(25 minute read)
I would first like to say that in the last six months or so, there have been multiple debates going on about curricula. They vary based on national context and subject. In Britain, I would say the subjects I have noticed people talking about the most are probably History and English. I last studied English at GCSE level and I would feel completely and utterly unqualified to talk about it. Structural changes in the curriculum need to occur on a widespread basis and I am sure other subjects have significant biases of their own but I am limiting my discussion to the subject of History alone, because that is all I feel like I can talk about with some confidence.
Those of you who have stumbled across the “About” section of The Polemic might be aware of my partiality towards a particularly great polemicist, George Orwell. I’m reminded of a famous line from 1984:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― 1984
I start the post with this quote because in order to properly discuss the curriculum, we first need to establish the relevance of this discussion, by addressing those who argue it isn’t worth talking about. As a History graduate, I am exposed to more than my fair share of jokes about my employment prospects in comparison to my BSc friends. This is of course good-natured and partially in jest, but there is an underlying implication that History might not be ‘worthwhile’.
There are certainly those who think it’s an esoteric and ultimately pointless pursuit of irrelevant facts. It’s happened, it’s done, get over it. I clearly don’t share these views but their prevalence requires addressing. In fact, the perception of History as collecting ‘facts’ and ‘dates’ is already framing it in a way that misses the point. In a way, this alludes to a fundamental problem in the way History is taught, not even in relation to content (which is what the majority of this post will address) but rather in relation to style. School textbooks (up to at least GCSE, and in some cases A Level as well) portray History as something concrete that is to be learned and I think this is why people think of it as a memory exercise of facts and dates. Ultimately, History is a contestation of narratives, as the Orwell quote alludes to. Historical debate on almost every topic rages through competing schools of thought, which are often framed by the modern political ideologies of historians. When historians are cited in popular mainstream publications or news articles, their views are implied to be fact, because they are ‘professional historians’. More often than not, they belong to a school of thought that reflects the publisher and they are used to legitimise contemporary political arguments.
This practice aligns neatly with popular conceptions of History as a fact-finding mission, as opposed to a debate between different schools of thought. Often, a historian quoted in a popular media outlet will simply be representing one interpretation from one side of a more complex debate that unfolds within the discipline. This distinction is crucial because so much discourse that criticises reform of the History curriculum suggests that restructuring the curriculum is a ‘rewriting of history’, akin to Stalinist reforms and a calculated attempt to rewrite the past. That particular phrase, ‘rewriting history’ is so prevalent in these discussions and yet such criticisms are laughable and show little understanding for the discipline. The popular narratives of History that filter into public consciousness are debated, contested and rewritten time and time again by historians with differing interpretations before they even begin to gain a foothold in public consciousness.
One such example would be the romanticisation of the Dunkirk evacuation. Strategically speaking, this was a major military defeat for the Allies. The Allies lost its final foothold in mainland Europe and it would not return for a long four years (4th June 1940- 6th June 1944). 10 days after the end of the Dunkirk evacuation, Paris had fallen. 11 days after that, the whole of France was under German control. The Axis powers no longer had to divert resources to the Western Front and could instead focus on strengthening aerial superiority and closing the gap on British naval superiority. In Britain, this fact proved intolerable for morale purposes. The UK was isolated and at its absolute weakest point in the war and it was only with an incredibly lucky weather pattern that they even stood a chance during the Battle of Britain that immediately followed Dunkirk in the Summer of 1940.
