FROM BRITAIN TO MALTA: UNDERMINING CIVILISATION AND NATIONAL PRIDE 

By Maltese Canadian

Katharine Birbalsingh has issued a stark warning about the teaching of history in British schools. The headmistress of Michaela Community School, often called Britain’s strictest, spoke out recently. She criticised how lessons now frame the past through an “oppressor versus oppressed” lens.

Birbalsingh argues that this approach leaves pupils ashamed of their country. Schools dwell on the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. They give little space to Britain’s role in ending the slave trade or its broader achievements. Arab slave trades, which lasted far longer, receive scant mention. Instead, children learn that Britain has “always been a land of immigrants”. Classic texts by Shakespeare, Dickens and Kipling are sidelined in favour of decolonised curricula.

This selective narrative, she says, breeds resentment rather than understanding. It mirrors trends across the West.

In the United States, similar distortions have deepened racial divides. History lessons often reduce complex events to identity politics. Nuance vanishes. Pupils emerge viewing their nation through guilt rather than balanced pride.

Canada offers a more tragic example. In 2021, reports claimed unmarked graves of Indigenous children at former Catholic residential schools. Media and politicians accused the Church of killing orphans. The stories proved exaggerated or false. No mass graves materialised in several probed sites. Yet the damage was done.

Churches burned across the country. Arsonists targeted Catholic sites, often on Indigenous land. Police took little action. Emboldened, perpetrators are currently turning to new targets. Reports now link ongoing fires to Ontario woods and forests. About half the recent fires have been caused by arsonists. Past inaction by the authorities bred further chaos. Justice delayed became justice denied.

Birbalsingh calls for schools to fly the national flag proudly and teach proper national stories, from Henry VIII to the World Wars, Shakespeare to Churchill. Duty, responsibility and truth must return. Instead, we see the Maltese Embassy in Berlin hoist the rainbow flag. And our political leaders marching down Republic Street in Valletta with Palestinian flags.

Birbalsingh warns that twisting truth leads to fatal results. Prejudice grows. Social cohesion fractures. Real grievances deserve attention, but fabrications inflame hatred.

Malta illustrates the power of imported ideas. Locals, glued to foreign social media, swallowed woke critiques aimed at America. They began accusing their own island of identical sins. Malta, with its distinct history of resilience and faith, faced demands for self-flagellation for slavery and Black Lives Matter tropes. Gullible adoption of external narratives ignored local context. Internet wokism spread like wildfire.

On 26 July 1551, Ottoman forces entered the Gozo Citadel. They spared only about 40 elderly or infirm inhabitants. Almost all the rest, over 5,000 of them, were captured, marched to the ships, and taken into slavery. Many ended up as galley slaves or were sold in markets in North Africa and Constantinople (Istanbul).

History matters. Taught honestly, it unites. Distorted, it divides and destroys. 

Failure risks more idiocracy and deeper prejudice. Civilisationitself hangs in the balance.