Relearning your past with schools rewriting of history

Here is a thread about education. It is a subject that is seriously worrying me of late and I have a few different angles on it. I thought I'd start with History, but I'm also concerned with other aspects of it which I'll come to later.

We have many different channels by which we learn things and one that dominates these days is media, as per learning from a book or a magazine or a lecture/teacher. These are often providing all sorts of information which you can take on trust, but a certain way of knowing if the provider of the information is telling the truth is to learn about something you already know about. You can apply this in a kind of spot-check methodology, so if randomly selected topics pass as true, the chance of the rest being true is pretty high, and the converse is also applicable.

In the following example I have been looking at a topic I am completely familiar with. This is the 1980s and what was going on in the entertainment and arts of that era. It is now being taught to schools which are so foreign you would be hard-pressed to find anyone British in the class, except possibly the teacher. This means that the teacher is unlikely to get caught out by some smart kid checking with older adults they know to see if what they have learnt is accurate. If it were the 1880s then certainly they would not be able to do this.

OK so here is Exhibit A: a school lesson on the late 80s rave scene in Blighty, which I was involved with at the time. A close school friend of mine was a fellow promoter who knew all the guys personally at Sunrise, the very first large rave operator.  In other words what I know did not come from any media, it came from being there. The following lesson has a lot of media clips drawn from the pool of media reports at the time. We have seen them before so are not really that interesting. What is interesting is the school teacher and how he rewrites what was going on. I'll give you some examples.

 According to him it was inspired by Kraftwerk. Where he gets that idea from is just peculiar. He also comments on the American and America black influences. Yes this is true and many earlier raves played American import records. So we get a bit of truth mixed with a bit of fiction. From the horses mouth the truth was more along the lines that the mid 80s Brits electronic pop bands were so naff and so gay and commercial that along with the London clubs charging exorbitant rate of admission and costly drinks etc, that people were in a rebellious mood and wanted something a bit more edgy shall we say. You will also recall Britain was going through Thatcherism which extolled the virtues of the self-made successful businessman who starts up, opens shop and makes loads of money and lives life to the full. This was the generation of the media-hyped yuppie city kid with expensive suit. However here we have a business demand and a kind of methodology on how to fulfil that demand by exploiting the market - all basic business school stuff like. In other words it was the law of unintended consequences. The right were pushing free trade and the left were pushing gay and multiculturalism. The artistic goods from the left were rejected by the market and the market got what it wanted, which was excitement. Not only this but up until that time the music industry was controlled by the liked of EMI. It was a corporate oligopoly and hence uncompetitive. It was this stranglehold on the market that made the goods so naff, like a McDonald hamburger.

The teacher then goes on to say that the reason it happened in the first place like it did was due to the miner's strikes. This is the first time I have ever heard anyone say this and it is categorically untrue. The thesis is the social unrest, left-wing activism and the fight with Tory backed coal board was what led to the general air of anarchy. He also points out the chap who runs Guido Fawkes is a nasty Tory activist who likes to create as much chaos as possible and was one of the early pioneers of the rave scene. As one can see this theory has problems with it, in that in the same lesson he also says the scene began around the M25. the astute amongst us would note that there are not any coal mines on or near the M25! As for the Tory activist, well the Tories at  the time were dead agaisnt the rave scene and made it a thing to campaign against it, portraying it as about as evil as Saddam Hussain. 

But I think the biggest whopper of a lie was to say that this scene was on the one hand a good progressive advancement in the art of electronic music that paved the way for all that followed (true) with the statement that later on what spoilt it was that criminals started to get involved and were peddling drugs that brought the police attention, as if here we have this great new art form and the ugly menace of drugs destroyed it with the blight of criminality. He conveniently forget the reason it was first referred to as Acid House was simply because everyone was on LSD. The art form was very well understood to be wholly influenced by LSD as anyone who knows what LSD is would tell you! This misframing is a delve into fiction writing. There is other inaccuracy, e.g. the travellers absolutely hated Spiral Tribe. They were the least talented and most disrespectful of all rave operators and I think it came to almost being kicked off site, so hardly as he says the reason why travellers got into the rave culture.

In conclusion this teacher is telling these kids a fat load of porkies about us and our culture and he is doing it in a way so as to politicise it through his leftwing spectacles. It is however a valuable insight into the modern inner London ethnic classroom and the talk about the difference in that culture to the modern day I found interesting. One Muslim girl seems to put it quire succinctly : then the main thing the youth got into was music, but now it is all about social media "status". I found the word status an interesting point. It's true. the modern kid clamours for status, where the top goal is an A-list celeb. Very corporate eh? It seems lost on the teacher how really the rave scene was actually anti-corporate and truly capitalist. The definition I'm using here is a capitalist businessman provides you with what you desire. Ironically this produces diversity since every capitalist is a unique person with his own ideas how to satisfy that desire.  Anyway, have a look yourself. You might want to skip some  of the long video insert, some even without sound, but the classroom was interesting. NB Youtube has now changed its algorithm. If you want an ad-free experience you'll need an add-on called uBlock Origin.