Given these dire straits, there was a careful and calculated spin effort to portray Dunkirk as a great ‘tactical retreat’. Nowadays, Dunkirk conjures romanticised images of brave civilians rallying to ‘bring our boys home’ in their small private boats. The myth of the “Little Ships of Dunkirk” thus became a centrepiece of British propaganda, because it was so alluring, tapping into this conception of ‘plucky Brit spirit’. It is true that 850 private ships were used to assist in the Dunkirk evacuation. Some were volunteered, but many were forcefully requisitioned by the government, with many owners not even contacted. Most were only used as shuttles between the beach and the Royal Navy destroyers that were used to actually bring the soldiers home. Some did bring soldiers all the way across the Channel, but the vast majority of soldiers were transported by the Royal Navy, not private ships. There was little sense of unity either. Initially, French soldiers were denied passage, but this was overturned during the course of the evacuation. Even unity within the British Armed Forces proved fraught. Fuel limitations meant that the RAF had limited ability to fight on Dunkirk beaches and most aerial battles took place in the Channel, where RAF planes were escorting ships. This led to a sense of abandonment and anger towards the RAF from some British Army soldiers. An oral history account from the Imperial War Museum archives actually demonstrates that some RAF pilots who were shot down had to fight their way onto evacuation boats because British Army soldiers tried to deny their passage due to their frustration towards the RAF. My point here is not that the Dunkirk evacuations were completely fabricated. Rather, the exaggeration and distortion of events has created a public memory that is near irreconcilable with the actual truth. This is further perpetuated in popular culture, especially film. I chose this vignette as a simple way to complicate understandings of historical narratives and historical memory in wider society. It is wrong to suggest that simply by providing more detail to the background of an event, that we are denying the ‘factual’ account of the past. In fact, it provides steps in the right direction, towards a more nuanced understanding of the past. In many cases, our popular understanding of History has been distorted many times over. Simply because you learned it in school, sadly does not make it true. It is often those with the least awareness of historical events who will shout the loudest about a ‘rewriting of history’. Ironically, they are a product of a flawed educational system, which has convinced them to defend its continuation.
Coming back to contemporary relevance, those who dropped History as soon as they could will assume it has no implication on their lives. But History is used covertly as a powerful political tool. In contemporary discourse, History is politicised aggressively. “Make America Great Again” and “Take Back Control” both implicitly hark back to a vague sense of a ‘better’ society, lost society, a society that can be recaptured (in this instance, the ‘lost’ society is a dog-whistle for racially homogeneous). If people knew more about the past, we would be less prone to Machiavellian political attempts to restructure History for personal gain.
Worse still, many don’t recognise this because they deem History to be the very small slither that they have been exposed to. It is difficult to relate Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries (a secondary school classic go-to) to modern society. For many people in Britain, this is genuinely what History means to them. And why wouldn’t it? Everyone studied it until Key Stage 3, maybe for GCSEs, a smaller proportion still for A Levels and only a tiny margin break into undergraduate study. It is only this last group that even begin to get any flexibility on what they study. And even then, that isn’t always the case. Let’s have a look into undergraduate History, before we dive into school study in a more thorough way.
The current state of undergraduate-level History
I made a claim in the previous paragraph that it takes until university level to get any flexibility on what you study. But this should be examined a bit closer, because even undergraduate approaches to History have their issues. The curriculum between universities vary wildly. Of course, this partially reflects the teaching expertise of the university in question and it would be unhelpful and impractical to standardise teaching across universities. I went to UCL, and the History department works with two other departments, the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, and the Institute of Americas. I was fortunate enough to study a lot of Eastern European and South American History for this very reason, but I only learned about Oceanic history on my year abroad, due to the expertise of the University College Dublin History department (and UCL’s comparable weakness in this particular area).
I consciously chose UCL due to the international scope of its History course (At 17, I was frankly bored to death of the Tudors and the Nazis!) But it isn’t necessarily fair to expect 17 year olds to prioritise the curriculum over all else. Many choose universities based on location, the university’s culture and of course, reputation. Indeed, the course was only one contributing factor for my decision too, but I was lucky that it worked out so well for me down the line. One of the biggest problems for undergraduate study is that universities with the best reputation don’t necessarily correlate with those with the most eclectic curricula. In fact, they often don’t. According to 2020 rankings, Cambridge is the number one History department in the country. The course is split into Part I (1st and 2nd year) and Part II (Final Year) Just as an example, these are the options for the Cambridge History undergraduate in Part I of their degree:
It almost seems like a waste of finger-strength to type this out, as it is so obvious, but this curriculum is not only Eurocentric (which it definitely is), but it’s also painfully Anglocentric. This eclipses simply a centring of whiteness within domestic ‘British’ History, as many social media posts have (rightly) critiqued, but it also intentionally holds a magnifying glass over our island, as the rest of the continent, let alone the rest of the world, is largely ignored. In fact, the above list doesn’t even truly do justice to how domestic the focus is. Not only is this the list provided, but you must take one British political history module and one British economic and social history module, alongside three optional modules from the remaining list. At Cambridge, it is quite possible to never study any non-British history for your entire degree, but it is impossible to exclusively study non-British history. Some might argue that domestic history is more important, but if I asked them why, I would be surprised to hear a response that doesn’t carry at least some implicit notion that History should serve as a propaganda tool to promote the standing of our particular nation (this problem is by no means exclusive to the United Kingdom, but it is certainly prevalent here).
