Over the past few days I've seen people describe European countries (including the UK) as if they're morally pure in comparison to America, and I can’t stop thinking about how the education system seeds and nurtures this belief.

First, I can't stop thinking about how much of British colonial history we can't teach and won't ever know thanks to Operation Legacy – a concerted effort to destroy records of colonial crimes by burning them or burying them at sea. What we do know is not even the worst of it.

But even the things we do know about our past, we don’t teach – or we teach in a way that both blunts their impact and divorces them from the present day. We don’t teach students to link then and now. We conjure a false and incomplete picture of Britain and tout it as history.

Inevitably, this creates adults who emerge from years of schooling ill-informed and ill-equipped to make these links; who take pride in the lie of a great and benevolent empire; who were told Black History was separate from History, if it was taught at all.

It's notable that we don't even teach local history properly. I never learned about English atrocities in Ireland. OUTLANDER gave me more knowledge about how England has treated Scotland than my school did. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know a thing about the Welsh Not.

If we refuse to teach the truth about our relationships with our neighbours, it’s not surprising that our schools create so many adults with little to no understanding of how brutally Britain treated its former colonies, or the scale of its involvement in the slave trade.

In short, the way we currently teach history in Britain seems to do more to obfuscate and constrain our understanding of history than illuminate and broaden it.

We need to look the past in the face, and to stop propagating the lie that the present is someone else’s problem.

It's discomforting to realise what your country is and has been. But imagine how frustrating and painful it is for those who already know these things happened, and are faced with thousands of people who know absolutely nothing about them and/or refuse to believe they're true.

I'll round off this thread by drawing your attention to Fill in the Blanks ( @fillinthblanks) and The Black Curriculum ( @CurriculumBlack), which are already working to address the lack of colonial and Black history in UK schools.