30 June 2026 - 1:00pm
Nothing can more rapidly diminish my respect for a person than their utterance of the phrase “I didn’t learn about this at school.” It’s a confession of unattractive qualities — incuriosity, a bovine passivity, and often a patchy, selective memory. It implies that schools ought to have a monopoly on learning, and that being spoon-fed by a teacher is a good substitute for picking up a book.
Nor can these memories of what one didn’t learn at school always be relied upon. We were all schoolchildren once, and we know that we didn’t always pay full attention. When people complain that they didn’t learn about a subject at school, it’s always worth testing their facility with trigonometry or titration.
Neither William Dalrymple nor Zack Polanski, apparently, learned about the British Empire when they were at school. On Polanski’s podcast, Bold Politics, they agreed that this was a moral disaster. The British Empire is the “elephant in the room”, the cause of so many of the world’s current ills: everything would be better if only the country’s imperial past were taught in schools.
The problem is that the British Empire is taught in schools. It has been on the national curriculum for history for as long as such a thing has existed. As former education secretary Michael Gove pointed out with a hint of glee, both Polanski and Dalrymple were privately educated, and in private schools the writ of the national curriculum does not run.
In Dalrymple’s case, one gets the sense that he won’t be satisfied until all school history lessons are about the British Empire. He has a monocausal view of the world: the Empire explains everything. The reason for “moral confusion” on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he suggests to Polanski — by which he seems to mean that not everybody in Britain is as fervently pro-Palestine as he is — is a lack of teaching on the subject in schools. His argument for the centrality of the British Empire to the ongoing war is shabby, emphasising Britain’s training of what became the IDF, for example, without ever mentioning the country’s extensive military support for Jordan during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Both Dalrymple and Polanski stand to benefit from the “I didn’t learn about the British Empire at school” myth. Dalrymple gets to market his books and podcasts as granting access to “secret knowledge” — what could be more enticing than that? Meanwhile, it flatters Polanski’s ego by making him seem like he is taking on a conservative establishment. When he says he wants empire to be at the heart of the curriculum, he obviously does not have in mind drilling schoolchildren with the names of battles and colonial administrators. What he and Dalrymple want instead is a national exercise in self-flagellation.
In that vein, what should we cut from the curriculum to make more room for classes in imperial guilt? Those who insist on making their favourite subjects mandatory often forget that schools and history teachers are already pressed for time. Polanski and Dalrymple guffaw a few times about the six wives of Henry VIII, their go-to example of school history frivolity. When I learned about the six wives of Henry VIII, there was, amidst the frivolity, a serious point to it all. Henry VIII’s chaotic love life, we learned, played a part in England’s break from Rome. That is rather an important moment in our island story. Perhaps it is even as important as our Empire.