Looking at other aspects of the curriculum, the political thought section doesn’t inherently state a national, racial or gendered focus, so you would be forgiven for thinking that this may potentially explore the feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin or perhaps the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was an influential philosopher on education? I studied both of these philosophers in third and fourth year respectively (although I must admit, I hadn’t even heard of them by the end of my second year, despite taking several core modules examining ‘key’ historical thinkers – so UCL is by no means perfect either).
You would think that in a course of this nature, there might be a cheap passing nod of diversity to a ‘token’ philosopher. This would be atrocious, but the bar falls even below that. The two modules shown above consist of the following list of political thinkers:
History of political thought to c.1700
1. Plato
2. Aristotle
3. Augustine
4. Aquinas
5. Machiavelli
6. More
7. Hobbes
8. Locke
History of political thought from c.1700- c.1890
1 Hume
2 Montesquieu
3 Rousseau
4 Smith
5 Burke
6 Wollstonecraft
7 Kant
8 Bentham
9 Constant
10 Hegel
11 Tocqueville
12 John Stuart Mill
13 Marx
This is a list of 19 dead, white, European men. (There is also Wollstonecraft, a dead, white, European woman and Saint Augustine, a dead man belonging to the heavily romanized North African Berbers of Thagaste. He spoke only Latin at home, but his writings do show some consciousness of his African heritage. I would point out that his Christian theology is the focus of his political thought and he is still very much a ‘traditional’ choice for these kinds of modules).
Now, I’m sure the above list does have one section that catches your eye, a glaring omission from my discussion thus far. ‘World History since 1914.’ About 80% of my university education probably would fall into this category, so I was curious to understand what ‘World History since 1914’ could possibly mean and how Cambridge (though an admittedly clever bunch, I’m sure) had possibly found a way to distil most of my four-year degree into a single 26 week course. The short answer, of course, is that they haven’t.
Let’s say you are a budding historian, intent on widening your scope beyond the school curriculum (more on this later). You see the rankings, decide to work hard to get into the ‘best’ History department in the country and you have a passing interest in Hutu-Tutsi relations and the legacies of the Rwandan genocide that you would like to develop at university. Already dismayed by the Part I options you see before you, you decide to take World History since 1914, to make the best of a bad situation. It’s very optimistic that Rwanda will even be included, but what other choice do you have?
Upon being handed the module outline, you see that one week is dedicated to “Nationalism & Decolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa”. One week. That week is Week 12 by the way. Before that, you are exposed to Indian partition, Indochinese rebellions against the French, Imperial Japan and the Middle East between the wars. These historical events have very little in common other than that they occurred outside of Europe and North America. You may have absolutely no interest in these topics and yet have to endure them anyway. Even if we should place more emphasis on the History of our continent (a contentious argument I disagree with, but for the sake of argument), then why would India be classified as ‘world history’ whilst the USA deserves its own set of modules. What is the difference between these two non-European countries? The elephant in the room is a perceived cultural homogeneity between countries with a predominantly white English-speaking population. This earns the USA its own module, at least in the eyes of Cambridge professors.
Imagine: you develop an interest in your own historical niche despite a rigged school curriculum, you work hard to get into the ‘best’ university in the country for your subject, you pick the only module vaguely related to your interest (even though there are four modules dedicated specifically to British socio-economic history) and what is your reward? Struggle through twelve weeks of random topics for one seminar. Even then, the week deals mainly with the D.R. Congo, Ghana and Kenya, three countries with vastly different histories, shoehorned into one week. I’m sure it would seem farcical to a European reader to suggest that Lithuania, Albania and Norway would be dealt with in a single week and yet the linguistic, cultural and historical ties are just as disparate as Ghana and Kenya.
There isn’t a single text on Rwanda even in the extended reading lists. You would have to bring it up yourself in the seminar. Even then, in an already jam-packed hour of a whistlestop tour around the African continent, the seminar leader would probably question if there was any time to address Rwanda instead of the Mau-Mau Uprising, Nkrumah’s presidency, or Lumumba’s role in Congolese independence. How can we expect to influence the field in a meaningful way if the brightest minds are forced down narrow paths, which inevitably malleates their areas of interests? I’m sure many great minds have ended up pursuing research in British socio-economic history simply because that’s what they studied at undergraduate level. This creates a systemic flaw.
