Almost every public debate has a point where the argument stops being about the problem and starts being about the argument itself. The movement against racist education in Britain, and more and more in the rest of the Western world, is right now deep in that moment. As the controversy grows, it gets harder to talk about what’s really going on in classrooms without being judged for taking a side.
It’s hard to believe how much stress English teachers are under these days. Reading lists used to be based on how well the writing was, how emotionally complex the stories were, and how much the teacher loved certain books. Now, they are being carefully looked over for something else: who wrote them, who appears in them, and whether they pass a kind of representational audit. Some schools have created virtual libraries with Black History Month and Black Lives Matter as themes. These libraries choose books based on the literal identities they reflect rather than the imaginative experiences they offer. When you look at that, you might feel two things at once: a real desire to include more voices, and a real unease about what gets lost when literature is used to spread approved messages.
The past doesn’t look good for this area. By the early 1990s, the last wave of antiracist education in British schools had mostly lost credibility. This wasn’t because the ideas behind it were bad, but because they were poorly carried out and often made the communities they were supposed to help feel bad about themselves. In particular, white working-class students were often made to feel accused instead of educated. The Macdonald Inquiry, which looked into the 1986 murder of 13-year-old Ahmed Ullah at a school in Manchester, said that the headmaster’s anti-racism efforts were not working as planned. That’s a very harsh evaluation. But it doesn’t look like the people who are making new antiracist lessons are spending much time with that history.
Another side of this argument is one that is really worth having. It is not a question of whether or not the canon has historically left out non-white writers; it has, and for important reasons related to both access and editorial gatekeeping. It can be fun to give students more to read. Pay close attention to new texts. But adding to a curriculum is not the same as rewriting it through a single interpretive lens, and this difference is very important for what students learn to do with language.
The founder of DisruptTexts, Lorena German, says that teachers shouldn’t teach books they love, but rather skills that help students learn how to think critically. In the beginning, it makes sense. But the critical thinking she talks about leads to a certain conclusion: Atticus Finch fails because he doesn’t break down structural racism, and teachers who don’t help their students reach that conclusion are accused of supporting racism. That is not thinking critically. What you’re reading has a conclusion already written in. Some of the most well-known people in this movement seem to have mixed up political certainty with rigor in the classroom, and the students are paying the price.
It’s especially painful to see how institutional pressure keeps squeezing out nuance. There isn’t enough time for teachers to ask the right questions, like whether a text can be interpreted in more than one way or whether they chose it for literary reasons or to check something off a list. When monitoring systems and social media pressure are both used to decide what to teach, something important is lost. The antiracist curriculum movement and the Ofsted push for a knowledge-rich education both came to schools at the same time, but they don’t always go in the same direction. English teachers are stuck in the middle, trying to do the right thing by their students without getting caught up in a political fight they didn’t start.
It’s still not clear if this round of anti-racist education will make the same mistakes as the last one. That’s what they mean. It makes sense to feel like time is running out, especially after 2020. But when people are in a hurry, they tend to skip the tough questions. And in education, students who were taught what to think instead of how to think often show the effects of those skipped questions later on.
