In March 2023, Gary Lineker — a man best known for crisp adverts and football commentary — compared the British government’s asylum policy to “language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” The response was predictable. The BBC panicked. The Home Secretary expressed disappointment. Social media ignited. But nobody asked the more interesting question: why is it always Germany in the 1930s?
When a Western politician is accused of authoritarianism, the comparison is Hitler. When a policy is deemed cruel, the analogy is the Nazis. When a movement is labelled dangerous, the reference is fascism. Never Stalin. Never Mao. Never Pol Pot. The historian Richard J. Evans has observed that “many, if not most, Nazi analogies are historically inaccurate” — yet they keep coming, with the mechanical predictability of a cuckoo clock that only knows one tune.
This is not an accident. It is not the product of careful historical reasoning. It is the product of something far more mundane and far more powerful: the British school curriculum. What you are taught at school becomes the lens through which you see the world — and Britain’s lens is remarkably, stubbornly narrow.
The Classroom
The British history curriculum, in its essentials, has changed rather less than you might imagine over the past thirty-five years. The National Curriculum was introduced in 1991, revised in 1995, 2000, 2008, and 2014 — but each revision left the core architecture intact. At Key Stage 3, when history is still compulsory for all pupils aged eleven to fourteen, schools are required to cover four broad periods: medieval England (1066–1509), the Tudors and Stuarts (1509–1745), the Georgian and Victorian era (1745–1901), and the modern period (1901 to the present). Within this framework, the Holocaust is the only topic that is specifically mandated — the only event that every state school in England must teach (Holocaust Education Trust, 2024).
Everything else is, in principle, at the school’s discretion. In practice, the discretion is rather narrower than it appears.
At age fourteen, history becomes optional. Approximately forty per cent of pupils continue to GCSE (Historical Association, 2021). The rest — a majority of the population — will never study history again. Their entire understanding of the human past will rest on whatever they absorbed between the ages of eleven and fourteen. For most, that means: medieval kings, the Tudors, the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars, and the Holocaust. A respectable syllabus. But one that stops at the English Channel with suspicious regularity and rarely ventures east of Berlin.
The forty per cent who take GCSE face a menu of options that, across the three major exam boards — AQA, Edexcel, and OCR — heavily features Nazi Germany. AQA offers “Germany 1890–1945: Democracy and Dictatorship.” Edexcel offers “Weimar and Nazi Germany, 1918–39.” These are among the most popular choices at every exam board, year after year.
At A-level, the picture becomes sharper — and the data more revealing. A Cambridge Assessment study of 506 schools using OCR’s A-level History specification found that “Democracy and Dictatorships in Germany 1919–1963” was the third most popular topic across the entire course, chosen by 21.3 per cent of schools (Dunn, Darlington and Benton, 2016). The Tudors came first and second in British history options — the Early Tudors at 19.4 per cent, the Later Tudors at 14 per cent. Russia 1894–1941 attracted 14.6 per cent — but that module covers the Bolshevik revolution and the early Soviet state, not the full horror of Stalinism.
And at the bottom of the table? “China and its Rulers 1839–1989” was offered by 1.8 per cent of schools. “The Rise of Islam” and “Charlemagne” attracted precisely zero. African Kingdoms, the Mughal Empire, and Japan each managed a single-digit number of schools out of more than five hundred.
The same study found that low-attaining schools were statistically significantly more likely to teach Nazi Germany than higher-attaining schools — meaning the students who will study the least history overall are the most likely to study the same period that already dominates the curriculum. The researchers identified the reason: teacher expertise and resource availability (Child, Darlington and Gill, 2015). Teachers teach what they know. What they know is what they were taught. And so the curriculum reproduces itself, generation after generation, like a photocopy of a photocopy — each iteration a little fuzzier, but the same image.
The Missing Chapters
Consider what falls through the gaps.
The Holodomor — the Soviet engineered famine in Ukraine in 1932–33 — killed approximately 3.9 million people, according to the most rigorous demographic estimate (Qian, 2024). A 2024 study in the Review of Economic Studies established that ethnic discrimination against Ukrainians explained seventy-seven per cent of famine deaths. This was not a natural disaster. It was a policy, directed from Moscow, that starved a people because of who they were. The British school curriculum does not mention it.
The Great Leap Forward — Mao Zedong’s catastrophic programme of forced collectivisation and industrialisation between 1958 and 1962 — killed somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people. The lower figure comes from early demographic estimates; the higher from the historian Frank Dikötter, who examined hundreds of previously sealed Communist Party documents and concluded that at least forty-five million died, including two to three million who were tortured or summarily executed (Dikötter, 2010). Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist who spent years compiling evidence from provincial archives, put the figure at thirty-six million (Yang, 2012). The median estimate across the scholarly literature is roughly thirty million. The British school curriculum does not mention it.
