School science lessons could be made less “Western” with “no more heroes” in Labour’s “woke” overhaul of the school curriculum. The Mail has more.
An independent review of what is taught in schools was launched by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson shortly after Labour’s General Election victory in July.
It is seeking to “refresh” what pupils learn after Ms. Phillipson complained the current curriculum is “outdated”.
The terms of reference for the overhaul says it must reflect “the issues and diversities of our society”, with a committee currently considering proposals.
In response to the Department for Education’s call for evidence, top science bodies stressed the importance of teaching “non-Western” contributions to science.
The Royal Society of Biology, Royal Society of Chemistry and Institute of Physics also said pupils should learn why some cultures were “less able to claim credit and ownership for ideas”.
Together with the Association for Science Education, they convened a group to make recommendations that have now been submitted to Labour’s review.
But their evidence has been branded “a ludicrous proposal from the wokerati”, while Labour has been accused of “education vandalism” with its curriculum overhaul.
Highlighting the work of the Primary Curriculum Advisory Group, the Royal Society of Biology’s own submission stated: “It is essential that all children feel included in the sciences by valuing their experiences and through the thoughtful use of contexts, imagery and narratives.
“This is partly achieved by ensuring that they build a repertoire of shared experiences; partly through techniques within the classroom; and partly through the narratives attached to the sciences.
“Specifically, the curriculum should offer children a chance to learn about historic Western and non-Western contributions to the sciences, as well as cutting-edge contemporary research from diverse teams of scientists.
“Teachers should be encouraged to frame historic examples of scientific discoveries in the context that some individuals, groups, cultures and nations were disadvantaged in their ability to participate in or to resource research and less able to claim credit and ownership for ideas that had been developed by them.”
The Royal Society of Biology also said it had sought expertise on “decolonising the curriculum” and for a “no more heroes” approach to teaching science in schools.
This would mean “avoiding prescriptive lists of historic figures in biology” and instead “exploring opportunities for local, recognisable, diverse historic and contemporary figures through which discovery and exploration of biological concepts can be explored”.
Does this mean Sir Isaac Newton might be headed to the scrap heap?
Worth reading in full.
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In a free country children would learn to admire their heroes, their top scientists and inventors. And this has been the case in England. The success story did not stop with Nelson and with Newton. Inspired by such exceptional people the generations that followed built on their achievements and the country has won world wars and harvested the highest number of Nobel prizes in Europe:
United Kingdom 142 Germany 115 France 76 Sweden34.
Now, we proudly celebrate as “our” hero the other Nelson from South Africa, whilst our servicemen are treated as garbage. As for scientists, they have all gone with the brain drain and have been replaced by legal immigrants with foreign qualifications.
Sir Isaac Newton’s contribution to maths and physics will live forever.
One day all this woke bullshit will be gone. Passé, kaput, finished, forgotten. An embarrassing glitch, some historical anomaly when a group of people had some weird ideas. Like 70’s fashion. It’s just noise. Shrug and move on.
Sir Isaac Newton will not be forgotten. Every time we do differential and integral calculus, he’s there behind the equations.
70’s fashion is again in fashion at the moment. Just more mass-produced than individually hand-made.
Sorry I didn’t know that. I am ignorant about fashion. Are those boots worn by Abba still around?
Not just Abba, also Mott the Hoople, Slade. Sweet… too many to list…
Ah. I may have revealed too much.
Good if 70s dramas came back, Z Cars to name a few, no woke BS in those days.
They already have on the less well known channels.
But, with trigger warnings.
I wish I could agree with you, but as always, to the victor the right to write history. Give it thirty years, white Europeans will be the minority and the Imams will be dictating education and history. I don’t think I will witness it, but with Sir Sadiq Khan bragging about London being a great city because of it’s population of one million Muslims, I think the inevitable path is already walked.
I agree. Demographics are everything unless you are prepared to repel invaders.
Racialising the history of science is going to be tricky for the anti-whitists. The madleft knows – as does every adult – that the great technological and scientific developments of the past 300 years are overwhelmingly the product of Western science and Western inventiveness. This means white men were the innovators and discoverers. But white men are the madleft’s most hated group, the group scheduled by the madleft for extinction. So, if the madleft racialises the teaching of the history of science our children will see very clearly who the achievers were, and who the achievers weren’t. This will make the anti-white project much more difficult.
