If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Nearly quarter of Brits think Churchill was a fictional character
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
And more than half believe Sherlock Holmes existed for real...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153628.htm?section=world
Are we becoming dumber by the day? It would seem so...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153628.htm?section=world
Are we becoming dumber by the day? It would seem so...
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
0
Comments
So, who's to blame for this dreadful state of affairs? As always, we never have to look far to find out. It is, of course, the very same group of people who are to blame for most things wrong with Britain today. Yep, you guessed it - warped Leftie liberals who jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Let's not forget - they are the ones who got rid of the old "elitist" education system and brought in "bog-standard" comprehensives, thus condemning generations of kids to failure. They are the ones who changed the way that children learned to read - as a result, employers constantly complain that kids and even adults can't read properly. They are the ones who purged History lessons of almost everything British.
If you believe what I was taught about British history, there are only two notable events in our past - the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the reign of Henry VIII from 1509-1547. Yet you can learn everything there is to know about Adolf Hitler, whilst the USA was portrayed as the great evil. Neither does it help that most History teachers are smug Lefties who read the Guardian on their tea breaks. All in the name of that utterly repulsive phrase, "social engineering".
I bet if the poll asked people to name Charlotte Church's baby, or the name of that trollop who Cashley apparently shagged, everyone would get it right.
You mean he doesn't???:shocking:
Still I'm impressed that 33% of people had heard of Biggles nowdays...
I kind of wonder if whenever you watch a clip 9/11, instead of passenger jets you see giant copies of The Guardian colliding with the Twin Towers and killing all those people.
No doubt it was a Guardian reader who kidnapped Madeleine, and another one who set up a bomb under the ocean that triggered the Boxing Day tsunami and killed 250,000.
Oooh yes
Surely it was The Mail?
Good post.
As a frequent reader and infrequent poster in P&D it is really noticable that StarGalaxy, you need to change the record and use your brain every now and then instead of churning out the same old line in every thread. As a product of a bog-standard comprehensive I don't think I'm doing that badly thanks :thumb:
On to my point. I suppose it depends who you poll, but if it was UKTV Gold viewers (so it seems) I'm not incredibly surprised by the result. Hardly a representative sample of the UK population.
Deffo the Guardian, one of my Leftie mates at Area 51 told me so :thumb:
I always thought Area 51 was where Hitler holed up after the Americans secretly spirited him away after the fall of Berlin? Unless the rumour that Hitler was a secret Bolshevik agent is true :chin:
I'd assume it was a survey of the UK population, commissioned by UKTV Gold, rather than a poll of UKTV Gold viewers.
But I could understand if they believed Miss Marple or the Royle Family are real
I don't post on these forums very often but read pretty much every day and I have to say I am fed up of seeing comments like this from you. It seems like you've recently heard/come up with the term "leftie liberals" and are determined to insert it as many times into every post in P&D as possible. If there were a drinking game based on it (bonus points for every time you also slag off the Guardian/readership) we'd all be in an alcohol-fuled state of unconsciousness right now.
That is all.
Back to the original issue, I do think stuff like this is becoming a problem - a friend of mine had a 16 year old relative ask him if Anne Frank was in the bible. Also out of 30 odd kids in my sister's grammar school class, only TWO of them had even heard of the holocaust.
I guess what is taught in schools depends on the issues/politics of the time, kids can't be expected to know everything but I thought that was pretty poor. Also a large part of it is down to family, my sister knew a lot about the holocaust for example because I've visited Auschwitz and told her about my experiences, but if parents and family don't have much historical or political knowledge then it is unlikely future generations will either.
Shakespeare's post about the crazy lefties high-fiving Muslims was a cracker too.
On topic, anyone ever noticed that schools seem to be required to teach every period of history that has ever happened? And if we miss anything out whatsoever, you'll have a specific group whinging?
Nope, care to give examples?
I'm doing history in uni and I like to pick modules from all sorts of eras, not because I don't like discriminating, but because I want to learn as much as possible about human history. As for a quater of the population thinking Churchill was fictional, well it's disheartening but it's not going to bring the country down.
On an even more serious note, surely taking a measly poll conducted by a channel whose sister-channel has renamed themselves 'Dave' - yes, 'Dave' - as some sort of Biblical authority on the knowledge and implied education of The Brits is a little... wrong. Hell, the Disney adaptation of Robin Hood has gone half way towards convincing me that Richard the Lionheart was nothing more than a cartoon lion with a big grin - and as far as I can tell Walt Disney was probably an arse-hole who hated kids: not a history teacher and surely more of a News of the World reader. And how do you know how many of those 23% (a paltry amount anyhow) who claimed Churchill was a myth were not grinning wryly, referring to that nearly always mythic realm of the hero which Churchill for many people inhabits? Sauntering off after participating in the survey to get pregnant and fart on public property, of course.
And also that some people won't actually know. We're all pretty intelligent on these boards, I've come across a lot of people who are 'slow' to use a euphemism and wouldn't even be able to use a PC. Just like anything there are gradients from encyclopaedic knowledge all the way down to intelligence just greater than that of a rabbit. I'm sure a lot of skilled individuals have failings in their intellect in many places - just watch Are You Smarter Than a 10 Year Old? to see this in effect. Some people are absolutely atrocious at maths, and so on.
Having a statistic on it's own is meaningless without some benchmark to compare it to. It's like saying the average height in the UK is 5'6 (guess). "So the fuck what?"
P.s. in the comments:
SG?
Well slavery was the most recent one that people were moaning we don't teach enough about, and people have said that we focus on the holocaust too much.
Still need to know who they spoke to though, in certain areas of the country there are high propotions of recent immagrants, it's more than likely they wont know much about British history, what were the age ranges? Were they asking school children? I wouldn't take these results too seriously.
What the poll also says is that the vast majority of people (more than three quarters) knew that Winston Churchill was a real person :razz:
Glass half full eh?
I don't believe in Paris Hilton.
To be fair according to the Telegraph it's under twenties
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/04/nhistory104.xml
Without knowing who did it we can't check the methodology, but I'd assume a wide geographical spread if its done by any reputable company (not that it neccessarily was).
That said I'd have thought even recent immigrants would have heard of Winston Churchill - given how pivotal he was to Twentieth Century world history, not just the UK.
http://uktv.co.uk/gold/stepbystep/aid/598605
Also I'm not sure how they came to the conclusion that King Arthur was fictional - he's almost certainly based on a real person. And the same is possibly true for Robin hood and almost certainly Lady Godiva. Robinson Crusoe is based on alexander Selkirk (though the name was changed and his adventures are fictionalised0
And Dick Turpin (who comes in at number six on fictional characters people think are real) was hung in York and there's enough documentary evidence to say he was a real life person.
However after looking a bit more closely at this I'm not convinced it's been properly conducted and without the name of the pollsters I wouldn't be sure they hadn't been a bit of trickery in interpreting the results.
ETA - there's also something strange about the historical figures people think are fictional 25% think Churchill is fictional, but only 6% think Monty was
That in itself is not newsworthy.
I've known this for some time now. I just thank God that I'm an intelligent, enlightened and educated man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A619760
Mona Lisa - who she was is debateable, but I don't think anyone seriously suggests she was made up by da Vinci.
So the only purely fictional characters are Sherlock Holmes, Biggles and Elenaro Rigby...
Yes there was a Dick Turpin, and yes he was a criminal - but apart from that virtually everything people 'know' about him is total rubbish made up about 100 years after he died.
He was actually more of a violent house breaker and robber than a highwayman. He was almost certainly also a rapist and used guns and torture to find out where loot was hidden in houses.
So the Dick Turpin think they know is very largely fictional.