The Gulag — the Soviet system of forced labour camps — processed approximately eighteen million prisoners between 1929 and 1953, according to declassified Soviet archives. Official records show some 1.7 million deaths within the camps themselves, though historians such as Golfo Alexopoulos argue the true figure is significantly higher, as it was common practice to release prisoners who were on the verge of death (Alexopoulos, 2017). The British school curriculum does not mention it.
The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia killed between 1.2 and 2.8 million people — roughly a fifth of the entire population — in just four years, from 1975 to 1979 (Heuveline, 2015). The British school curriculum does not mention it.
Add the purges, the Cultural Revolution, the Ethiopian Red Terror, the forced relocations of Soviet ethnic minorities, and the famines engineered across half a dozen communist states in the twentieth century, and the toll runs into the tens of millions even on the most conservative scholarly estimates. None of it features in the education of most British citizens. The one-point-eight per cent of A-level schools that offer the China module notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of Britons will leave formal education knowing the name of Hitler’s dog but not the name of the worst famine in human history.
The Science of the Lens
This might not matter much if what you learn at school stayed at school. It does not. The evidence that school curricula durably shape adult political beliefs is now substantial — and, for education policymakers, rather uncomfortable.
The most precise evidence comes from a natural experiment in the German state of Lower Saxony. Between 2009 and 2014, the senior high school history curriculum alternated between covering the communist German Democratic Republic and Nazi Germany. Luca Braghieri and Sarah Eichmeyer, economists at Bocconi University, surveyed more than two thousand former students approximately twelve years after graduation. Their findings, published as a CEPR Discussion Paper in 2024, were striking. Students who had studied the GDR scored seven per cent higher on a quiz about the communist regime — a full decade after leaving school. More importantly, they showed significantly lower support for extreme left-wing ideology: less agreement with core communist ideas such as extensive government control of the economy and support for a socialist state (Braghieri and Eichmeyer, 2024).
Knowledge of Nazi Germany, by contrast, remained stable across all groups — because Nazism is covered throughout the broader German curriculum, not just in the final two years. The implication is that the additional, focused study of a specific authoritarian regime produces a lasting, measurable reduction in support for that regime’s ideology. Students who learned about communism in depth became more resistant to communist ideas. Students who did not, did not.
A second study, from a very different context, reinforces the point. Between 2004 and 2010, the Chinese government rolled out a major textbook reform across its provinces. Davide Cantoni and his colleagues at the University of Munich surveyed nearly two thousand Peking University undergraduates, exploiting the staggered provincial rollout to isolate the causal effect of the new curriculum. The result: students exposed to the reformed textbooks held more positive views of China’s governance, were more sceptical of free markets, and showed changed views on democracy — shifts of approximately a quarter of a standard deviation that persisted after leaving school (Cantoni, Chen, Yang, Yuchtman and Zhang, 2017). Governments that design curricula to shape ideology get what they pay for.
The cognitive mechanism underlying all of this is well understood. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified what they called the availability heuristic: the tendency to judge the frequency or probability of events by how easily examples come to mind (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973). If you can easily recall an example of something, you are more likely to believe it is common and important. If you cannot recall an example, you are more likely to believe it is rare or irrelevant — even if the opposite is true.
Apply this to historical reasoning and the implications are immediate. A British adult educated in the standard curriculum has one highly available template for authoritarian evil: Nazi Germany. When they encounter a policy or politician they consider dangerous, the comparison that comes most readily to mind — the comparison that feels most natural, most apt, most resonant — is the one they were taught in school. Not because it is the most historically accurate comparison, but because it is the most cognitively available one. The comparison to Stalin’s collectivisation, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or Pol Pot’s Year Zero does not arise — not because it would be less apt, but because it is not in the mental toolkit. You cannot reach for an analogy you do not possess.
The Newsroom
The effects are visible in the data. David Rozado, a computational social scientist, analysed more than thirty million news and opinion articles from fifty-four outlets in the United States and United Kingdom, spanning 1970 to 2019. His findings, published in Social Sciences in 2022, showed that the frequency of terms denoting far-right political extremism had risen sharply across UK media — and that this increase was substantially greater than the corresponding rise in far-left-denoting terms. The asymmetry held even in right-leaning outlets: British newspapers of all political stripes were significantly more likely to invoke far-right extremism than far-left extremism (Rozado and Kaufmann, 2022).