Not just white men. Marie Curie springs to mind straight away. Also Annie Maunder.
Western science was happy to nick the Arabian idea of a placeholder digit for zero – just as well we used Indian digits instead of Arabic as we’d have confused ourselves when the idea of decimals came along. I think it’s interesting that the USA still uses (or is in the process of moving away from) fractional inches and suchlike rather than ‘metric’ measures (they still can’t spell ‘litre’ though).
Can I give a credit to Ada Lovelace too. The forerunner of every coder and programmer in existence today.
I saw a film of hers once, although I thought her name was Linda…
Countess Lovelace once wrote a program which never ran for a computer which was never built¹. Wrt to Get immensely famous by creating something completely useless nobody understands, she could probably be regarded as forerunner of today’s AI researchers (still using methods proposed by Marvin Minsky in the 1960s) but that wouldn’t do her justice as this was all posthumously because of her eminent suitabilty as woke icon (probably helped by the fact that she was dead) which puts her in contrast to real female innovators in computer science like (US) Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.
¹ Supposed to calculate Bernoulli numbers and written a programming language Charles Babbage had created for his analytical engine.
Yes.
Without naming them or knowing anything about their backgrounds or the society they lived in it would be difficult to understand their (Lovelace and Hopper’s) relative merits and impact on the modern world.
We need to keep referring to Newton’s laws or Copernicus’ understanding of the solar system or Pythagoras’ ratios. Divorced from their history how will we understand how we got to where we are? For that matter how we got to the point of forgetting their names?
Americans use fraction measures mainly for nominal dimensions such as hole diameters or plate thicknesses.
Mist other dimensions are given in thousandths which make for easy interpretation.
It’s a perfectly usable system, eminently practical.
And why the heck should we accept French spellings of stupid words like “meter” and “litre” when we have perfectly viable easiest such as yards and pints whi h have stood the test of hundreds of generations?
Get a grip.
Metre.
The French invented it, Though the definition has since changed.
Why keep the French spelling? To distinguish it from a measuring device. Why Litre? To be consistent – but it’s not a hill to choose to die on.
Yes, of course it’s possible to learn and ‘do’ science and engineering in other units (such as Imperial). Obviously, exactly what one means by ‘ounce’ for example might be open to interpretation depending on what one is weighing. Also ‘gallon’ or ‘pint’ depending on where you are in the world. A more consistent set of units has certainly helped the development of science.
Thou as a unit? Far too coarse for many purposes – 25.4 microns. However, it’s usable for some purposes: I remember using feeler gauges to adjust the contact breaker (points) gap on my Minis to 15 thou (0.38 mm) until I discovered the dwell meter (not metre).
Of course, in most construction work, it is big smile, thumbs up, “Cock on!”
I have read that the French found the measurement in one of the Pyramids. Wow! I’ve found an article on it:
https://metricviews.uk/2013/06/07/was-the-metre-invented-by-the-ancient-egyptians-4500-years-ago
From Wikipedia:
It seems that there is plenty of pressure to make Farenheit 451 reality. Just like 1984. Is there reason to be alarmed? I think so.
The central theme of Fahrenheit 451 is that information and learning confuses people and makes them unhappy and that the task of government is to ensure that they remain mentally undisturbed and happy instead. They’re supposed to sit in front of their TV walls and to be entertained by soap operas expertly created for this very purpose. There are some hints of that in our present but Bridge, Rachel & The Climate Changers certainly don’t want us to live mindless, happy lives in a world where everything to enable us to remain so exists in abundance.
I’m looking forward to streaming the next episode of ‘Bridge, Rachel & The Climate Changers’. Any ideas when it’ll be released?
Early next year would be my guess.
A year after we have reached NET Zero?
There is little doubt that almost all our Beloved Leaders and their Civil Serpents view their “Settled Science” in the same light as the TV adverts with Albert Einstein, no less, explaining that “Smart” Meters will save you money.
It does. Calls for Newton’s laws to be renamed beause of slavery have already been made years ago. But that’s a sideline issue. The actual core of this idea is to stop teaching science in so-called science classes and use them to do political indoctrination in criticial this-or-that theory instead. That’s exemplified by the
It is essential that all children feel included in the sciences by valuing their experiences and through the thoughtful use of contexts, imagery and narratives.
