This article was published in the Australian Spectator – you can get the original here and add your own comments if you wish!
Princess PC versus the colonisation of the curriculum
Were you aware that the curriculum of our universities has been colonized? Apparently this is a serious problem and we need to decolonise as quickly as possible – according to a report commissioned by the Office for Students in the United Kingdom which recommends that universities should decolonise the curriculum to end the dominance of Western values and beliefs.
It’s an idea which has been welcomed by Meghan Markle – although why Princess PC’s opinion on academic institutions should be considered significant is not immediately obvious. But then apparently you don’t need qualifications or experience in order to be able to comment or make policy on education. Angela Rayner, the UK Labour shadow secretary of education, who left school with no qualifications and has no experience of higher education, has already declared, “Our universities are too male, pale and stale and do not represent the communities that they serve or modern Britain”.
One exception to the ‘male, pale and stale’ version of academia is Kehindi Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University. He recently appeared on the Moral Maze, the BBC’s excellent discussion programme, defending the call for ‘decolonisation’. In the course of this discussion he made the incredible (in that it was not credible) remark that “ “Before the Enlightenment the only part of the world that was in a Dark Age, was Europe – and Europe had to draw on other parts of the world to build its culture”.
The idea that a Western State is paying for an academic to teach that the rest of the world was living in blissful enlightenment, whilst the West was in darkness is as laughable as it is fanciful. It bears no relation to historical reality. It’s the equivalent of the geology department at the University of Sydney employing a flat earther. Mind you if that flat earther was prepared to accept an intersectional understanding of gender, race and sexuality, perhaps they would have no difficulty getting the job! Absolute truth is after all a Western colonialist concept – as is the idea of Western science – designed to oppress the rest of the world’s cultures. Such is the madness that this irrational path leads to that for some witchcraft is as valuable as Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity!
When there was a proposal from the Ramsay Centre for a degree in Western Civilisation, more than 100 Sydney University academics wrote an open letter denouncing it as “European supremacism writ large”. This puzzled me. I can do Chinese studies at the University of Sydney, which helps me ‘to understand Chinese society and culture’. Or I can do Arabic language and cultures. Did academics write open letters denouncing these courses as ‘Chinese or Arabic supremacism writ large”? I would love to do Chinese or Arabic studies at the University of Sydney, but why ban Western studies?
The Sydney academics had their answer. “We are a university, not a training institute for a future political ‘cadre’”. I would utter a hearty ‘Amen’ to that wonderful doctrine – if it were not the prime candidate for the most hypocritical statement of the decade! Mainstream (and especially elitist) universities in the West have become monoversities whose main purpose is social engineering. They have become the ultimate training institutes for a future political cadre. I suspect you could count on one hand the number of academics in social science and arts faculties who are not liberal, left progressives. The last kind of diversity you will get in these academic circles is political diversity. I spoke at one university recently where a student stated that he was the only one in the university who was even vaguely right wing. Another lecturer told me that their university was a ‘liberal progressive’ one and that his students had never heard any other point of view; a fact he seemed proud of.
The argument for ‘decolonisation’ states that we need to open our ways up to different ways of thinking and the diversity that that brings. But those who make that argument are among the least diverse people ideologically you can meet. A BBC producer once told me that the BBC doesn’t do diversity in an ideological sense.
There is a sense in which decolonisation is already well under way. The traditional values of Western liberal democracies, stemming largely from our Judaeo-Christian foundations – tolerance, liberty and the rule of law – are being removed and replaced by the new “progressive” order – which practices intolerance in the name of tolerance; restricts liberty in the name of freedom and uses the law as a political and ideological tool to prevent equality under the law for all.
This is a new colonisation. Western “progressives” are so convinced that they alone are on ‘the right side of history’; that their values are self-evidently right, they have no qualms about imposing them on every culture in the world. Western aid is often tied in with the imposition of Western values. They use Western power – money, media and even military – in non-Western countries.
Their methods are more insidious in the West where in a supposedly multi-cultural society they demand a monocultural political system. These are not revolutionary ideas stemming from the oppressed working classes. No – these are the values of the bourgeois elites, who love to talk about the poor, but who live in their own comfortable corporate bubble.
This ‘Western liberals are the peak of evolution’ snobbery currently seems to be the dominant force in much of the media, politics, business and the upper echelons of academia. Anyone who dares challenge this worldview is automatically accused of being ‘populist’ or far right. I am not writing this as some kind of right wing conservative. My nickname was ‘Red Robbo’ for a reason! And yet I am regularly accused of being a Fascist because I don’t accept Queer Theory philosophy.
Intimidation, irrationality and ideology have replaced reason and revelation. It’s time to resist the cultural colonisers who are using the values of the West to destroy those values.
