Earlier this year, PGCE lecturer, Lesley Nelson-Addy, wrote in Britain’s leading professional publication for English teachers: The ‘new’ GCSE curriculum is Anglocentric and epistemically violent: it uses knowledge as a weapon. Not solely because of the removal of the Steinbeck classic, Of Mice and Men – a book most of us grew to enjoy […]
Open letter to UCU members and conference delegates
We are members of the University and College Union (UCU). Some of us have been active in organising in branches, including in past industrial disputes. The following reflects strong disagreements we have with the orientation of our union, manifest in the current motions that have been proposed to our Congress and sector conferences to be […]
We’ve Learned So Much From Dead White Men – Trying To Remove Them From History Is Madness
It’s often claimed that accepting or conforming to Western canonical standards necessarily means non-white people have to pay too high a cultural price and swap authentic ethnic identity for inauthentic something artificial and inauthentic. Lindsay Johns at ibtimes disagrees and argues the case for the universality of great literary works: To see books or bodies […]
The Danger of ‘Decolonising’ Education
Education activists and diversity consultants claim decolonising education is the same as improving it. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert at Spiked Online disagrees. In curricular matters, elevating political aims as equal to, or more important than, disciplinary principles and the commitment to truthful knowledge is a recipe for bad education, if not indoctrination: In a ‘decolonised’ […]