This is not proof that the asymmetry originates in the classroom. But it is consistent with a population — journalists included — whose historical reference library is heavily stocked on one side and almost empty on the other. When Lineker reached for 1930s Germany, he was not making a considered historical argument. He was doing what the availability heuristic predicts: retrieving the most accessible historical analogy for “government doing something bad.” It was not the most accurate comparison he could have made. It was the only one he had.
The asymmetry has consequences beyond rhetoric. It shapes how citizens evaluate political risk. If your mental model of authoritarian danger is exclusively right-wing — if the only tyranny you were taught about wore jackboots and used gas chambers — then you will be well-calibrated to detect threats from that direction and systematically blind to threats from the other. You will recognise the aesthetics of fascism (nationalism, militarism, racial hierarchy) and fail to recognise the aesthetics of communism (class warfare, forced collectivisation, ideological purity tests, the liquidation of the bourgeoisie). Not because you are stupid. Because you were never given the information.
The Preference
In September 2024, YouGov asked Britons a question that had first been put to the public in January 1939: if you had to choose between communism and fascism, which would you pick? Thirty-nine per cent chose communism. Ten per cent chose fascism. Fifty-one per cent said they did not know. Excluding the undecided, the split was eighty-twenty in favour of communism — almost identical to the seventy-four-twenty-six split recorded in 1939 (YouGov, 2024).
The eighty-twenty figure merits scrutiny. The vast majority of those who chose communism — eighty-three per cent — said they regarded both systems as bad but considered one “noticeably worse than the other.” They were not endorsing communism. They were applying a comparative moral judgement: fascism is the greater evil. This judgement may be defensible. But it is worth asking how much of it rests on evidence and how much on the availability of evidence.
A separate YouGov survey in 2020 asked Britons to rate their knowledge of ten historical themes. Eighty-four per cent said they had good knowledge of the Second World War — the highest of any topic. Yet a 2019 YouGov survey designed to test actual knowledge found that only forty-nine per cent could correctly identify what D-Day was, and only fifty-seven per cent knew that the Allied forces were fighting Germany (YouGov, 2019). The gap between perceived and actual knowledge is instructive. Britons believe they understand the Second World War. They largely do not. What they have is a set of emotional and narrative associations — Nazis bad, Allies good, Holocaust monstrous — that were instilled at school and reinforced by decades of films, television, and commemorations. It is a moral frame, not a historical understanding. And it is the only moral frame most of them have for evaluating authoritarian evil.
Against this, consider what they know about communism. No equivalent survey exists for knowledge of the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor — which is itself revealing. Nobody thinks to ask the question, because nobody expects the public to know the answer.
The Remedy
The Braghieri and Eichmeyer study points toward a solution. Their finding was not simply that curriculum shapes belief — it was that curriculum shapes belief specifically about the ideology studied. Teaching the history of the GDR reduced support for left-wing extremism. It did not affect views on right-wing extremism, because Nazi Germany was already embedded in the broader curriculum. The mechanism is symmetrical: to reduce susceptibility to an ideology, teach its history in depth. To leave an ideology untaught is to leave a population undefended against it.
The obstacle is the self-reinforcing cycle that the Cambridge Assessment data exposed. Teachers teach what they know. What they know is what they were taught. The curriculum perpetuates itself because the people who deliver it are products of the same system. Breaking the cycle would require not just new syllabus content but new teacher training, new textbooks, new resources — and, most importantly, a political willingness to say that the current curriculum, however well-intentioned, is producing adults with a systematically lopsided understanding of the worst century in human history.
Augustus tried to control what Romans learned about the Republic. It worked for a while — until the gap between the official narrative and reality became too large for the fiction to sustain. The British history curriculum is not propaganda. It is something more insidious: a set of omissions so longstanding that they have become invisible. Nobody decided not to teach the Holodomor. It simply never occurred to anyone that they should — because nobody who writes the curriculum was ever taught it themselves.
A nation that teaches its children only one face of tyranny will produce adults who can only recognise tyranny when it wears that face. Britain has spent three decades ensuring that every school-leaver knows about Auschwitz. This is right and necessary. But it has spent the same three decades ensuring that almost none of them know about the Gulag, the laogai, or the killing fields of Cambodia. The result is not historical literacy. It is historical astigmatism — a nation that can see with terrible clarity in one direction and is functionally blind in the other.
A country that can only spot tyranny in one colour is a country that is half-blind to tyranny itself.
