I have just been marking our first year students' British history exam papers. They have a series of questions to which they are supposed to write one or two sentence answers.

One of them was "What does the expression Swinging Sixties" refer to?"
Answers included:
A new way of playing the guitar.
The invention of electric guitars.

and my two favourites:

1) The Swinging Sixites refers to the invention of music. Before the 1960s proper music didn't exist and no one used to listen to any music.

2) This expression refers to Queen Elizabeth I who, in her sixties, still hadn't found a husband so instead she used to listen to swing music.

Rather bizarre.

I haven't got the foggiest idea what "The Swinging Sixties" meant Vague ideas had something to do with suspect parties and bunches of keys from that era
bev.

I would associate that more with 70s suburbia!

Must say I find that a bizarre question to put in a history exam!

I didn't set the paper, I just ended up marking it. I teach in France and the perception of English history is sometimes rather bizarre. In the first year all the students have a compulsory course on British Political Institutions and history. The university department wrote a (very) short history of Britain which the students are supposed to learn. This contains (so I was told) everything that the average British person knows about their country. In actual fact it contains an awful lot of things that the average British person does NOT know. Before I started teaching the course, I could not name all the Kings and Queens from William the Conqueror in chronological order, had no idea what the British Bill of Rights said ...

For the Swinging Sixties, they were supposed to say that it referred to the 1960s and the liberalisation of society (legalisation of abortion, contraception etc.)

Well... hmm I am English... and while there was a "British History" option at GCSE I got to do Medicine through Time and The American West instead... but that does sound bizarre, my best guess would have been something about swing music! "The swinging sixties" no?

But then that was around in the thirties and forties! Poor kids! I love the Queen Elizabeth one - someone's showing a spark of originality there - do they get half marks for that?

Sigh - I was part of the "swinging 60s" generation. We were the first post-war lot to make a bid for freedom from heavy-handed legislation, kind of invented the "feel good factor", had shorter skirts, hippy dress and music, the start of the drug culture, didn't meekly obey our parents anymore, and so on.......And we saw the start of student unrest on university campuses, man on the moon, the World Cup victory, the Beatles and the new pop culture evolving and much, much more.

It was a good time to be alive but I'm not sure I'd go back to it if I could. Would involve all those interminable science and maths lessons again.....

I thought the legend was that if you could remember it then you weren't really there.

Me?? I'm too young