Decolonising curriculums is sinister and wrong

The Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle attending the Association of Commonwealth Universities — her first official visit with the ACU in her new role as Patron of the international organisation which is dedicated to building a better world through higher education. Picture: Twitter

Around the country, hearts will surely be soaring at the news that the Duchess of Sussex supports decolonising the curriculum. During a recent visit to City university in London she encouraged greater concentration on black and female thinkers.

The Office for Students has published a report similarly recommending that undergraduate courses decolonise the curriculum by addressing the way in which its values “perpetuate white westernised hegemony and position anything non-European and not white as inferior”. This is Marxist gibberish.

Yet it seems to have become the default position among many of our supposedly brightest and best.

Cambridge University’s sociology department says it will prioritise work by non-white, non-European authors.

Keele University says the way in which the “Eurocentric” curriculum cites mainly white men recreates a world “where only knowledge produced by them is considered important”.

Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, says this isn’t about adding black or brown faces to the curriculum. It’s about “changing the basis of knowledge” and constitutes “a revisionist history of a lot of western thought”. It’s doing so by dethroning some of the greatest and most influential thinkers in western culture simply because they were white men, and inflating the worth and influence of lesser thinkers simply because they were not.

Where to start? Pinning colonialism on white society alone, the campaigners ignore non-white cultures that have also promoted imperialism, slavery and tyranny. They assume European society was racist because it was overwhelmingly white. That, though, was merely the demographic reality rather than a uniquely repellent value system.

According to Andrews, the Enlightenment was about “white identity politics”.

Thus the great movement of thought that created the rise of science, democracy and modernity itself is grotesquely reduced to a spasm of racial bigotry.

Meera Sabaratnam, a lecturer in international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, took a potshot at John Locke, one of the architects of western liberalism, when she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that he should be taught not as a modern enlightened thinker but as implicated in a system that benefited from slavery.

This is to distort history by viewing it through a modern-day lens.

Many historical figures subscribed to attitudes that would be obnoxious today, but merely reflected the assumptions of their era.

Teaching what to think, not how to think

To use such a warped perspective to denigrate their huge role in shaping European society is a category error. The very principle on which liberal education is based — to teach the best that has ever been thought or said — is being overturned in favour of refracting information through the prism of ideology. Teaching students how to think is being replaced by telling them what to think. This is not education but propaganda.

Supposedly “deracialising” the curriculum is also profoundly racist against both whites and non-whites.

At Kingston University, a degree course on rural Britain has been refocused on Africa and Asia because it previously “normalised white experiences”. Black and other minority students were “less likely” to visit the countryside and so would apparently struggle to grasp concepts such as the “rural idyll”.

This is extraordinarily offensive towards minority students.

Yet much of the campaign is based on the racist notion that such students are incapable of relating to British or European society, culture or history. Robert Gildea, professor of modern history at Oxford, said: “If a student arrived to do a degree that was all about the Anglo-Saxons and the Tudors and Winston Churchill, they might think: what is in this for me?”

The contempt thus expressed for minority students is breathtaking.

Denying them equal access to the culture that has shaped the society in which they live is a recipe for keeping them as marginalised outsiders.

British culture and history are suffused by antisemitism. If any group should think, “What’s in this for me”, it’s surely the Jews.

Yet it was only by being inducted into this unsanitised literature and history that Jewish immigrants into Britain around the turn of the last century not only became integrated and successful but came to understand, admire and even love the nation and its culture which they were now equipped to share as equals.

In the 1990s the curriculum was captured by academics who believed that, since Britain and the West were institutionally racist, education should no longer transmit that culture but teach how terrible it was.

“Oh my God”

This agenda of ideological control and exclusion has now moved into a higher gear.

Upon being handed data showing that British professors are overwhelmingly white men, the duchess is reported to have exclaimed: “Oh my God.”

University professors are also overwhelmingly left-wing. So where is the campaign in the name of diversity and inclusion to appoint more conservative academics? But that would suggest educational values based on the reality of the culture students inhabit so they can all take their place as informed participants in the society they share.

Oh my God, indeed. For a liberal education is itself fast becoming a historical anachronism to be disdained. How can it not be? It was invented by hegemonic white people.

Thank goodness we now have a “social justice warrior” duchess to set a royal seal on its demise.

— The Times