To be fair, some universities are closer, but still not entirely there yet.
For contrast, instead of World History being shoehorned into one module, at my university, different continents had multiple modules (surely the bare minimum). I took a course dedicated specifically to the topic of race and ethnicity within Africa. Even then, this is problematic. We would jump from country to country every week or a few weeks, which massively limited depth. I may have had the luxury of dedicating a week or so to the politics of autochthony against Bamileke people in Cameroon, which I find fascinating, but just as I was getting into it, we were suddenly whisked 1000km west, to Liberia, to study the influence of William Du Bois and other African-Americans who became involved in Liberian politics. Fascinating for many, I’m sure (indeed Du Bois’ double consciousness theory has great relevance to contemporary race discussions), but it simply wasn’t an area I was as interested in as Cameroon. There was at least some tangential relation in topics (both dealt with intra-racial ethnic disputes within an African context), but to me this was too tangential, and I would have appreciated separate modules in order to address both in appropriate depth.
In contrast, I spent a whole year studying the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth through to its collapse and the revival of the Second Polish Republic, from 1573-1918. My course was one of the more ‘diverse’ ones in the country and even then, as much time was dedicated to one European country of 38 million people as was dedicated to an entire continent of 1.3 billion. (Maybe contemporary population comparisons are slightly misleading, but as a crude yardstick, I’m sure you see what I’m getting at). Keep in mind this isn’t just tertiary level education, but supposedly one of the less obviously Anglocentric/Eurocentric ones. This is the ‘peak’ and it is still problematic. Let alone Cambridge. Let alone secondary-level education. There is a long way to go yet.
The current state of the school curriculum
But let’s dial this back. If these are the problems facing undergraduate curricula, then what is happening at school level? Nothing short of a national catastrophe.
School History is not taught well. In 2018, at GCSE level, 72.9% of students passed English Lit, 90.6% passed Physics, 89.7% for Chemistry, 89.2%. The figure for History? Just 63.9%.
It’s difficult to speculate on why this could be. I doubt History is innately harder than these subjects. Also, it is an optional subject whilst English Lit for instance is compulsory. Surely students who elect to do a subject will be more passionate about it and more likely to succeed. So why isn’t this the case? Again, it is speculation but perhaps it could be the divide between formal historical education and what one is exposed to at home. Speaking anecdotally for a moment, I remember hearing rich and detailed explanations of Irish history from family members, even when I was a kid. Oral histories were captivating, like a story. It was also made clear to me that this was my heritage and that I had a duty to know it, even if I was born in the United Kingdom and had an English accent. I think that to varying extents, this is an experience that lots of second-generation migrants can empathise with. As I went through school, I noticed there was no overlap between what I learnt at home and what I was being taught. When I asked why, I was told it wasn’t relevant to what we were studying. Perhaps many students elect to take History as they are interested in it from what they’ve been taught at home, only to be met with a curriculum that does not inspire. It is easy to see how this could lead to a fall in motivation and pass rates.
As well as oral histories told to me at home, documentaries also had a bigger impact on me than school-taught history, especially when I was younger. Again, I credit this to the engaging visual and oral format, in comparison to less engaging reading and memorising of dates, which is sadly often what early History education is about. Popular discourse surrounding curriculum reform is currently revolving around content, which I agree should be the main focus. But it is not the only reform needed. It may seem tangential to most proposals for curriculum reform being discussed at the moment, but reform needs to take place in terms of style as well as substance. Unravelling biased content is only half the battle. If History is taught in more engaging ways, more students will choose to study it and will do better in it as a result of being more passionate.
Below is a list of the topics that the government deems necessary for a school to cover at Key Stage 3 level. I have chosen KS3, because it is the highest level of compulsory History education and likely heavily influences students’ GCSE choices.
