In my previous post, I touched upon how the UK is guilty of upholding systemic racism, just like the USA. Today I would like to focus on one specific area: the British school curriculum.
Given the current discussions surrounding race relations, many people are questioning the education they received. I will preface this post with a disclaimer: whilst it’s now clear that the curriculum in the UK, particularly in a subject such as history, is skewed, you cannot expect school to teach you everything. Yes, the education system may be biased but there are two things to note here:
- Most UK schools only allow for one or two periods of history a week. Clearly, teachers cannot be expected to cover every aspect of human history since the beginning of time. How do you decide which parts of history are more significant than others?
- The majority of people drop the subject aged 14 (myself included here) and then never pick up a book about history again.
We are all responsible for educating ourselves. If you are an adult and you can read, in the age of the internet and documentaries, you have no excuse and we cannot blame everything on schools. Learning should be a lifelong process and school should only be the beginning of that process, not the end.
With that said, let’s examine how the beginning that many of us received, may be fundamentally flawed.
History
The first problem with history is that many educational institutions have a ‘black history month.’ Question: why should black history only be studied for a month? Why isn’t it more of integral part of the curriculum? Britain today is very diverse and each ethnic group has it’s own past. Therefore, when we study history and we look at the contributions of groups from ethnicities to British society, we should just call it history. It is all British history and to squeeze people and events concerning minorities into one month is reductionist, insulting and too general.
The thing that I remember studying the most in history lessons was WWI and WWII. It wasn’t until later on however, that I realised that many soldiers who fought for Britain were black or Asian. Muslims alone made up 400,000 of the soldiers in the trenches with the majority of them being from India since at this point, India was still part of the British empire. No doubt, they fought alongside many Sikhs, Hindus and Indians of other religions too.
Also problematic, is the way in which we are taught the colonialisation of the Americas by the British. At school, I was taught about the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Yet humans inhabited those lands since Ancient times. The British weren’t the only ones to invade; there was the the French, Spanish, Dutch and Portugese. (Did you ever wonder why French is spoken in some parts of Canada and Spanish is the language of most of Latin America?)
These European voyagers were portrayed as heroic in history lessons but we were never taught about the genocide of Native Americans that occurred as a result. We had one lesson about what tipis looked like, a reference to the Disney movie, Pocahontas, and that was about it. There is much evidence to suggest that entire civilisations were brutally enslaved and/or killed under Western European rule.
Of course, let’s not forget about the UK’s role in the slave trade. I was taught that there was a ‘triangle’ between Africa, USA and the UK but the emphasis was on the fact that the Americans were the bad guys, as though the Brits had a passive role.
We then learnt about Victorian Britain and about the poor conditions many lived in. There were a few lessons on cholera and children in workhouses but not that much about the empire and what it really meant. (i.e: colonisation) Whenever ’empire’ was mentioned, it was in a positive light, as though subjugating the poor and weak was something that put the ‘Great’ in Great Britain. We were made to feel like the UK was special and clever but then I later realised that most Western European countries were also colonising, such as France, Italy and Spain. This week, Belgium has apologised for what they did to Congo. A case of too little, too late, perhaps?
In general we are taught a very narrow version of history. Outside of the history of Western Europe, very little is taught. The curriculum could be much richer, interesting and diverse if we touched on the history of other parts of the world. It would only broaden a child’s horizon and whilst I appreciate that teachers cannot cover it all, even a little bit might be enough to spark a child’s imagination and set them on a course to learn more independently. Primary schools seem to do this pretty well – I still remember learning about the Egyptians in year 2 but that didn’t mean we neglected “British” history because we did the Vikings and Romans in year 3 and tudors in year 4.
If the government wants to make history lessons more inclusive and accurate then perhaps schools should teach us about the Bristol bus boycott and Brixton riots because it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I realised the UK also had it’s own civil rights movement
Maths/Science
The sciences began to flourish centuries ago, particularly in medieval times in Muslim countries. This means that when we are taught about the renaissance in Italy in the 1500s, we are in fact, at least 3 centuries too late. The golden age of science has been put at between the 8th and 14th centuries in the Arab world. Imam Jafar Sadiq (AS), a descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammed (PBUH) was the first to refute Aristotle’s theory that the Earth is stationary and that the sun circles it. He also challenged the theory of the four elements saying that the Earth was not an element as it contained metals.
Ibn Sina, AKA Avicenna was a Persian polymath who was regarded as one of the most significant physicians and philosphers. He was given the title, the father of medicine, but he was never mentioned during any of my schooling in either science or RE. I did biology until year 12 and completed A-level philosophy and ethics.
We are often taught about Florence Nightingale, but few gave heard of her Jamaican counterpart, Mary Seacole.
Literature
There are so many things I could say about this since this is my specialism and I am an english teacher but here are a few things that come to mind…
The Tempest is a Shakespeare play which has strong parallels to colonialism. I have been in the classroom as both a student and teacher and witnessed people getting uncomfortable when discussing what the character of Caliban really represents and how much of a right Prospero over the island. Over the years, I have found that it is not being as widely studied anymore and when it is, the colonialism aspect is often skated over.
Othello is a play that is rarely taught at KS3/4. It is probably one of the best plays, if not the best. Racism is a big theme because the protagonist is black and you have to wonder whether it’s not that commonly taught pre- A-level because people are afraid to discuss it. In fact, many of Shalespeare’s works are very multicultural but schools insist on sticking largely to Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.
It is also down to individual schools whether they push for novels and poetry by people of colour. This is something that schools are still trying to figure out because the literary canon is mostly middle/upper class, white men. Even in 2020, the lack of diverse characters and authors in fiction is part of a wider problem which many publishers are now trying to address.
Geography
At univeristy, I did a module called post colonialism in literature. A lecturer told us that there are theories which suggest that Africa was intentionally made poor by the West, because in this world, money equals power. This was mind boggling at the time but actually does make sense. Diamonds are one of the most expensive commodities in the world, most of them are mined in Africa but poverty is rife in the region. You could say more or less the same thing for Asia; with it’s warm climate, it is an ideal place for an array of fruit and vegetables to grow. So it seems that Africa and Asia own and produce the resources but… Europe is wealthy? But for some reason, most of what I learnt in geography was about rivers and the expanision of Heathrow airport. To give some credit to my school though, we did get a lesson on footballs being made in Pakistan.
Conclusion:
By having such a white- washed history curriculum, it implies that people of colour have done nothing to contribute to civilisation. It makes a child of colour feel that their history is non-existent and devalues their future. (After all, if previous generations of BAME people weren’t acknowledged then why does anything I do, matter?) You have to know your history to be able to pan out a trajectory for your future. It is important that children from all races can find role models from the past that look like them so that they realise that they too could have the potential to do anything they want. If our heroes are only ever shown as white men then it tells children of colour that they cannot achieve their dreams. It also goes back to a subconscious form of racism which reinforces white supremacy and notions of the white saviour. That is, in other words, that it sends out the clear signal that you need the white man for a civilised and learned society and that everybody else is inferior.
There is currently a group called The Black Curriculum which is lobbying for change, however, it doesn’t consider other ethnic minorities. So, it seems we still have a long way to go.
Dusk Until Yawn 