Mary Queen of Scots – Woke Movie of the Year
David you say….Angela Rayner, the UK Labour shadow secretary of education, who left school with no qualifications and has no experience of higher education.
Wikipedia says ‘she later studied British Sign Language, care, and counselling at Stockport College, a college of further and higher education’
I think that qualifies as experience, I now have no confidence to read on if there could be other misleading statements.
I don’t think going to college is study sign language, care and counselling at Stockport is ‘higher’ education….
Stockport College is a medium-sized educational institute in Stockport, Greater Manchester, England, providing further education and higher education to those aged 16 and over. It provides educational opportunities for the community including school leavers, adults, and businesses.
Wonder why they would put ‘higher education’ if it is not? Or were you alluding to ‘sign language, care and counselling’ as inferior studies.
No – its my error – I think of higher education as Universities….which is technically not true…
A college of further and higher education by definition teaches both. Not all courses taught will be higher education. To qualify it would have to be at level 4 – equivalent to 1st year undergraduate. Further education teaches at level 1 (KS2), level 2 (GCSE) and level 3 (A level) standards as well as pre-level 1 courses. I have no knowledge of the courses run at Stockport College, nor the courses studied by Angela Rayner. What I do know is that further education is woefully underfunded and colleges often need to run higher education courses to make ends meet. Also if there are no level 4 plus courses in BSL there should be.
In a world where everything is
1. a construct
2. relative
3.oppressive
4. an aggression
– this nonsense makes a kind of sense. It is all an expression of the self-deification of the Imperial Self:
“I am worthy to receive glory and honor and power, for I have created all things and by my will they were created and have their being.”
As Rev 4.11 fails to say. There is no god more jealous for his “glory” than self-deifying man.
There are those who would say of “European civilisation” the same thing Chesterton said about Christianity: while others would be startled to see its curriculum (if truthfully constituted) cover French, German, Spanish, Italian (and the rest) input rather than the single glories of “England” following straight on from the Romans.
(And yes, that mindset *would* have to be reminded that the UK is more than one country – sigh.)
Nor can those of Anglo-Saxon heritage honestly bring to it the same academic detachment they can to “African” and “Asian” studies – being as we are on the inside of what we are studying, and indeed still producing it as we try to study it. (No slant here – the same will apply to other peoples studying their own ethnic history.)
I would suggest that the best universities to have “European culture” courses, while we study theirs, would be in countries we had never treated unfairly, cheated in trade, or er, generously welcomed into the Empire – so their opinion would not be equally biased *against* their subject.
Hm. Might be a Large Teapot problem and a biscuit as well….
That leaves us with….Poland 🙂
You do know what happened at Yalta?
And how badly we treated those Poles who had heroically fought with us all through the war?
Nope. That one – unlike the Polish squadrons – won’t fly. I wish you were right!
Interesting perspective from Karen. As the Roman playwright said 2000 years ago, I’m a human being, so I don’t consider anything human to be foreign to me. On Karen’s logic Jews are not well placed to study the Torah, or Christians to be expert in the NT field. All academic study should, according to Karen, be carried out by people who are totally uncontaminated by the culture or tradition that they are studying. The reductio ad absurdum is that we end up, as is in fact increasingly the case, with no understanding, in the popular culture anyway of the influences that made us who we are. So, when we become totally clueless and all bridges to the past have been demolished, we can begin studying our own civilisation again. By that time it will be too late as even the remnants of that civilisation will be gone. It will have lost all meaning.
Nobody has ever said that European civilisation was a UK-centred thing, although the various nations in the UK have contributed significantly to it. And the French and Germans and other European nations have all laid claim to the Graeco-Roman inheritance. Think of Schliemann and the obsession with excavating the site of Troy.
The great thing about the Classics is that the whole field, linguistic, cultural, historical etc. is so different in space and time from our own and yet our own civilisation is so derivative from theirs. Like but not like. Lloyd George claimed that as a boy he knew a lot more about the kings of Judah than about the English kings and queens. But that history too has been subsumed into our own lived experience. The Greeks, Romans, OT and NT have formed our society and culture, though we are determined seemingly to obliterate all their traces, leaving us in the value-free cultural swamp we are in today. Although people do like to talk a lot about their “values”.
“This is a new colonisation. Western “progressives” are so convinced that they alone are on ‘the right side of history’; that their values are self-evidently right, they have no qualms about imposing them on every culture in the world. Western aid is often tied in with the imposition of Western values. They use Western power – money, media and even military – in non-Western countries.“
The same phrase could be written about Christians whether you are considering church groups (that I have come across) that tie money/support to willingness to listen to and accept the gospel, to the United States, which has previously tied funding for HIV/AIDS to issues like abstinence only sexual health and abortion.
