It sounds radical, but it is not. I simply feel that it is necessary to decolonise and diversify the UK curriculum, as education is the key to creating well-rounded individuals with an open-minded understanding of the whole world, and not just the Western world. To avoid any confusion, the definition of “diversify” provided by Google is to “make or become more diverse or varied”, NOT to remove or censor existing content. Individuals should look at the history of their own countries of origin analytically. In the case of the UK, we should teach students how actions carried out by commandants of the British Empire enabled racism and microaggressions to fester within the UK itself, ensuring they do not grow up thinking that the Empire was some sort of ‘force for good’, because this saviour complex is quite frankly outdated and incorrect. This diversification of the curriculum is not only to make White British people aware of events in the non-Western world, but for every student, whether from a minority ethnic group or not, to better understand the people around them in the multicultural society we find ourselves in.
Recently we have seen British society divided over the issue of the removal of statues of former slave-owners and slave-traders as well as other problematic and discriminatory figures, with the graffiti painted onto Winston Churchill’s statue in Central London provoking outcry from a lot of members of the British public. If you were not aware, under the inscription of Churchill’s name on his statue, protesters wrote “was a racist”. This was met with fierce criticism from people, with comments such as ‘if it wasn’t for him, we would all be speaking German’ and ‘but he was a war hero’ being seen in online discussions for days. But it begs the question…if the general public was aware of just a fraction of Churchill’s comments or atrocities he was responsible for, would they not feel more empathy towards the people Churchill historically discriminated against? Winning the Second World War was indeed a great feat, and I am not disputing that. I am a British Asian woman and I have benefitted from living and growing up in the UK, which means I have in turn benefitted from the victory of the World Wars. My own great-grandfather was an English man who grew up in Yorkshire and helped in the War Effort on the submarines, and the sacrifices made by those who lost their lives fighting in the World Wars is not something to be forgotten. So please do not confuse my desire for change and diversification for being ungrateful or unpatriotic, because that it is not. But if children are to be taught about Winston Churchill, surely they should also be taught of his role in the formation and running of concentration camps in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising of 1952-1960, and the fact that his policies directly contributed to the 1943 Bengal famine that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2.1-3 million people out of a total population of 60.3 million. Whether you see him as a war hero or not, that doesn’t take away from the fact that he has the blood of innocent people on his hands. Furthermore, many people feel that the removal of statues from public places is censorship of history, when it is in fact the complete opposite to that. There are plans to erect many of the statues that are to be removed in museums with notes on who these people were that cover both their positive and negative contributions to the world. In my view, censorship of history is actually having these statues up in public places in the first place, without addressing the bad things that these specific figures had done in their lives.
Some may argue that it is not necessary to diversify the UK curriculum because people can choose to go onto higher education to gain an extensive knowledge of global history, but the truth is this is only possible in a small number of courses. For example, if a student chooses to go on to University to study International Relations, it is true that they will be taught a more diverse account of global history from an international perspective, but there is no room for the accumulation of this knowledge in non-humanities subjects (I promise I am not just biased to my course!). This means that the idea that people go to university and surround themselves with so many different people from different walks of life that they will graduate with a much more open-minded understanding of the world is in fact a misconception. I recognise that there simply is not enough time in the school day or enough space in the school curriculum to cover every single event in international history, but I do not understand why space and time should not be found to cover the British Empire and colonial rule, because whether people like it or not, this too is a part of British history. We should ensure that it is not presented as a time when Great Britain was thriving because it had global domination, but instead talk about it for what it was…an oppressive regime that was built on foundations of chauvinism, racism and white supremacy. Once people gain an understanding of this, they will begin to slowly recognise microaggressions that have been carried over from this time in history and are more likely to work to reduce the presence of these in contemporary society. In addition, with an understanding of Empire and how it worked, the public will inevitably come to understand the waves of immigration, and how people born under colonial rule have just as much of a right to be in the UK as someone who was born here. The fusion of all of these points will in my view mean that the presence of racism will begin to be reduced in the generations to come.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post, below there is a link to a petition to teach about the atrocities of colonialism in British schools and also a link that will direct you to a number of resources to support the Black Lives Matter movement, because every life will not matter until Black lives matter.
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