"British Isles"

I do like to point out that "Great ____" or "Greater ____" is a normal name to give to the largest island in an archipelago, but does this imply that Ireland is "Lesser Britain" or "Britain Minor"?

Brittany is Lesser Britain. So some people say.

More than two decades ago now, but it wasn't really taught at all in my high school aside from mentioning "home rule" as being a hot political topic of the Edwardian & late Victorian eras, but that meant as much to us as the Corn Laws. Especially odd as I went to a weird state Catholic secondary school named after one of the English Martyrs, where we were taught that we were a persecuted minority, not allowed to raise money for Oxfam (had to be Cafod, Oxfam fund abortions!), not allowed to do bonfire night because Guy Fawkes was a martyr framed by the state, etc. Half of the kids (including me) seemed to have some sort of Irish ancestry, but still Ireland was basically never mentioned in the whole five years.

I doubt that the Gove era of education has changed any of this.

I think my nephew goes to the school you are talking about!

I don't think I learnt anything about Ireland at school but I didn't do history GCSE and although my history teacher in 3rd year was head of the history dept he was a fucking awful teacher and we were way behind the syllabus. Everyone in other sets were doing WWII and we were still on the industrial revolution

tbf you are 16 here before you learn anything about irish history

everything I knew I learned from Yeats' poems in english class, not history.

Where's the 'Miserable Damp Fucking Shithole' option?

Was singing "James Connolly" before I could walk etc.

Have had English peeps justify colonialism to my by saying with pained sincerity: but they’re called the *british* isles DO YOU SEE, as of the term isn’t itself a colonial dick punch.

Bleedin' Saxons.

I know it's been gnawed over ad infinitum, but seriously, the idea of an education which leaves you unable to draw your only land border..

Art education has been the pits for decades it's true.

tbf there is a lot of history to cover and I don't think I could come up with a curriculum for 3 hrs a week for years 7-9 that wouldn't leave ppl with huge gaps in their understanding of the country & world. history was one of the best-taught subjects at my school and in the late 90s/early 00s we did the industrial revolution, the first world war, the norman conquest, shi huangdi & early china, the french revolution & napoleon, the civil war, and for gcse due to an anomaly with the history syllabus at that time we almost exclusively did 1918-39 for 2 years, which was great. I'm be tempted to say doing one period in detail is better than skipping over lots of other stuff, but the more I learn abt history the tougher & more absurd the idea of coming up with some basic crib-sheet version that will sort the kids out seems.

I really love condensed histories and overviews, and the single volume world history is mb my favourite format of book, but it's bc of how working on such a big scale reveals the contours, peculiarities and particulars of one perspective, not bc they are in any sense definitive. braudel's history of civilizations was initially intended to be an overview for the equivalent of a-level students in france, and if you really wanted ppl to have some outline of everthing you'd need to adopt its thrillingly-light-on-detail style, and that probably wouldn't include land borders

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you can't refer to a group of over 6000 things as x & x

The Britains and Ireland.

sure we're all things like

you want to name it, beat the brits imo

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51i44PfMk%2BL.jpg
I've not got around to reading this yet, but apparently Edgerton says the British Nation ceased to be in the 70's, as it realigned itself as part of the EU. Which might make him sound a bit like Nigel Lawson, but apparently he is a much deeper thinker than that.

Greece is just called Greece, if you want to talk about the Greek islands you talk about the, er, Greek islands.