ABSTRACT
When I used to teach 'Liberal Studies' to Technical College students, I used to find myself in a dilemma. I had given up history teaching in a Grammar School because I did not want to teach about May Day in Shakespeare's England to the young boys or the causes of the Hundred Years' War to sixth-formers. I began to teach, among other things, about the rise of the Labour Party and the origin of the Welfare State. But, at the same time, I felt that I was treading on dangerous ground. How far was I getting my students consciously or unconsciously to share my own political beliefs, however carefully I stuck to the 'tacts'? And if they did come to share them was I not indoctrinating them, not educating them? In my very selection of topics to include these political issues was I not doing with different content what a planner of a history syllabus in Soviet Russia does—and wasn't this indoctrination? I thought back to what my head master had told me after a disastrous lesson on sex I had given to a class of fourteen-year-old boys in a Secondary Modern School when I first taught: 'I've always said so, and I'll say it again, lad: you can teach anything you like in school, as long as you keep off just three things: religion, sex and politics.'
