The TWADDLE that was WDWTWA has now mercifully become TWTWTW

Civitas, 1 July 2008

For those sufficiently fortunate never to have needed to know, WDWTWA stands for ‘Who Do We Think We Are Week?’ For those still none the wiser, according to the proud boast of the Department of Children Schools and Families, ‘WDWTWA is a new, DCSF-funded education project, designed to engage primary and secondary school teachers in the exploration of identity, diversity and citizenship with their pupils.’
TWTWTW stands for ‘That Was the Week That Was’, a sixties satirical tv show that brought the likes of Bernard Levin and David Frost to fame. Since it supposedly took place last week, WDWTWA has now mercifully become TWTWTW. I say “mercifully” because of the awful twaddle it well and truly was.

The brain-child of Sir Keith Ajegbo, author of last year’s Curriculum Review of Diversity and Citizenship, WDWTWA was to be ‘a high profile, national event involving investigations and celebrations by schools of pupils’ histories and their community’s roots and the of the national and global links they can make.’
The DCSF created a website to provide schools with ‘assembly ideas’ for the week. It suggested that they should invite their pupils to ‘explore history and settlement, showing that movement is a regular part of life’ and ‘consider that Britain has always had immigration.’
It also suggested that schools should ‘use the Socrates quote: “I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world” to look at the theme of national and British identities, asking who pupils will be supporting in the 2012 Olympics.’
Britain has by no means always had immigration on anything that remotely approaches its present scale. Nor has movement always been a ‘regular part of life’, especially for so insular and sedentary a folk as, until only very recently, virtually all of Britain’s population have been for centuries.
Nor can Socrates be held up as any example of an itinerant cosmopolitan. So much did he love Athens that he never willingly left the city environs save upon military service. The saying attributed to him on the WDWTWA website was originally put into his mouth by Plutarch who lived several centuries after Socrates and so had never known him.
This is unlike Plato who did, and who, in his dialogues, portrays Socrates as so fond of Athens that he refused to propose banishment as an alternative punishment for the crimes for which he was falsely condemned by the court there, even when the alternative penalty was death, and who is also portrayed by Plato as having declined to evade that punishment by escaping from jail when offered the opportunity, because he claimed he did not wish to undermine Athenian law by disobeying it.
Few of our schoolchildren would have been taught that about Socrates last week, although a proper consideration of the early Platonic dialogues such as the ‘Apology’ and ‘Crito’ would have taught them more about citizenship than they are ever likely to learn at school today about that subject, despite it now being on the National Curriculum.
Ah well, as John Ruskin once wisely observed: “Modern ‘Education’ for the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them.”
No wonder Bernice McCabe, headmistress of the best performing girls school in the country, the independent North London Collegiate School, recently condemned current Goverment educational initiatives for threatening to effect ‘the cultural and intellectual impoverishment of a generation of school children.’
For those not rich enough to be able to afford a decent private education for their children, roll on the school holidays when they can escape the state-run fortresses of ignorance and error they must attend, and start to be able to learn a few things for themselves free of Government propaganda.