England’s elite, all-girls Roedean School is “decolonising” its history curriculum to take on the “white Western narrative” to appease the Black Lives Matter movement.
The clifftop school, founded in the 1800s as Wimbledon House, which charges pupils’ parents up to £40,000, will insert lessons on “black Tudors, Queen Victoria’s black goddaughter and how Africans helped to resist the slave trade” into its syllabus, according to The Times, as well as teaching its wards about the Song dynasty which reigned in China from 960 to 1279.
(The school, which generates a chunk of its revenue from wealthy Chinese sending their children to England for an elite education, already allows Cantonese and Mandarin speakers to earn qualifications in Chinese.)
“We wanted to challenge the predominantly western European narrative and to look beyond the limitations of Britain’s ‘island story’, to discover hidden histories both nationally and internationally,” said Roedean headmaster Oliver Blond.
“The question was raised as to whether everyone in the Roedean community saw themselves in the history they study at school and to this end more diverse perspectives have been incorporated within the existing programme, in order to challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate.
“We hope that some of this passion to rediscover the past both at home and around the world will inspire the pupils towards a deeper love of history.”
While Britain’s independent/private schools — the most prestigious of which are traditionally called public schools, somewhat confusingly — are thought of as bastions of conservatism and the old establishment by many, Roedean is by no means the only such institution to have gone “woke”.
Eton College, probably the most (in)famous such school, which has educated many of the country’s most eminent public figures throughout history — including Prime Minister Boris Johnson — has been embracing social justice warrior causes such as Black Lives Matter, Pride, and radical feminism with increasing enthusiasm in recent years.
To cite one recent example, Will Knowland, a teacher at the school who attempted to give a lecture titled ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’ challenging fashionable left-wing orthodoxy on “toxic masculinity”, was prevented from doing so after colleagues objected, and then fired for putting it up on his personal YouTube channel and refusing to take it down.