to think that out of four houses in a school, two could carry the names of women and they needn't all be white?

[DrSeuss]

The secondary school I teach in is in one of the least diverse areas of Britain. Folk here can be very insular. Nice but insular. The area has one of the lowest take ups of Languages in the country. For some, a trip to the city five miles away is a big adventure. You get the idea.

Our school needed four new names for its four new houses. We now have three dead white males and one dead white female as names. None of them is in themselves objectionable and they have to be dead so as to avoid a situation where a house winds up carrying the name of someone we would rather it did not.

However, three men, one woman? All white? Surely we can split the genders two and two and surely we can have someone who wasn't a WASP?

Non-male!???????? NON-MALE?????????? What sort of beastie could that be?
Non-male............ gimme strength... now I have heard it all.
[groaaaaaan]

so there aren't any women or non white people who ever did anything noteworthy ever in this country?

really?

not one?

oh, ok. what a funny place this is then - can't think of any other country for which that's true

also mega lol @ the idea that having white men dominate culture = the way to ensure people look beyond race and gender

At my DD's school the houses are named after Scottish islands.

At my secondary school every house was named after a woman: bronte, fry, nightingale and caval.

Not all schools just use men.

what does it feel like to belong to an ethnic minority and never see people like yourself represented in the history you learn at school?

I know exactly how this feels.

My hero at school was Grantley Adams.

Someone of the opposite sex and a different race to me.

Oops. How very dare I?

I think perhaps you need to travel a bit, OP. you do sound somewhat unworldly.

Arabella
why "landowners"
many of those industrialists and mayors and inventors and politicians were landowners
very few people are "just" landowners
they are also things like Queens and Dukes

I was just about to start a similar thread. We have just decided to go for a house system, explorers, all men. Why no women I asked? Well women never found anything! So why pick explorers? Doesn't need to be people. DDs school have trees, she's in Sycamore.

It matters because women are half the population but absent from our history (and lacking in current leadership) we need to have people to look up to who inspire us. We need to believe we can participate in leadership and not just leave it to menfolk. Celebrating male achievement and not female achievement, it's just really depressing.

Someone up thread asked what WASP was, can't see it answered, White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant iirc.

guess i will have to become notable myself, talkinpeace, seeing as how in alllllll of recorded history, no women or nonwhite people ever did anything of note/admirable, ever, nope

yes, maybe in 100 years, there may have been one person worth celebrating

chibi, please list the multitudes of women , non - white at that, who did something historically significant in Britain.
And who are dead.

Is it even legal to have 4 dead white people? Don't schools have an equality duty?

Wonderstuff
So Mary Kingsley never existed?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kingsley

Oh dear! Thanks to this thread I think I am going to spend all day trying to remember the houses at my secondary school. As I left 45 years ago, I'm struggling . Austen, Browning , Bronte , Rossetti, Potter and I'm sure there was one more. All girls' school and all female authors. Each had a colour associated with it - Potter was green, I think .

sashh

Is it even legal to have 4 dead white people? Don't schools have an equality duty?

You appear to be confusing 'equal treatment under the law' with 'box-ticking tokenism to appease swivel-eyed Trots'.

flatpack

If you are female and non-white, I will personally campaign for you to be a house at the OP's school.

We'll have to kill you first, obviously.

But a small price to pay knowing your sanity and common sense live on.

My younger sons school houses are named after saints.
3 male and one female. No doubt that offends someone somewhere but i wont be losing any sleep over it.

You'd think it wouldn't hurt and then you read some posts and realise that some people strongly object.

talkinpeace I think you missed the post my initial comment was responding to. A poster said her school houses were named after 7 famous Mancunian landowners. The implication was that they were famous as landowners not e.g Joseph Whitworth, who has a park & a art gallery names after him, but is actually famous for inventing something to do with screws

This idea some people have that you can't relate or look up to somebody who isn't the same race/sex as you is the most racist/sexist thing of all.

Arabella
Fair point ~ Whitworth is actually quite an interesting character
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Whitworth

Currywurst
Absolutely.
I admire and respect people for what they have done, not what colour their hair is or the cut of their underwear.
I have little in common with Richard Feynmann but what he achieved was just fantastic.

at our school they were all men,saint andrew,david,george and patrick.didnt bother me didnt even notice,esp about tehm all being white.

Also, maybe the criteria isnt "white and dead" but "noteworthy and dead".

^^ This.

does it not seem a little tiny bit unbalanced to only honour the achievements of a avery narrow segment of the population?

even where there are others (women, non white people for example) who also contributed greatly to the nation/their field?

no one is saying we must never mention the achievements of white men. however, people on this thread are saying we shouldn't highlight achievements of anyone who isn't a white man, for some fairly specious reasons

ho hum

Chibi
The criteria should be noteworthy and worth remembering.
The fact that historically most of those people were white men is a reason to change how we look forward
NOT to dumb down the criteria of noteworthy to get other groups in.

Which non white / women Georgian Britons would you include - and why?

Chibi, do finally list the women, non - white ,who contributed greatly to the nation. And are dead. Still.

Maybe we could have houses named after world leaders.

Then we could have John F Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, who's not long for this world, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher.

The last two might be women, but they are noteworthy, and so might find favour with some of the posters on this thread for that and other reasons.