Education, Edukashun, learnin stuff

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History textbook tells pupils USA first landed on moon in 1979

An official history textbook used by thousands of GCSE pupils contains embarrassing errors, including the assertion that the United States won the race to the moon in 1979.

The new book, written by examiners, also tells pupils that John F Kennedy was president of America in 1960.

Entitled History: The Making of the Modern World, the textbook for a new Edexcel GCSE history exam, the inaccuracies have been slammed by historians and teachers.

"You have got to get these things right," said Sean Lang, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridgeshire, and honorary secretary of the Historical Association. "The whole issue of exam boards putting out official exam text books that students then buy is highly suspect as it is, but if they are going to do it, you expect it to be right.

"Children take what they see in print as gospel. These books have enormous authority and the facts have to be right."

Nick Gibb, the shadow children's minister, said: "The decline and fall of history continues under Labour. Fewer than one in three children now takes the subject at GCSE and it's little wonder when even the syllabus contains basic historical errors."

The history of the modern world exam will be taken for the first time by pupils next June. Many schools will use the text book in class and pupils can buy it from bookshops.

It states on page 96 that "The 1960 Paris Conference, between Khrushchev and new President John F. Kennedy, was a disaster". However, Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president in 1960 and JFK was not inaugurated until January 1961.

On page 125 it says that the US "won the race to the moon in 1979". The Apollo 11 moon landing was actually in July 1969.

The book also says that during the cold war the hot line between the US president and Soviet premier was a "telegraph" system rather than a teleprinter.

A spokesman for the Edexcel exam board said: "All our books are thoroughly checked during the development process but unfortunately occasional mistakes happen. We would like to take this opportunity to apologise to teachers and pupils for the errors. We take errors such as these very seriously and we will correct them at the earliest opportunity."

Occasional mistake? Big glaring errors is more like it!

Our education system has been messed around too much by liberal leftism without handicapping the kids further with wrong facts, I mean these are major errors, how many minor ones might have slipped through in past publications? How many teachers would actually know? It's not like they teach history properly anyway, they've turned one of the most interesting subjects into one of the most boring by concentrating on social history rather than events. Don't believe me? Then try and get hold of a book called "A Social History of Britain" It's the one used by most schools in the 1970's. Try and find a mention of the Napoleonic wars, you know the one that lasted for 25 years, laid waste vast territories with terrible suffering inflicted on the civilian populations of the time. with proportionately more people dying than in the First or Second world wars and lasting 4 times longer than either? I can assure you it's there, wedged in as an adjunct to the corn laws, just in passing, completely misses Pitt, Wellington or even Napoleon Bonaparte.

The teachers have brought up a generation to be disinterested in history as boring. Most kids get their history from films, thinking that Braveheart is real, or that the Americans captured an enigma machine first in U571. Hell for all I know they may even believe that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is ancient history. (Yes I know I'm generalising and not all kids are like this)

But I really do despair at times for the future of England's kids, they're being allowed to run feral, taught to ignore the past and falling into a social democratic nightmare with an unelected elite to control them.