Monthly Archives: December 2010

English education: the roots of its politicisation

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Robert Henderson

When I left school in the mid-sixties the Empire was effectively finished – the final nail in the coffin of imperial feeling was banged in by our entry into the EU in 1972,  which alienated the  white dominions – and … Continue reading →

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English education in saner times

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Robert Henderson

I was born in 1947. Never, perhaps, has England (and Britain) been more of a coherent community.  The dramatic recent experience of the Second World War  filled the minds of everyone  and that  shared experience  bound together even more tightly  … Continue reading →

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English state education – a project to culturally cleanse the English

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Robert Henderson

Ask an English child of 2011 about the iconic dates of English history such as Hastings, Blenheim and Waterloo and your chances of getting a correct answer are very small. Quiz them on who was Alfred the Great  or ask … Continue reading →

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England was wealthy long before the Empire and the Slave Trade

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Robert Henderson

Researchers at Warwick University led by  economist Professor Stephen Broadberry have concluded that Mediaeval England,  far from being a land of poverty-stricken peasants oppressed by a small aristocratic  elite,  was a prosperous land with a higher average per capita income … Continue reading →

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Evolving English exhibition – ends 3 April 2011

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Robert Henderson

http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/ British Library (Immediately next to St Pancras Station) Entry is free to all the exhibitions mentioned This is an exhibition I can wholeheartedly recommend.  The show  takes the visitor from the beginnings of English following the Germanic colonisation of … Continue reading →

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England and the only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Robert Henderson

Of  all the social changes  which have occurred in human history,  none has been  so  profound as the process of  industrialisation.  The  two previous  great general  amendments  to  human  life  –  farming   and urbanisation – pale into insignificance. Before industrialisation,  … Continue reading →

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England and the Enlightenment

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Robert Henderson

 In his book “Enlightenment:  Britain and the creation of the modern  world”, the  historian Roy Porter remarks how peculiar it is  “that  historians have  so  little  to say about the role of  English  thinkers   in  the European  Enlightenment  as a … Continue reading →

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England and the practice of science

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Robert Henderson

 England was from the seventeenth century in the vanguard of the rise of science.    William  Gilbert’s   work on   magnetism  was  followed  by William Harvey tracing the circulation of the blood,  Halley’s work  on comets and Robert Hooke’s polymathic span from … Continue reading →

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England and the concept of science

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Robert Henderson

The development of the concept of what we call science is arguably  the most  dramatic intellectual event in history,  for it  utterly  changed both  the way in which men viewed the world and provided them with  the means to mould … Continue reading →

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The beginnings of English intellectual history

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Robert Henderson

English intellectual history is a long one.  It can reasonably be  said to  begin  in  the early eighth  century   with  Bede’s  Ecclesiastical  History of the English,  which amongst other things firmly  establishes the  English  as  a people before England as  … Continue reading →

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