Decolonising the curriculum?!
We learn from Ealing Today that the borough is involved in a drive to ‘decolonize the curriculum and to replace it with anti-racist learning’. Are teachers surprised to be told that their current teaching has been ‘racist’? What is going on in Ealing? Who is messing with the curriculum in our secondary schools and on what authority? The school curriculum is established in law. It’s intended beneficiaries are pupils and parents. If change to the curriculum is envisaged, these are the “stakeholders” who need first to be considered and who should lead the conversation, not the Ealing Learning Partnership, a quango condescending from above. And not unions. One wonders how loudly the voices of parents and pupils are heard in the ELP, directly even, rather than mediated by headteachers. What does the ELP do? Six committees have been established. How often do they meet? Are minutes kept? Unfortunately, if I want to read more, “full access is only available to registered users from schools and settings that subscribe to the Ealing Learning Partnership” and user accounts are currently only available for Ealing maintained schools and academies staff and Ealing LA staff. Why Ealing LA staff? Why not parents and pupils? Why not concerned council-tax payers who are funding the enterprise? The idea that the ELP can operate in secrecy, without scrutiny by those most concerned, is outrageous. If this organisation is publicly funded, its papers should be publicly available. The ELP also provides information and guidance relating to Black Lives Matter and anti-racism, and presentations addressing George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests. It is produced by the Hackney Learning Trust and shared with Ealing in the spirit of collaboration, but of course not shared with Ealing Council council-tax payers. Sadly, I can’t ask the date of the next demo and what to take along to throw at a policeman. Is it a LA’s role to give advice about protests, particularly one with a politically motivated agenda and violent reputation?What, as council-tax payers are we getting for our money in funding the ELP? The recent contribution of Ms Julie Lewis (Ealing’s director learning, standards and school partnerships) to Ealing Today suggests not much. She tells Ealing Today a ‘huge amount’ is being done to tackle the under achievement of Black Caribbean students in the borough and that the ‘learning outcome of this work is ……of much wider and greater significance.’ Ms Lewis had the opportunity to tell Ealing Today’s reporter something specific, but her comments amount to little more than amorphous guff. In this she is matched by the contribution from Stefan Simms, secretary of Ealing’s National Education Union. He is another master of vague superlatives, ‘immense amount of enthusiasm and willingness’. Is that really worth saying? The whole of the ELP’s literature is couched in this embarrassing mission-statement drivel because of course it has A VISION. Don’t they all! Mr Simms goes further than Ms Lewis. He takes on the current curriculum in English in schools: ‘Michael Gove insisted that the English curriculum has a lot of dead white men in it’. Well, he didn’t actually. It was Mary Bousted, General Secretary of the National Education Union, thinking, no doubt, of Fevre and Bancroft’s Dead White Men and Other Important People (2010, 2016). She said, 'schools must look beyond dead white men to make the curriculum more diverse'. Leaving that aside, Mr Simms goes on to say ‘there is a wealth of other authors and poets that can be studied that would be just as good, just as relevant, and perhaps more engaging for our population.’ The idea, in that last phrase, that literature can be better studied because it mirrors the consumer’s own culture and, thereby, becomes more engaging defeats the object of teaching which is to extend the pupil’s awareness from the familiar to the less familiar. Did it not cross Mr Simms’ mind that, if Shakespeare were not still relevant today, he would long ago have joined the ranks of the dead forgotten? I recently saw young children in a production of The Tempest in a London primary school, simplified and abbreviated and incorporating additional songs and dances but performed with huge vigour, enthusiasm and excitement by a cast of widely differing ethnicities. They also gave us Macbeth (another of that dead white man’s efforts) with several Macbeths and Lady Macbeths from a variety of races. A clever way of making long roles more manageable and the whole thing very enjoyable for actors and audience. Mr Simms and those who think like him fail to appreciate just how alive those dead white men are for kids and would seek to deprive them of the opportunity of finding out. It is noticeable that pressure for change to the curriculum does not come from kids. It comes from adults who have their own agendas. Kids do not, to my knowledge, quarrel with the curriculum qua curriculum. They get on with doing The Hunger Games or whatever and get something out of it.Pupils’ under-achievement is a complex issue. A recent article by Jonny Brooks-Bartlett, a Black Caribbean graduate in Maths with a Ph D from Oxford, in the magazine Chalkdust never once mentions deficiencies/ biases in school curricula to explain Black Caribbean under-achievement. On balance, he suggests, under achievement stems from the narrow expectations of parents, encouraging children in subjects which they think will lead to good jobs, and, mistakenly, failing to encourage proficiency in other subjects which have equally good career prospects. I do not know if he is right. But, I think, on balance the socio-economic positioning of Black Caribbean children is far more likely to explain their underachievement than a school curriculum that needs to be decolonised.
vincent paul wrigley ● 2252d11 Comments ● 2248d