Who will educate the educators, when the educators get things wrong? This week, one of Britain’s leading teaching unions passed a motion to ‘decolonise’ all subjects in the secondary school curriculum: not just history or English, but all subjects, including food technology, computer science, geography, and maths. Black history must be ‘fully embedded’ across the curriculum, NASUWT’s president, Michelle Codrington-Rogers, said.
What started out as a laudatory attempt to teach black students that their history is much more than slavery and colonialism, has led to a sad, pathetic, hyperbolic overreaching.
Black Maths? What is that? The only name of any mathematician I ever learnt at high school was Pythagoras, and no one ever thought of him as a heroic white dude – Pythagoras didn’t even mean a ‘person’, it meant ‘triangles’. People groaned and moaned when his name popped up, but no one mentioned what colour his skin was. So what will decolonised mathematics look like? Are we going to learn about the black hypotenuse? Have we been learning white algebra?
Children have missed enough time in the classroom already this year
It’s also worth wondering whether we can trust those championing the cause of decolonisation, when they can’t even teach black history.
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