Critique of History Education Practices

The culture shift comes from what children learn at school and online.

Ask any young person what history they learned at

school and they'll tell you, Ask them what else? Slavery. Ask them what else?

American civil rights.

In fact, what little they know of

history will be all about black and brown people fighting for

equality against the white man.

Women fighting men for the vote.

Gay and trans people fighting for various rights.

Our young people have

been taught that history is simply one long story about various

groups struggling under the oppressive

dead white man. Out with Dickens, Shakespeare, Kipling and Wordsworth.

We must decolonize.

History is taught through an oppressor lens.

The triangular slave trade, white men held the power. What about Britain ending the

slave trade? More than a quick mention, if at all? No.

What of the Arab slave trade that lasted three times as

long as the triangular slave trade? No.

Okay, so GCSE history in Britain is often taught as migration through time.

So the idea that Britain has always been a land of immigrants is embedded in

our children's heads.

Most schools would prefer to concentrate learning about the

tiny number of black people who existed in Tudor England over a thorough analysis

of England's break from Rome.

Medieval history becomes

her story and is told through the eyes of Eleanor of Aquitaine because,

after all, she was a woman.

Not to mention weeks on King Mansa Musa

of Mali because he was a black Muslim.

His bearing on British institutions,

laws and faith is non existent.

And the fact that he is said to

have been the richest man in history thanks in part to his massive

slave owning society is a detail,

somehow, that teachers rarely ever teach.

But it isn't just our schools.

It's our general culture, too.

Take your kids to a

museum or an art gallery in any Western country and you'll find the same narrative.

As an example,

when learning about aviation in London's Science Museum and the extraordinary feat

that is man making massive machines move in the sky,

a write up on the wall explains that women and

black people were historically barred from aviation schools and the military.

Similarly, James Watt,

the man who invented the steam engine and

is considered the founder of the Industrial Revolution, has a write up on the

wall explaining that his early career involved slave trafficking with a bonus

analysis of the whole of Britain's complicity in the slave trade.

They flatten the entire human story and all of its complexities into the narrative

of oppressor and oppressed,

leaving young people unable to see the world in any other terms.