Alan Clark on the value of a ‘Wilberforce-centric’ education, Deryck Browne on the report’s progressive points, Rachel Stone and Sylvia Ashton on decolonising the English curriculum, Mark Holman-Lisney on ‘structural elitism’ and John Orrell on the report authors’ blindspot
David Olusoga rightly inveighs against aspects of historical illiteracy in the Sewell report (The poisonously patronising Sewell report is historically illiterate, 2 April). But it is wrong to imply that the “politics and passions of the young” are some wondrous Damascene revelation felt only by millennials. In my youth, we were every bit as passionate. I went on my first anti-racism march 50 years ago. As a pale, male and now stale human being, I have had close friends from every ethnicity all my life, and so have most of the white people I know.
And though our education on these issues may indeed have been what Olusoga condemns as “Wilberforce-centric”, it was nevertheless morally admirable and effective so that, even in the 1960s, most schoolchildren believed that slavery was an obscenity on a par with the Holocaust, that colonialism had a dubious legacy and that the empire was a jingoistic joke.
Alan Clark
London
