Somehow, we’re well into October already. Autumn always brings the passage of time into sharp focus for me, and never more so than in this year, when so much and yet so little seems to have happened. We’ve had far more time to reflect and ruminate on global events, politics and injustices this year. October is Black History Month – something that my colleagues in a Black-led grassroots organisation welcome with caution. It’s an important step in the right direction to have a month of centring people, events and perspectives that have been wilfully erased from historical narratives. And yet, a month of focus on Black experiences before re-opening history books written by the “winners” may seem like cold comfort at a time when traumatic news of racist violence continues to abound. I find myself thinking and feeling deeply about this, though I’ll never experience that trauma first-hand.
The vision of my coaching and consultancy work is to contribute to communities that facilitate wholehearted communication, mutuality, safety and creativity. I write and speak often about social justice issues because I cannot see a way for us to fully live according to these values and practices while systemic oppression prevails. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of education. While we humans are equipped with the potential to live together in ways that value our equal worth, nurture skills and talents and promote positive wellbeing, in reality this requires supportive structures and systems, practice (or learning by doing) and the tools to think critically and reflectively.
And as we moved into Black History Month, while the modern iteration of the civil rights movement continued to fight, the U.K government launched an attack on the sort of education that will equip young people to think critically about what is included and excluded from the stories they are told by way of ‘historical fact’. While this guidance does at least ban the teaching of racist material, it does likewise for what it considers to be illegal or ‘extremist’ movements, in which it counts Extinction Rebellion, and some of this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. Preventing schools from teaching narratives not written by the winners is a thinly veiled backlash to calls for ‘de-colonising the curriculum’.
I’m part of the generation whose school years happened to coincide with Section 28, the legislation that banned educators from “promoting homosexuality” (for that, read “mentioning any form of queerness at all, unless explicitly condemning it”). It was revoked right around the time I finished high school. As a person who took a long time to make sense of my queer identity, I can only imagine how different things might have been for me if my education had been explicitly inclusive of all genders and sexualities, and if I'd been taught about the LGBTQI people before me who’d fought for their rights.
The history of civil rights movements cannot be taught in a political vacuum. It would be difficult to teach Black history in this place and time without being somewhat critical of the political, philosophical, religious and (pseudo)scientific beliefs and practices that led to, for example, the transatlantic slave trade. Even those who may privately yearn for the ‘good old days’ of Empire and eugenics would not get away with explicitly voicing these views in a mainstream education setting. There is a consensus that it is acceptable to be critical of injustices that happened in the past, given that we are encouraged to hold a belief that we have made so much progress since then that nothing like this could ever happen again. But, without cultural criticism, analytical skills and the introduction of a range of philosophical concepts, how will we know whether we’re collectively sleepwalking into further atrocities? What are our young people expected to make of acts of violence against specific groups of people that are taking place right now? And who will be held to account for ensuring that the curriculum doesn’t implicitly or explicitly centre the voices of some learners over others? It’s hard for me - someone who was privileged enough to be raised and educated with more than my fair share of critical and rebellious tendencies - to see this as anything other than a cynical attempt at censorship. This is something that totalitarian regimes do, and they don’t usually do it all overnight. It’s a slow creep of human rights being eroded that always includes banning criticism of the current political system.
I spent several years training professionals in how to teach Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenting (RSHP) Education to young people. We in Scotland moved from a tired, old curriculum that essentially encouraged victim-blaming and an over-simplistic view of consent, to a somewhat improved version that taught about moving beyond narrow gender roles, about enthusiastic consent and how to ensure you’re not engaging in coercive control (something that had recently been defined in law as a form of abuse). How ironic, then, that this latest warning to teachers in England should fall under the banner of Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE), when the guidance itself seems to be a great example of coercive control.
Having a background in youth work, I’ve always been heartened by informal education as a way to teach young people to critically engage with the world around them, especially the media and key cultural influences of the day. I’ll continue to advocate for holistic, well-funded youth provision that supports young people to have their voices heard, to build relationships of trust with adults and to learn to make sense of the world. Of course, the youth work sector has faced savage funding cuts under the current UK government too. And yet, just this week at work, I was reminded of the power of young people talking passionately about their lived experiences. I heard young, Black people speaking with clarity, rage and a wisdom that they shouldn’t have had to develop at their age. These young people, like so many others, give me hope for the future... but we can’t leave it to them to rescue the rest of us, especially since they didn’t get us into this mess in the first place. Someone needs to take responsibility for teaching history from the bottom, for inspiring the younger generations with stories of struggles for freedom that were won, no matter how small. And if this is really to be prevented in formal education settings until the current administration is finished, let’s take to social media, to community organising and to the streets to teach, learn and raise voices together.