by Tony Sewell, Telegraph
(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
Caribbean leaders want to purge British influence from schools to stir up resentment among a new generation. It’s a form of self-hatred
After graduating from university in the early 1980s, I decided to discover my Caribbean roots and apply for a job as a teacher in Jamaica. My school was nestled in the heart of rural Jamaica, and my students were fantastic.
I arrived during an interesting transition. Jamaican children up until that time had exclusively followed the British curriculum. The region had rightly decided to develop a syllabus that better reflected its own history, culture and local context.
But even after that, it was an education system that was firmly rooted in a British tradition, and Shakespeare was compulsory.
Most of my students took the traditional British track, and all of them achieved grades A and B. When I returned to Britain to teach in a London secondary school my pupils, with far more resources, managed to average grade C.
I tell this story because, in their manic drive to persuade Britain to pay reparations, a cohort of Caribbean activists and leaders is lobbying for the cleansing of the curriculum to make it less “Western”.
In particular they want the curriculum to reflect the history of slavery so as to foster resentment in a new generation that will continue lobbying Britain for reparations.