I don't quite understand why Caroline Stevenson feels that the teaching of Scottish history in our schools, as now proposed by the Scottish Qualifications Authority, might turn out to be more biased than the teaching of English, British, European or world history (Letters, November 22).
She is, however, pursuing a chimera in her apparent demand that Scottish history in particular should henceforth be taught "without bias" as even for professional historians, let alone history teachers, this is a practical and psychological impossibility. We are fated to study and interpret the past from our collective standpoint - or perhaps more accurately individual standpoints - in the present.
In this respect, there is no such conceptual entity as historical objectivity. Historians - perhaps surprisingly - are people, too. To illustrate the point, may I draw her attention to the fact that there are still some English medieval academic historians who devoutly believe that the sustained attempt by the English Plantagenet monarchs, Edward I and Edward II, to suppress and conquer the Scots in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was part of the rulers' great civilising mission to incorporate this country into the English jurisdiction.
I need hardly add that this is not nowadays a view which finds much sustenance among contemporary medieval Scottish historians.
Ian O Bayne, 8 Clarence Drive, Glasgow. Your article (November 23) anent the probability of an imminent influenza pandemic should make us all sit up and take serious notice that flu isn't just a sniffle or sneeze. Many will know - but many more won't - that while the First World War caused the deaths of around 20 million people, the so-called Spanish flu of 1918-1919 killed anywhere between 50 and 100 million.
It is, indeed, good to know that the government is taking the matter seriously and is planning to stockpile supplies of the appropriate vaccine as soon as the viral strain is identified.
It makes me think, though, that this is exactly the kind of emergency that we should have been throwing money at long ago, rather than buying nuclear submarines and missiles to put in them, when anyone with even half a brain knows that they can't possibly be used.
Barry Lees, 12 Denholm Street, Greenock.
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