It's a truism on the web that journalists (and, by implication, most of the population) don't understand the sciences. The old 'two cultures' of CP Snow gets dragged out with monotonous regularity. Worstall concentrates often on the lack of understanding of economics. There's numerous sites dedicated to the lack of understanding of statistics (including this one when it comes to DVR). And underlying it all is a view that hacks are arts graduates, who have to be lectured on elementary numbers. Unfortunately, most hacks aren't that much better at history, whether modern or ancient. Maybe I just notice it more given a history-reliant background (well, I did do economics too, but I try and forget about it). I don't really blame the hacks in question, it's just too easy to re-write PRs, fail to do any research and repeat vaguely remembered myths from school. And, while the TV fascination with the subject continues, it's usually in terms of 'celebrity family history' or the even worse 'celebrity egomaniac with a book to sell' (see Starkey, Holmes, Crucikshank), rather than any attempt to provide us with a contextual overview of whence we all came. Which leads me to Labour MP Gordon Marsden's attack on school teaching of history, for its 'Yo Sushi' style. By which he means taking little bits, rather than looking at the overview. I'm not sure why he thinks this is anything new. Any historical museum knows that Tudors, Victorians and WWII are sure bankers to base entire education programmes and interpretations around. Every year students will do those subjects while ignoring large swathes of the rest of our island history (never mind the history of Europe or the rest of the world--hey, you ever heard of any English ECW school course that puts it in the context of the Thirty Years' War? Thought not...) Most of us studied small or large chunks or bits without having any sort of overview. And, while he recognises that the problem is one with Britishness, and defining it, there's no solution offered beyond the usual Labourite nostrums. Of course, he quotes the requisite trendy-lefty notion that we should study how waves of immigration contributed to Britain since the sixteenth century. But that's just another chunk (albeit a useful one), replacing one type of prescriptive schooling with another. Underlying it all we have to look at how history has been used and abused, as image, ideology and excuse, throughout, uhhr, history. Which might explain why the journalists who refer to it insist on repeating the same cliches and simplifications again and again. History, after all, he postmodernises, doesn't exist outside of books and TV programmes and half-remembered facts. It's all a myth. Now that's a school course that would get them leaving in droves.