‘Rewrite part of a Disney story of your choice but without the sexist/racist aspects. Think about gender roles, character and story outcome/ending.’
This is a homework exercise set by a geography teacher for her class of 11-year-olds at a British state school.
Is it any wonder that so many normal people feel that their country is not their own any more — that its traditions, values, and cultural norms have been hijacked by a minority of doctrinaire leftists?
That homework assignment is by no means unusual in British classrooms.
It comes from the website of an organisation called Tes — formerly known as the Times Educational Supplement, now a recruitment, training, and classwork resource for teachers in the UK and beyond.
Our mission is to enable great teaching by helping educators to find the tools and technology they need to excel and by supporting them throughout their career and professional development. We are home to the world’s largest online community of teachers…
If it really is the largest online community of teachers, then we should be very afraid for our children.
Here is the free coursework model from which that teacher above borrowed her class’s homework assignment. Teachers who have used it give it four and a half stars out of five.
‘Racism/sexism in Disney’ was created five years ago by a teacher with the handle ‘Rclifford12’ who — to judge by her avatar photograph — is a female in her late twenties or early thirties and who teaches at a school in England.
A lesson origanally designed for year 8’s looking at prejudice and discrimination but I have used it for different year groups who also enjoyed it. There are also loads of youtube clips discussing the same issue. Great if you want a group to pracitce debating/ discussion skills. Great for RS, PSHE and Citizenship. Please leave comments and ratings if you like this resource.
Those spelling mistakes — ‘origanally’ and ‘pracitce’ — are retained from her original screed, which has not been corrected in the five years it has been up. Rclifford12 seems to have a problem with spelling.
In some of her other modules, ‘ability’ is rendered ‘abilty’, ‘descriptors’ ‘descriptiors’, ‘activities’ ‘activites’ . Originally is spelt ‘origanally’ on one of her other models, suggesting that it wasn’t a one-off typo — (which we all are guilty of now and again — me very much included) — but that she really doesn’t know how to spell the word.
None of the teachers commenting on her resource has tried to correct her spelling. Nor has the website — Times Educational Supplement? lol — made any attempt at quality control.
This then is a snapshot of Britain’s education system in 2019: a place where barely literate teachers indoctrinate 11-year-old children in the art of seeking grievance everywhere.
Is it any wonder that by the time kids end up at university, they are skilled at spotting the merest scintilla of sexism, racism, homophobia from a half a mile’s distance; that they’re quite incapable of taking up a subject like History without wanting to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ and attempting to remove from the lexicon perfectly normal, unexceptionable terms like ‘Anglo-Saxon’ because they have managed to find in them some imaginary grounds for taking offence?
Is it any surprise that there is such a gulf of understanding between Millennials and their more rational, easy-going, better-educated seniors (derided as ‘Boomers’) — the latter who realise that Disney is just entertainment, the former trained from an early age to see everything from the Seven Dwarfs to the Little Mermaid as evidence of an oppressive, racist, phallocentric hegemony?
Oh and remember: this nonsense continues to prevail under a Conservative administration wont to boast that one of the greatest achievements of Conservative governments over the last decade or so is to have reformed British education and made it more rigorous and less grotesquely in thrall to the liberal left.
If this really is the Conservatives’ best achievement — and I fear it might be — then I’m wondering what, if anything, they have done to deserve our vote.