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’ education system, in which every approved identity group is to see itself, there will be even less to challenge individual pupils intellectually, irrespective of their ethnicity.
A curriculum should enrich and challenge young minds, not indoctrinate them. So review curricula by all means, but we cannot let the process be dominated by activists, whose aims are not primarily educational.
If vice chancellors have anything to apologise for, it should be for their inability to stand up for education and knowledge. The principles that determine curriculum changes are important. But if those principles are purely political, be they from the left or from the right, then they are unlikely to create a better education system.
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