I always felt uncomfortable for example, my liberal friends trying to push on Uganda through petitions and sanctions, a pro-gay philosophy without having any understanding of the issues. At the same time though you had evangelical American money pouring in to push an anti-gay agenda.
As for universities, I agree that there needs to be more acknowledgement and debate of right wing views as legitimate but Christian universities and Christian organizations on campus have exactly been bastions of free thought. I seem to remember my CU requiring me to sign up to a doctrinal statement that fit on a 10x10cm piece of paper before I could be a member. If there was ever an organization guilty of groupthink, it was the CU. Looking at history as well, it seems as if the Church has only started crying about free-speech and thought since it has been in the minority, the church in Scotland being an organization that used to execute those who dissented.
Frederick, well, I don’t know about that. The second half of the 19th century saw a very open debate about Darwinism and much else anthropological and theological. The Victorians were buzzing with new ideas, even if some of those ideas led to unfortunate consequences down the line. The idea that the religious establishment when in a majority has operated some sort of ban open debate is preposterous. I know about the Aikenhead case of 1697, and I even have read a novel about it, Doubting Thomas. You have to go pretty far back to find one victim of an oppressive Christian religious establishment. As with Calvin and Servetus, the hanging of Aikenhead was a shameful episode. But for the most part Protestantism ushered in an age of open scientific and philosophical enquiry. Now that we are abandoning Protestant Christianity we have given in to some absolutist ideologies that are not allowed to be the subject of open scientific enquiry: anthropogenic climate change for example.
About Western values, I think the problem post-1945 is that they have not been promoted with much vigour at all, and this is very apparent when one surveys the history of endemic corruption in post-colonial regimes. Of course the West is hardly free from corruption itself, but when it’s revealed it does cause some outrage and cuts short political careers. The greatest gift of the Empire (and there were some less desirable ones) was the idea of a Civil Service with competitive entry and ideals of probity. That has gone completely out the window in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and public office is really just seen as a legitimate sinecure. Western Government aid keeps the kleptocracies in power.
I’m a bit hazy about the basis of US foreign aid, but I think that the Trump administration may be the first to try to try to withdraw federal support from overseas programmes that have an abortion element. Of course private US groups and individuals may provide aid on whatever basis they see fit. The behaviour in the field of members of right-on organisations like Oxfam and the UN doesn’t inspire much confidence in the enlightened policies of the organisations with no religious or moralistic hangups.
I find your comments on the university scene frankly incredible. I remember the Billy Graham university mission in Cambridge in 1980. There was a sort of ginger group formed at that time to oppose the mission. It didn’t come to much but it was a straw in the wind. We have had egregious instances of CUs actually being banned from participation in Freshers’ Week, and I think Exeter University Students’ Union tried to ban the CU from campus altogether ten years ago. The same problems are encountered by pro-Life groups. It’s bizarre to take as an example of restriction of free thought the CU asking you to sign a doctrinal statement. You were free to agree or disagree. If you join a vegetarian or vegan society you may have to sign up to a code of some kind with a definition of those two lifestyles. But that is your choice, like getting married or whatever. That is totally different from the no-platforming of people with beliefs that don’t fit in with the prevailing Zeitgeist. CUs have never tried to do that. It’s a stupid policy because if the Zeitgeist ever changes back again the anti free speech zealots will be left with no defence to being no-platformed themselves. In fact it has begun to happen, with Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell being no-platformed. The revolution tends to devour its own children. I think it’s the great Mark Steyn who has commented that these days diversity doesn’t seem to include diversity of opinions. He was himself a target of the Stasi-like commissars of the Ontario and British Columbia human rights councils. But he fought them and won, and even got the law changed.
I don’t agree with your characterisation of current/past Western values being tolerance.
For most of my life misogyny has been alive and well in our culture, including it being socially acceptable to sexually assault women in public. Even today, women are struggling to be paid the same as men for doing the same job. It’s illegal, but pay bands allow it to be legally so.
The U.K. has not had the systemic and horrific racism that the US still endures, but we have had severe problems on and off.
The U.K. has only had freedom of religion for a relatively short time. Anti semitism is rife and has been rife. There are still some laws restricting Roman Catholicism. Most schools in England and Wales privilege (at least on paper) Anglican Christianity above other forms of Christianity and above other faiths.
Gay people only began to get equal rights with straight people in the early 2000s and still are treated less well both by the state and society.
What country do you live in? It has never been acceptable in my country to sexually assault women in public. It is illegal for men to be paid more than women for doing the same job.
The UK has had freedom of religion for the past 200 years. And gay people are not treated less well by state and society (can you name one way in which the state treats gay people less well)? In fact there is a case for saying that in some instances they are privileged.
You seem to live in a very different world or planet from me….don’t believe all you read on the internet!