Take To Kill A Mockingbird, for example. Over the years many GCSE students have studied Harper Lee’s coming-of-age novel about Scout, the child narrator, who gradually awakens to the horrors of racial injustice in early 20th century Alabama. Even those who didn’t study it have absorbed its themes and characters through the cosmic resonance of the half of the country that were reading it in their lessons. Over the years, hundreds of students’ faces have lit up when this staple of a quiz question appears, reminding them of the profundity of their first reading. This year, however, only a handful of students across my five groups could name the author. Okay, the syllabus moves on – I get it – but when I read that some educationalists have decreed the novel is now considered ‘problematic’ with its ‘white saviour’ narrative and use of racial slurs, then I can’t but help but despair at how quickly something so culturally significant can be memory holed in the pursuit of progressive ideals.
The History and Geography rounds are equally dispiriting. “Who was the Prime Minister at the beginning of World War Two?” fares better than the Mockingbird question, but there are enough blank stares in the room to suggest that what I would consider to be essential historical knowledge is missing. I suspect that if I asked them to name a black nurse from history, they’d all shout, “Mary Seacole!” in unison. The same goes for Geography: while my students are no doubt familiar with the looming (for the past 30 years) threat of ice cap collapse and the ‘settled science’ of rising sea levels, few could tell me that the Indian Ocean is located to the east of Africa and west of Australia. There’s an irony here: Ofsted frameworks over recent years have laudably emphasised the primacy of knowledge and ‘retrieval practice’ in the classroom; the problem is, to an ageing educator such as myself, the knowledge our children are being asked to retrieve is banal at best, useless at worst....<<<Read More>>>...