- the development of Church, state and society in Medieval Britain 1066-1509
- the development of Church, state and society in Britain 1509-1745
- ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901
- challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day
- a local history study
- the study of an aspect or theme in British history that consolidates and extends pupils’ chronological knowledge from before 1066
- at least one study of a significant society or issue in world history and its interconnections with other world developments
These topics are biased not only in a domestic sense, but also in terms of the sub-disciplines that are promoted. These guidelines overwhelmingly prioritise religious history and political history over cultural and social histories, to add to the issues of a disappointing but ultimately unsurprising domestic focus. The government document also offers non-statutory suggestions for what topics could be used to examine these themes. For instance, a popular option for “challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day” is: “the Second World War and the wartime leadership of Winston Churchill.”
Schools can opt for a different topic if desired, but the fact that the government ‘nudges’ schools towards certain interpretations is still problematic, even if it is not dogmatically enforced. Anyone with a tertiary level History education could point out the reductive nature of associating Churchill exclusively with his ‘wartime leadership’ as opposed to other aspects of his career (I don’t want to go into detail here but there is a wealth of material that provides a more balanced image of Churchill’s full career than the cult of personality that he enjoys in the United Kingdom). The government covertly encourages the perpetuation of ahistorical mythologisations of History. Indeed, there is more to the Second World War than the ‘heroism’ of Dunkirk and the ‘strength of leadership’ of Churchill. Unfortunately, the government’s tactic of providing very detailed suggestions but not explicitly enforcing them gives critics of reform a weapon to use. They often argue that the government does not literally force the schools to choose what topics to cover, as it is only guidelines.
It is a nice idea that schools have real autonomy, but those who peddle this argument are living in something of a fantasy world. There is theoretically some manoeuvrability for schools to provide more well-rounded educations, in-keeping with the vague statutory themes the government prescribes, but ignoring the Anglocentric and Eurocentric non-statutory ‘suggestions’ that the government lists. This unfortunately seldom plays out, as school History departments will often rely on the structure they have been using year-in, year-out. It requires a lot of work to write an entirely new module and teachers frankly aren’t paid enough and many just can’t be bothered. Though I support lobbying government to change their guidelines on the History curriculum, change can also be enacted through lobbying schools, whether you’re an alumnus/alumna, parent or student yourself. In the short term, the most direct way to achieve action is to push for it on a school-by-school level.
Ironically, the position Britain currently finds itself in is precisely a product of its postcolonial legacies. The cultural ties between the metropole and its colonies do not sever on the day a new flag is raised. Continued economic dependence and soft power institutions such as the Commonwealth are ways in which former colonisers (not just the UK by any means) attempt to continue to exert influence. Inevitably, such relations has meant the continued migration of those from former colonies. As their children and grandchildren try to navigate Britain in that murky purgatory of second and third generation migrants, we are faced with this dichotomy of reconciling what we are taught at home and what we are told is ‘British’ history at school. In actuality, ‘British’ history ought to include detailed accounts of British actions in the colonies, as it was an aspect of British foreign policy (to put it in slightly emotionless terms).Without being blunt, the British Empire made it’s bed and now Britain has to lie in it. It cannot reap the benefits of continued Commonwealth trade links if it can’t come to terms with the whitewashed history it portrays about the past, either excusing or ignoring the way in which colonies were treated.
There is also the issue that even the domestic British history that is taught at school level carries deeply problematic assumptions about what constitutes ‘British history’. For instance, schools teaching domestic British protests are far more likely to choose to teach white suffragettes than to teach the Bristol Bus Boycotts. Anecdotally, I have heard the bus boycotts described as ‘black history’ countless more times than I have heard it described as ‘British history’. It is, of course, both.
What should a new school curriculum look like?
The impetus for recent discussions about curriculum reform has been the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests championing racial equality. A lot of social media posts have shared the work of ‘The Black Curriculum’ as an organisation championing curriculum reform. For those of you that might have seen it mentioned, but haven’t seen the breakdown of the curriculum proposed, here is a graphic of the modules proposed:
There is much to be said for the way this was been structured. One of the many problems with school-level History is a focus on religious history and political history. Cultural history is traditionally ignored, so it is encouraging to see the ‘Art History’ component as a great example of inclusion of cultural history (such as the influence that music has had on social movements). My one gripe is the naming, rather than being called ‘Cultural History’, it is named ‘Art History’, which is misleading as this is an entirely different discipline. This is only a minor issue however and could easily be fixed.
