I said, circa 20% of French people are estimated to know Spanish, and it is growing elsewhere in Europe too.
(6) So objective and dispassionate History classes are impossible then, regardless of who won or lost wars? My point is I bet the average American pupil knows more about the historic mistreatment of Blacks and Amerindians there than e.g. the Average English (or I suppose British) pupil knows about the Bengal and Irish potato famines.
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