Do you feel like you learnt everything you actually needed to know to navigate life after you finished school through a system of trial and error? How to change a light bulb, how to do a tax return, the fact that Winston Churchill wasn’t exactly a noble hero who saved the West from fascism.Our curriculum is still failing to give young people an education that prepares them for the real world, focusing instead on outdated lesson plans and the subjects that schools need to check off government target boxes. Imagine a world that focused less on churning out good GCSE results for Ofsted ratings and more on giving teenagers the tools they need to function in a society. Behold: the alternative curriculum.
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LISTEN: "School's Out, What Now" – a podcast about UK education from the VENT Documentaries series, produced by VICE UK and the young people of Brent.
MATHS BUT ACTUALLY USEFUL
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HISTORY BUT ACTUALLY ACCURATE
“I was never taught to inquire or criticise the ramifications and reality of colonisation and its aftermath”, says Kaleke Kolawole, a civil servant in spectrum policy who works alongside the Decolonising SOAS working group. “It is essential to teach the reality of colonisation, to teach children how to criticise sources and information, to challenge thoughts, bias and history.”“There's a lot of people who think that decolonising is just simply replacing,” explains Lavinya Stennett, founder of The Black Curriculum. “I do think that at some point there needs to be some replacement, but before that there needs to be the opening of a discussion and thinking about the value of the contributions that are already there. Comparing and contrasting [historical figures], and chipping back the idea that we have to start with really powerful white male figures; understanding that we can draw on different kinds of examples to create a different context”.
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Toslima Khatun, a PhD candidate & researcher at SOAS, agrees. “I don't think learning about World War II is a bad thing, especially with the rise of the far right that we're seeing now. I just think it should be more inclusive. You should take into account that there were black lives, East Asian lives, American and Latinx lives and Indian lives that were involved. The defeat of Nazi Germany could not have happened without these people, and without their deaths”.It’s safe to say that at this point most teenagers are pretty aware of climate change and the urgent need for action before the sky somehow catches on fire, but how do we teach sustainability in a way that will mean we have future scientists and designers equipped to deal with the challenges ahead, and the (hopefully) imminent green technology revolution?“Sustainability is about understanding how we can do things – as an individual, as a community, and as a society at large – that doesn't just protect the environment, but harmonises our relationship with the system around us”, says Leyla Acaroglu, founder of The UnSchool. “It looks at the social, economic and environmental impacts of our actions”.It’s clear the time for sustainability as a separate lesson for the Shambala kids who want to wear hemp clothing to school is over. “I don't think segregating sustainability out into its own chunky thing is necessarily a good thing – it doesn't work” says Leyla when I ask about how sustainability could be taught in schools, suggesting that it should feature heavily in science and design teaching. “The legacy issue of environmentalism is that it's been disaggregated from the reality. We don't teach people systems and how the world is interconnected in a very fundamental, practical way. Understanding [that] is science, and design is part of the solution.”
BUILT-IN SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION
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SEX EDUCATION BUT ACTUALLY EDUCATIONAL
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ENGLISH LITERATURE BEYOND THE WESTERN CANON
SCIENCE AS RECREATIONAL DRUGS EDUCATION
Unfortunately this vision is still far too farsighted. “Drugs are already in the science curriculum, but the trouble is that [they’re] only taught in relation to individual pathology, and the bad effects of drugs on your body” explains Harry Shapiro, the director of Drugwise. “To try and introduce an alternative view is politically tricky. Given how much concern there is about mental health problems among young people, and the fact that mental health services are pretty much broken, there would probably be a concern that this initiative might promote the idea of self-medication, which has already happened with drugs like Xanax,” he adds.Until drugs are incorporated into society through legal means, teenagers will probably still be taught about them via that video of a horse being injected with a shit ton of tranquilliser as a warning about the dangers of ketamine.Sign up to our newsletter to get the best of VICE UK delivered to your inbox every week.@niluthedamaja