{"id":60388,"date":"2020-09-04T17:10:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T14:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/study-shows-uk-school-textbooks-teach-a-highly-simplified-version-of-us-civil-rights-movement\/"},"modified":"2020-09-04T17:10:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T14:10:00","slug":"study-shows-uk-school-textbooks-teach-a-highly-simplified-version-of-us-civil-rights-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/study-shows-uk-school-textbooks-teach-a-highly-simplified-version-of-us-civil-rights-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"#Study shows UK school textbooks teach a highly simplified version of US civil rights movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Study shows UK school textbooks teach a highly simplified version of US civil rights movement<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"Study<\/img>
\n Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his \u2018I Have a Dream\u2019 speech during the March in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963. Credit: Wikimedia<\/a> Commons, CC BY-SA
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As children return to school in the UK, they will encounter a curriculum that still pays little attention to black British history or culture. This is despite an urgent Black Lives Matter movement and growing demands for a more honest reckoning with the racial legacies of Britain’s imperial past.<\/p>\n

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While some cling to the notion that US-style racial tensions are unthinkable in the UK, critics have condemned Britain’s “historical amnesia” and ongoing racial inequalities\u2014highlighting the Windrush scandal, the Grenfell Tower fire and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BAME communities as evidence. <\/p>\n

A March 2020 review into the Windrush scandal, investigated the mistreatment and deportation of British subjects of Caribbean descent and cited “the public’s and officials’ poor understanding” of Black British history and the end of empire as a relevant factor.
\nYet learning about the Windrush generation in school remains an optional topic for 11 to 14-year-olds studying history\u2014and has only been on the curriculum since 2013.
\nIn UK schools, students often study Martin Luther King and the African American freedom struggle, but rarely the histories of Britain’s own racial minorities.
\nAs experts in US history, we believe King offers an invaluable entrance point for conversations about race and anti-racist protest. But our new research found a routine over-simplification of his beliefs and tactics that weakens connections between the UK and the US, and contributes to this “historical amnesia.”
\nIn our latest research with Benjamin Houston and Nick Megoran at Newcastle University, we wanted to find out exactly how the US civil rights movement is being taught in UK schools. <\/p>\n

We examined history textbooks and curricula, and found British children study a very simplified version of the US freedom struggle. In UK schools, Martin Luther King is often synonymous with the entire civil rights movement. It’s also a very conservative image of King\u2014the more radical elements of his philosophy and activism are ignored.
\nReductive app<\/a>roach<\/b>
\nYou would never know from UK textbooks that by the time of his murder in 1968, King was a self-professed democratic socialist working on a multiracial campaign to address economic injustice \u2013 speaking openly about the trip<\/a>le evils of racism, poverty and war to international audiences, including in the UK.
\nThese oversights are problematic in their own right. But they also obscure important aspects of British history by ignoring the relationship between the African American freedom struggle and campaigns for racial justice in the UK.
\nInstead, UK children learn a simplistic “feel good” tale of how, back in the bad old days, the heroic Martin Luther King defeated a brand of racism and discrimination “over there.”<\/p>\n

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