Teaching science is about other people’s experiences and ideas which necessarily tower far above anything directly experienced by school children in their own lives because they’re school children and not groundbreaking scientists (whose discoveries and theories are worthy of being learnt about). The statement above is thus the credo of someone who’s dedicated to avoid teaching science. Instead, it’s supposed to become, minus appealing to the minds of children with various behavioural tricks, about how
some individuals, groups, cultures and nations were disadvantaged in their ability to participate in or to resource research and less able to claim credit and ownership for ideas that had been developed by them.
That is, teach critical race theory instead.
OK, let them try to design a bridge, engine or medicine using critical race theory and let’s see how they manage.
We won’t need those, existing in our 15 minute cities.
That’s right.
But once this has been introduced, they will be able to lower the voting age to 12. So long as they aren’t pale and male, of course.
ie teaching children that truth is subjective, thereby dismantling any chance of them developing enough critical thinking skills to challenge their poisonous orthodoxy and leave their cult. Fortunately not all children are as dumb as Bridget Phillipson so many of them will prevail.
This is a way for more and more teachers to not have to teach subjects which are too difficult for they themselves to understand, never mind the kids.
I remember my own maths lessons, where it was impossible to be wrong. You were merely encouraged to “express yourself”.
Made life a lot easier for the teachers.
“Describe a typical day in the life of Pythagoras”, “Draw a picture of Archimedes”, etc etc.
What about having an Archimedes Screw?
“non-Western” contributions to science. Make two lists and compare.
Yes like Black History month – make a list and that lasts about 5 minutes, not a month.
The Chinese invented gunpowder. Erm…
And why did they not match the achievements of Great Britain? Glass!! Or lack of it. No optical instruments without glass.
On the Origin of Species – Authors name withheld
“Someone’s” Theory of Special Relativity
“Someone’s” Third Law of Thermodynamics
Is that the idea?
Darwin – Junk science
Relativity -disproven more times that a bird sings in the spring.
Thermodynamics – which disproves Relativity – better.
Much of ‘Science’ is rubbish. It is dogma.
And what is taught is very very selective.
Why isn’t the Michelson Morley 1887 experiment which disproved the Earth’s mobility ever taught? Or Sagnac 1913 who disproved the invariance speed of light?
Dogma that is why.
Not all science is dogma. Some $cience is influenced by a sort of dogma but not real science.
Yes. Well spotted.
Obviously Lammy’s outstanding performance on Mastermind in 2009 was the precursor to this.
No it was caused by this… er.
Going to have problems with Boyle’s Law, Charles Law, Youngs Modulus, Ohm’s Law, Kirchoff’s Law, the Faraday Cage, Morse Code, the Avogadro Constant, Roentgens, Pascals, Saybolt Seconds, etc
And the SI units, including Ampere, Kelvin, Newton, Joule, Watt, Maxwell, Coulomb, Hertz, Pascal, Coulomb, Volt(aire), Farad(ay), Ohm, Siemens, Weber, Tesla, Henry, Becquerel, Gray, and Sievert. There’s the katal but, unfortunately, no Mr Katal, Miss, Ms or Mrs Katal, or even Lord or Lady Katal.
But there is the Gilbert, Maxwell, Orsted, Gauss, Rutherford, Curie, and degree Celsius.
If Sir Isaac Newton is cancelled does gravity cease to exist.
Another example of how the left are desperate to make sure that mass immigration of alien cultures is accepted. Evil.
This argument about how science should be taught neatly ignores the current woke culture which distrusts science per se. From basic things such as biologically-determined gender to the inability of basic face masks to stop the passage of minute virus particles. From the inability to perceive natural fluctuations in global temperatures over millennia to the idea that fossil fuels can be simply replaced with “renewable” sources of energy that are both free and inexhaustible. Science is being subverted. Everything we are told is based on a slanted interpretation of selected scientific findings, with inconvenient truths ruled out on the basis that “the science is settled”. Science is all about investigating, questioning, hypothesising, testing, proving. None of this fits into woke culture.
Science is being subverted
Exactly right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDHarKGM0Jo
Decolonizing light? Conceptual penis? Chemistry prof urges feds to remove DEI from research funding
I don’t recall learning about any scientists in school science lessons, it was not (and should not be) part of the curriculum, which was simply about The Science.
