"There Will Always Be An England." Right?

Maybe not.

Perhaps you heard about this story:

Schools told to dump Churchill and Hitler from history lessons

Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.

Even Winston Churchill no longer merits a mention after a drastic slimming-down of the syllabus to create more space for "modern" issues.

Along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King, the former prime minister has been dropped from a list of key figures to be mentioned in history teaching.

This means pupils may no longer hear about his stirring speeches during the Second World War, when he told Parliament that defeating Hitler would be Britain's "finest hour".

The only individuals now named in guidance accompanying the curriculum are anti-slavery campaigners Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce.

...

Key subjects such as history and science will be cut back to allow teachers to spend a quarter of the day helping pupils who struggle with literacy and numeracy.

At the same time, staff will be expected to introduce topics such as personal finance and Urdu aimed at preparing youngsters for life in the 21st century.

Urdu?!?! That paragraph speaks volumes about the future of the United Kingdom. Rather than learning about what made their nation great, British children will be learning the languages of what were once subjects of the Empire. Dead White Men are now in disfavor, unless they were involved in the antislavery movement. And while I think slavery was a bad thing and that those who fought for its abolition are worthy of being remembered, it's ridiculous to strip the curriculum of people like Churchill, without whom the children would be learning in German, not Urdu.

While it's not a bad thing to learn foreign languages, it should be a requirement that foreigners immigrating to a country should learn the native language. In Britain, as in America, that language is English. If Urdu is necessary for life in 21st Century Britain, then they are in deep, dark trouble. And if they have no memory of their nation's glorious past, then they face an inglorious future. George Santayana's words have never been truer.