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'Chilling' union report warns schools are 'shaped by colonisation' and tells teachers to educate children about white privilege and anti-racism


  • National Education Union report says a need to decolonise education is 'urgent'
  • Report says the education provided in schools 'lacks honesty and transparency'
  • NEU suggests activist training for teachers who should 'make white privilege and colonialism visible' in every subject and at every key stage of education
 

The country's biggest teaching union has urged its members to educate children on white privilege and to decolonise their classrooms, a report has revealed.

 

The National Education Unions has told its 450,000 members that 'from curriculum to routines to classroom layout, our education system has been shaped by colonisation and neo-liberalism'.

 

The union said the need to decolonise the education system has become 'urgent' since the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

In the report, the NEU suggests that education offered in schools lacks 'honesty and transparency' because of the 'silence around British imperialism and racism in the British education system, as well as a lack of histories from around the world'.

 

In its summary of lessons learned from the decolonising education conference, it sets out strategies that should be undertaken to address the issue including activist training for teachers.

 

Describing an 'urgent' need to decolonise classrooms, the National Education Union has urged teachers to educate their students on white privilege and address colonisation in curriculum
 

 

In suggesting 'strategies for decolonising education in our nurseries, schools and colleges', the report details a list of actions that should be taken by its members to decolonise education.

 

It suggests specialists could 'train teachers and schools on whiteness, anti-racism, creating tools for critical self-reflection and understanding the system' and says schools should 'make white privilege and colonialism visible'.

 

In addressing the curriculum, the report says schools should 'move beyond diversification of literature to look at critiquing the ideas and knowledge we perpetuate and transforming pedagogical methods'.

 

Teachers need to address every subject at every key stage, according to the report which says 'British culture is saturated with a longing for return to Empire without any understanding into what Empire is/was'. 

 

Critics of the report say the content is 'divisive' and the product of a 'warped view of the past'. 

 

Sir John Hayes, chair of the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, told The Telegraph: 'This is sinister. To think that people with such a warped view of the past, present and future should be instructing our children is chilling.

 

'The truth is Britain has made disproportionately noble contributions to the history of the world.'

 

Mark Lehain, of the Campaign for Common Sense and a former headteacher, added: 'Schools are there to educate pupils, not evangelise for extreme ideologies or turn children into activists. It's sad that a union would encourage its members to push things that are so divisive.' 



Read More Here: Daily Mail 

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