I question the ‘Land and the Environment’ section. The influence of race on the six topics addressed is very important and I would advocate for the inclusion of how race affects topics such as food inequality and housing both globally and within a single country such as the UK. However, I think this is best suited to being co-opted into Geography, as a discipline. It is not that it is irrelevant, I just think the multi-disciplinary approaches that are present in Geography would better dissect these issues. Their contemporary relevance to modern British society also places them better within the remit of Geography than History. Perhaps this is indicative of the need for reform of many other subjects beyond History, but this is for someone else to write on.
The remaining two modules are very relevant to History and should arguably be the central focus of this curriculum. It would have been easy to throw migration into the politics module, but this would not do justice to the importance of the attitudes and policies of successive British governments in relation to migration and I commend The Black Curriculum’s decision to separate these modules. It is a shrewd way to dissect the complex issues at hand and the modular structure is very appropriate.
There is however, the wider issue of whether we should be focusing on providing a clearer, more inclusive and more accurate depiction of Britain’s history, or whether we should eschew national focus and widen children’s understanding of the wider world. In my opinion, the answer is both, whereas I fear ‘The Black Curriculum’ may only advance the former. In a sense, advocating a more diverse (and accurate) depiction of British history is still operating within the framework of those who believe that domestic History is inherently more worthwhile than global history. Global history would only be explored in the most tangential of ways through migrants who came to Britain and I think it would be a stretch to suggest that studying the Windrush Generation will tell you much about domestic Carribbean history in the 1960s (for example).
Whether this is inadvertent or intentional, it carries the implication of British superiority at worst, and at best it subconsciously advocates ignorance of the wider world. This births a whole secondary debate about what it means to truly ‘widen’ the curriculum. The Black Curriculum is a fantastic start, but it would be a shame to not widen children’s horizons so that they can better understand world history.
Also, even if you do hold the belief that British history is inherently more important than world history, then there are still questions about the narrow scope of The Black Curriculum. I fear that even if we do succeed in achieving a more well-rounded History curriculum at secondary level, it could well manifest as a knee-jerk response by government. The Black Curriculum provides a fantastic starting point for children to learn about traditionally under-taught aspects of British history, but it is only one of many under-taught topics. The British Empire was the largest of all time and it affected people from across the globe. I hope you don’t conflate my reference to the following topics as ‘bashing’ Britain, I simply want to demonstrate some of the lesser known aspects of Empire. I won’t go into all these topics in detail, but if there was education of the Empire’s role in the Bengal Famine, the use of concentration camps during the Second Boer War, the Black and Tans, the Bush Wars of Australia or the theft of land from the Maasai people in modern Kenya, then I imagine that the persisting toxic romanticisation of the Empire in our society would be somewhat abated and our history would be better represented. The history within Britain’s borders is of course important, but so is Britain’s role in the events I’ve just listed, which span most of the globe.
Even within Britain’s borders, of course the Windrush Generation needs to be taught within our curriculum and it is a shame on every British government since 1948 that it hasn’t been taught. But we also need to address topics like the 1968 amendment to the Commonwealth Immigration Act. It was implemented by the British government in direct response to Kenya’s ‘Africanisation’ policy, which stripped those of Indian-descent of their Kenyan citizenship. Many of these people also held British passports and opted to move to the United Kingdom (in the post-war period, there were surprisingly liberal migration laws within the Commonwealth, but this was cracked down on over time). The amendment to the Act specifically excluded Indian-Kenyans from migrating to the UK, despite the fact that it had been their legal right as Commonwealth citizens. The UK feared a mass influx of immigration, which proved politically unpalatable. James Callaghan, then the Home Secretary, reflected on the Bill: “Public opinion in this country was extremely agitated, and the consideration… was how we could preserve a proper sense of order in this country.” The fact that a British government as recently as 1968 associated ‘order’ with low levels of non-white migration is appalling. The subtext is abundantly clear. I knew nothing of this until my final year of university, which again, is an indictment on the British education system.
As I referenced at the very beginning of this long-read, History is influenced by contemporary events. The fact that the murder of George Floyd has prompted discussions of change is an important kernel of hope to emerge from a tragic murder, but we cannot allow the emotion of contemporary events to dictate how we move forward in grappling with our past. In order for Britain to engage with the darkest aspects of its past, there needs to be a full examination of the dominance and persecution of other people. If we limited reform to a specific topic, we would be doing injustice to ourselves and to history.
-JP
The Polemic 