Cultural Narratives in Education

Instead, young people swim in a culture of instant gratification and live

your best life. You do you. Be who you want to be.

And if you think Gen Z is bad,

just you wait till you see Gen Alpha.

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, Hitler.

Ask them what else? Slavery. Ask them what else?

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.

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.

How can children feel that they belong

to their country when they are immersed in an

educational culture that teaches that their country is merely an evil oppressor?

Children are the future.

And yet, we are teaching them to have contempt for their elders,

whose oppressive world needs overthrowing by a new world of young,

arrogant anti racists who know better than we do.

We older Westerners are cutting off the branches upon which we sit because of the

guilt some of us feel for being white and privileged.

We look at Mandami, the mayor of New York, and Zak Polanski,

the very popular leader of the Green Party amongst the under 30s in the UK,

and we wonder what on earth is going on.

Why are our young people voting

for and cheerleading these Marxist and really quite extreme politicians?

Few of us understand how much the online world reinforces this culture of the

oppressor versus the oppressed.

Victimhood saturates every video,

whether it's about a foreign war, transphobia or racism, and white guilt lingers

everywhere. It should not come as a surprise that our

young people's moral core does not recognize complexity or nuance.

They have been formed by school and the online world to make one judgment only,

oppressor or oppressed,

good or bad, and they are desperate not to be seen as racist.

We see this most starkly with our young police officers.

While I'm here to tell you, that's on us. We don't care about childhood.

And then we wonder why our children have imbibed the wrong values.