I knew who it was

I don't particularly want to get drawn on this as I'm a History teacher and so looking at it from a pragmatic stand point more than anything.

It's a very well written article but the reality of teching history is that there's only so much time to do it which means a hell of a lot of history is going to be missed out and once you start arguing that we should be teaching X, it's not long before Y and Z are thrown into the ring too and there's got to be some semblence of order and process in what is taught or else kids would be taught history in segregated little chunks with no critical thinking or analytical skills to see how certain historical events impacted society or how they lead into other events.

If anything I feel the Holocaust and the World Wars get too much emphasis (I know certain schools who do WW1, Weimar Germay and WW2 in every single one of the 6 years that the children attend!!!)

As for why they don't teach about Leopold is that unfortunately for him he was kicking around during the build up to WW1 and that (to my mind as a historian) has a much bigger and wider impact on the whole world than him being a criminal nutter. FWIW colonialism and Leopold himself is mentioned in the section that deals with imperialism and empire building but to focus on the genocide there would lead kids away from the reasons behind colonialisation. As has already been stated - murder and genocide were not primarilly the aims of imperialisation for the most part.

There's certainly a lot of politicising that can take place in history teaching (Can't help but notice how our curriculum is getting much more Scottish based instead of looking at the UK and European context, must be a refrendum coming up!!!) but the kids are taught about slavery, the wiping out of the American Indians, the Holocaust and some schools do the fall of the Raj and so on so the article is a bit facetious and biased when it makes out that we just gloss over all of this stuff because the truth hurts. That's not the case at all.