Back when I was a schoolboy, it was a standing joke amongst pupils that, if you were ever stuck in an RE test, you had at least a 50% chance of getting a mark if you simply wrote in the all-purpose words, “Because Jesus was the Light of the World” as an answer. “Truly, it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a schoolboy to fail his RE exam,” we claimed Jesus had once taught his own private learning-circle in Mark 10:25. As one classmate still got his GCSE passing grade in the subject even after answering that the letters mockingly placed by the Romans above Christ on his cross were RNLI rather than INRI, I suspect this may actually have been true.
So much for RE exams: but should school, college and university papers in other subjects be made equally as foolproof and impossible to fail? As September begins and students of all ages return to their classrooms, a new campaign to do just this seems to be afoot, under the predictable modish rubric of ‘decolonisation’.
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