Anti-woke headteacher urges peers not to ‘crumble’ before student activists

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Apologies for the lack of a share token.

I don't think this has already been posted (I couldn't see it anywhere)

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/23/anti-woke-headteacher-urges-peers-not-crumble-student-activists/

The headline is certainly click-bait. But the actual article is pretty balanced IMO. I didn't read it as in any way suggesting that the students needed a smack down. They do need a sense of how things work in the real world though - major changes take time to implement properly, even when your overall aims are correct and (again, even when you are right) it is important to understand that other people may well disagree with you.

The problem with teaching history is that the subject literally encompasses everything that's ever happened in the world. It's a huge subject, which isn't given enough time in school. If you are seeing a class once or twice a week for less than a hour each time, you do have to consider really carefully how best to use that time. Bearing in mind that many kids drop the subject at GCSE. So I think the Head of that school is right to say that change shouldn't be rushed, but carefully considered. Not least because these courses have to be assessed and anything that the state rushes through, tends to be shit and that impacts on children's grades. There's nothing wrong in taking the time to plan what we really want to teach. I think most people agree that we should look more at the contribution of female and black people in British history and give a more rounded picture.
The issue of referring to girls as girls and not getting sucked into the whole 'anyone can be a woman' bs is separate and important.
I went to school in Wales and we learnt about Welsh history, so i don't know where pp got the idea that it is English centric.

@CorrBlimeyGG

Never ceases to amaze me how low some people will go in the name of your style of feminism. You'll happily accept racism, anti semitism, just as long as the speaker hates trans people.

Oh Corrblimey, here you are! We could do with your perspective over on the Genital Preferences thread.

Some questions have been posed and seeing as you're here..

My daughter is in Yr 10, doing history GCSE and they are not covering women's suffrage in any depth at all, a fact she has complained about. She would love to focus on that, as well as Nazi Germany and the US black civil rights movement.

It depends on the board and syllabus. DD has covered Nazi Germany in detail. She's doing A levels now and American Black civil rights are covered (though this really should be learnt before then).
The Suffragette movement has been barely covered though.

@HazelCarbyFan

What is feminist about refusing to teach global history, the impact of the slave trade, or the contributions of Black women to history?

Perhaps they could be taught about the modern slave trade and the countries which are guilty. The UK isn't one of them.

How many people managed to get a pass in History exams without learning about the right for female suffrage?

Part and parcel of the history of achievement of universal suffrage. I could, at one point, have listed all the relevant Acts and what they each achieved.

How many of our Welsh, Irish or Scottish students learn anything about their nations' histories?

Are you serious? Have you been inside a Scottish school?

The UK isn’t guilty of modern slavery? Really? There are no migrant workers in the UK? No sex trafficking? No women trapped in exploitative labour conditions? The UK has no implication worldwide in the forced movement of women in particular for sex and labour?

Statements like this demonstrate why a robust education in global feminist literature and thinking is necessary.

Glad to hear that Curriculum for Excellence has changed things in Scottish Schools.

My DD is at this school and they are currently doing Black History Month. Rosa Parks, Hidden Figures all covered multiple times.

They know all about the suffragettes. The school musical was ‘Made in Dagenham’, so yes, they know about working-class women and Barbara Castle. The school has a significant Jewish population, so Nazi Germany is very well covered.

And so is racism.

Maya Forstater is a past pupil - they encourage independent thought and standing up for principles.

Ms Bingham is not saying that there shouldn’t be changes, but that they should be thought about, starting from the first principles of what the aim is, and how best to achieve it. She has spoken out in support of Jo Phoenix, when do few other educators did and is making a point that just because student groups agitate - as they have done at many universities - the teachers should think and reflect, rather than instantly give into demands.

She is a fantastic role model.

@334bu

Glad to hear that Curriculum for Excellence has changed things in Scottish Schools.

My experience was a long time before the Curriculum for Excellence came in. There was not lack of focus on Scottish history or literature a couple of decades ago where I was taught in Scotland. And that has only increased since then.

Good on her.

I hope they don’t only study U.S. based Black women and also learn about the histories of Black women’s organizing in the UK. Claudia Cumberbatch Jones, for example, remains an extremely important - but overlooked - thinker and writer years ahead of her time in her race, sex, and class analysis. Treating Black history as though it is imported from the U.S. leads to situations like on this board where many insist anti-Black racism is largely a U.S. issue and isn’t relevant in a UK context.

Students are absolutely correct in expecting these materials be taught. The very fact that so many on this board don’t engage with Black feminist work - and then believe what Triggernometry or whatever presents about intersectionality, etc. - shows why schools (especially feminist schools) need to teach these materials alongside all the other great feminist texts and authors and sheroes.

It would also be good if they studied Rosa Parks’ organizing prior to and beyond the bus boycotts - her work, for example, in advocating for Black women facing gang rape and sexual violence in the American South. And also why Black women and girls who refused to move before Parks such as Claudette Colvin - considered too dark-skinned and not respectable enough to be the perfect victim. Or the many overlooked women in the Civil Rights movement such as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, all of whom organized before King and taught him how to organize.

Sorry that should read “why women like Claudette Colvin…have not been taught or recognized.”

Thank you for those names. I had never heard of Claudette Colvin or indeed any of the other women.

