Thinking about this and just discussing it with my girlfriend, here are some general thoughts about education:

Schooling is, like, 10% of what kids learn growing up. I was never systematically taught about either World War, nor did my education every cover any of a dozen other historical periods. With so many thousands of years of history, school cannot teach a child everything. What I did get from school was maths, science and english - these are things which teach you how to acquire knowledge from other sources, rather than just feeding kids the knowledge itself. I'm by no means an expert on Churchill or WWII, but I certainly know as much or more than anyone would expect and that comes from parents, grandparents, books, TV, etc. etc.

We shouldn't be looking at schools to teach a child absolutely everything they need to know to live in the world - parents and family and communities have to do their part too. Anything else is a failure of society to provide for its young.

Yeah, of course - I'm just saying that what you scratch the surface of is a judgement call. WWII was the biggest event of the 20th century - but are we still feeling the repurcussions of it now? The cold war is gone, the methods of war are different, the Germans aren't evil anymore, everyone who fought in it is old or dead...

I'm not saying "World War Two is irrelevant, we shouldn't teach it to kids", but just that it's not neccesarily more relevant than other major stuff in world history like the Reannaisance, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and so on. As I said before, every generation prioritises the stuff that happened to their or their parent's generations - but 100 years down the line it's just another part of history. I think history is important, but there's so much of it (especially for Europeans) that it's not that easy to say "these are the periods that define our nation". This is kind of touching on what we've talked about here before about the mythology of America and so on, I guess.

Again, I'm not saying Churchill should be taken out of the curriculum, but I do have the anecdotal evidence of my own education, of which he was not a feature, and I haven't grown up with some sort of lack of understanding about him and his contrubition to the history of Britain (and the world). Responsible parenting goes a long way in life.