Historically, you don't get us, we're part of the Union

AN eerily familiar claim echoes through Scotland's glens. A claim brandished like William Wallace's claymore: “Scotland’s children have been denied their own history.”

- Todd Ferguson

It is a bold claim. Full of bluff and bluster. It arrives in social media forums like a rowdy Highland charge. We hear it from nationalist politicians, crazed Anglophobic cybernats, and journalists who should know better. The bellowing is loud. Scottish history has been “airbrushed”, and it is only thanks to the nationalists that it is now being rescued from the dark shadow cast by Britain.

As with most things in Scotland, it is an emotional narrative, but I hate to burst the bubble, it simply is not true.

The facts say otherwise. For much of the 20th century, Scottish school exam papers easily found in the digital archives of the National Library of Scotland record that our history has long been a central part of the curriculum. Scottish pupils have been asked to write essays on the 1707 Act of Union, have debated the motives of Mary Queen of Scots, and analysed the Reformation’s causes and consequences. This is not the syllabus of a nation kept in the dark.

BUT still the myth persists. This idea, that Scotland’s history has been hidden or suppressed, fits neatly into the politics of grievance. It paints Scotland as a victim, England as villain, and turns the classroom into a battleground for ideology.