I think the criticisms of intersectionality is that it is conducive to become a box ticking exercise, which creates another sort of hierarchy in practice.

Another is that it is really hard to but problems in proportion, if you say things have changed for the better for women, for black people and for gay people in the last 70 years you can be accused of denying the problems that do remain.

There is a widespread criticism that class is left out of analysis too

Thank you. I am passionate about these histories and what we learn about present day organizing by studying these women - and understanding why it is they have not been recognized and their work and contributions have been erased. My namesake on this board by the way, Hazel Carby, is another feminist giant whose work should be taught and understood! She writes, among other things, about Black British feminist histories that should be known.

Isn't it amazing how women are so quickly erased from any fight for freedom. Similar thing happened to the female members of the French Resistance after WW2.

There is really no Black feminist literature that dismisses class, though. The Combahee River Collective statement - considered to be one of the foundational texts of Black feminism - is very clear on the connections between race, sex, and class. It can be read here: americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf

Angela Davis and other classic Black feminist write extensively about gender, race, and class. Going back to enslavement, Black women abolitionists were talking about domestic labour and women’s class issues and the specific exploitation of Black labour. All theorizing of slavery recognizes that race and capitalism - and the creation of Black people as property - go hand in hand. I cannot think of any serious text that does not analyze Black women as a labour class - part of the very root of Black feminism is recognizing that white feminists presented histories that ignored Black women’s labour - Sojourner Truth in 1851 was raising this issue! All analysis of the development of anti-Black racism recognizes that poor white people initially took common cause with Africans (Irish indentured labourers in the U.S., for example, are documented to have initially rebelled alongside African slaves) and that a function of racism under capitalism is to divide the interests of the white working classes from brown and Black people by teaching their allegiance is with whiteness instead. The construction of whiteness - very recent in its present form - is heavily tied to the interests of the ruling class. This is well written about everywhere including in literature about intersectionality. Race and poverty remain connected.

Again, it is important people actually do the work to read these things and not rely upon misrepresentations. There are many disputes within Black feminist theorizing - as there are in every field (the joke that there are as many feminisms as there are women in the room applies here) but there really is no informed or serious critique of race and racism that doesn’t engage class or capitalism from Du Bois, to Eric Williams, to Hill Collins, etc.

@HazelCarbyFan

The UK isn’t guilty of modern slavery? Really? There are no migrant workers in the UK? No sex trafficking? No women trapped in exploitative labour conditions? The UK has no implication worldwide in the forced movement of women in particular for sex and labour?

Statements like this demonstrate why a robust education in global feminist literature and thinking is necessary.

Statements like yours are turning a blind eye to modern slavery.

Statistically, modern slavery is most prevalent in Africa, followed by Asia and the Pacific, according to theGlobal Slavery Index, which publishes country-by-country rankings on modern slavery figures and government responses to tackle the issues

www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-trafficking-persons-one-in-200

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century?wprov=sfla1

You said the UK “is not one of the countries” involved. The UK certainly is involved both historically and in real contemporary ways. I have spent years organizing with migrant women workers - my family comes from a background in the UK of exploited migrant labour (in another thread I detailed my grandmother’s work as a domestic and her rape) so I can tell you first hand these conditions also exist in the UK. Your attempt at whataboutism during a discussion of marginalized Black feminist work by pointing at African countries as some kind of gotcha to try to dismiss the need for UK girls to learn a fulsome history that includes Black women is sad and a derail from an interesting discussion on what is taught, what is left out, and what larger feminist histories look like. Why are you so uncomfortable with learning about Black feminist books and ideas that you have to try to “win” by raising a separate issue?

334bu: yes, women’s organizing is either ignored, treated as not really political, erased, reframed into being nurturing rather than leadership, treated as irrelevant and an extra to the “real” work of men, etc.

You may enjoy the work of lesbian writer Butch Lee, a White woman who also supported radical Black movements. She writes with amazing clarity and it still burns today. The Military Strategies of Women and Girls is a must read against the current liberal feminist constructions.

It’s online here: redyouthnwa.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/finalbutchleelo.pdf

Had the title wrong, it’s Women and Children.

@CorrBlimeyGG

Never ceases to amaze me how low some people will go in the name of your style of feminism. You'll happily accept racism, anti semitism, just as long as the speaker hates trans people.

This, the dismissing of racism sickens me a little. How '' white feminism '' is almost seen as default on here. I find the previous post about intersectionality really interesting, and definitely should be taught in all schools, it wasn't in mine.

@HazelCarbyFan

You said the UK “is not one of the countries” involved. The UK certainly is involved both historically and in real contemporary ways. I have spent years organizing with migrant women workers - my family comes from a background in the UK of exploited migrant labour (in another thread I detailed my grandmother’s work as a domestic and her rape) so I can tell you first hand these conditions also exist in the UK. Your attempt at whataboutism during a discussion of marginalized Black feminist work by pointing at African countries as some kind of gotcha to try to dismiss the need for UK girls to learn a fulsome history that includes Black women is sad and a derail from an interesting discussion on what is taught, what is left out, and what larger feminist histories look like. Why are you so uncomfortable with learning about Black feminist books and ideas that you have to try to “win” by raising a separate issue?

Why are you so happy to turn a blind eye to modern slavery and the countries at the forefront of modern slavery?