Did you not learn of Boyles Law (maybe it was just a guideline)? Did nobody demonstrate a Wilson’s Cloud Chamber with alpha, beta and gamma radiation? Or a van der Graaf generator? Did you not learn about Dmitri Mendeleev’s development of the periodic table of the elements? What about Gregor Mendel’s experiments with genetic inheritance? You missed out on a lot of interesting stuff!
Put aside all the Woke bollox, we can all agree it is all Bollox so no need to comment further on that. But history could be a bit more honest about our historic leaders. Churchill was a WW2 hero, fair enough but lets not forget how he talked about the Welsh (I’m here in Wales) people in say, Ceylon etc. An article in The Light covered the Firestorm of Dresden after the allied bombing of the town; a town with no industrial power base or munitions factories and refugees from the east.
The article quotes Churchill and if what he said is true, that is disgraceful.
“I don’t want any suggestions how to destroy militarily important targets around Dresden. I want suggestions as to how we can roast the 600 000 refugees from Breslau in Dresden.”
The morning after the firebombing Churchill ordered low flying planes to machine-gun the survivors on the banks of the river Elbe where they had dragged themselves to try and find shelter from the suffocating heat, by water immersion.
I’ve seen this (the quote) in German a couple of times but I seriously doubt that it’s accurate because it simply doesn’t fit into Churchills role in this. He obviously knew what bomber command, that is, Arthur Harris, was doing and what it accomplished but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it, that was just something he tolerated and hid (in its details) from British public because it was a means of waging a war he was waging. It’s the first time I’ve seen Breslau mentioned here. The Dresden bombings occured from 13th – 15th of February 1945 and famously, the fortified town of Breslau (Festung Breslau) capitulated a few days after the German general capitulation on 8th of May 1945.
Here’s another quote I read somewhere (either in Friedrich’s Der Brand or Overy’s The Bombing War but I can’t give an exact location right now). In winter 1944/45 the Russians had asked for something to be done to help with their push into German territory and one of the motivations for the Dresden bombings was
Show the Russians what Bomber Command can do.
It’s its technocratic brutality, I find that much more telling than the supposed Churchill quote.
Another important thing: The RAF didn’t do daytime attacks because this was deemed too costly in terms of losses. Daytime raids, including the supposed machine-gun attack on civilians in Dresden, would have been done by the Americans. It’s also unclear if this ever really happened. Overy (from memory) says it might have been a fight between German and American planes which gave this impression.
There are other first-hand accounts of American fighter-bombers doing daytime attacks of civilians and civil infrastructure, so, some of them probably happened. But the Dresden one is questionable.
Well the article mentioned Mustangs (US) that machine-gunned the people in the town the next morning.
Gwendoline is truly evil.
Here is some chemistry, and by definition, science. It is the history of the acquisition of all of the elements of the periodic table and more. Notice the nationality of each discoverer. This time table goes back to 1250 when the 10th element was discovered.
Good chart. I’d never seen one like that before.
I have been a Member of the Royal Society of Biology for a long time but will not be renewing my subscription for many reasons – a list that is too long for here.
In essence I have disagreed with their so-called “policy” submissions (submissions that are supposed to represent members’ views) for years but their method of reflecting member views is flawed; another issue which would require explanations.
So, the news that they (ie the management of the RSB) have performed their usual trick of imposing another ludicrous woke-infested proposal and have only succeeded in adding to “educational vandalism” comes as no surprise to me.
This education submission from the RSB, the RSC and Institute of Physics is particularly bad and in my opinion, the role of these “professional” bodies should be subject to review along with the rest of the woke bureaucratic machinery that infests the UK.
The fact that RSB management sign off emails with pronouns just shows how utterly “woke” and “un-biological” the RSB is.
They want to be the heroes in their own curriculum. How degrading.
What a load of bollocks. These people despise Western achievement. I bet the Chinese don’t do themselves down. Anyone who watches the NHK channel, will see just how proud the Japanese are of their culture, their history, their traditions, their science, their engineering etc. Not our elite though; they are embarrassed by it all.
My career consists of projects outside of the UK, mainly across Asia and the Middle East. When I discuss the topic of this article with people there, who are citizens of those countries, they near universally find it to be hilarious. It seems only to be in the UK and Canada where anybody takes this ‘de-westernisation’ narrative seriously.