Abstract
British Conservatives happily acknowledge the debt that they owe to E.D. Hirsch. To understand the nature of their curricular project, and how it is located within the wider goals of education and social policy, we need to attend carefully to the character of this transatlantic borrowing. Its emphases and omissions reveal much about the exclusionary reimagining of national identity that informs the continuing counter-revolution in education.
Highlights
KEYWORDS Knowledge; culture; curriculum; identity; difference; nationalism. Living in this post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-truth period, it is easy to emphasise the novelty of these times, to remark on manifestations of nationalism and routine, calculated and aggressive assertions of white, masculinist, heteronormative supremacy as distinctively new – as evidence of a moment of rupture in politics, culture and society
The new British prime minister’s commitment to the reintroduction of segregated secondary schooling may represent a fresh trajectory for the politics of nostalgia, but even this might be construed as building on the legacy of Michael Gove, former education minister and prominent Brexiteer (Jones 2013), and of the Conservative-led government in which he served
What we are presented with here is something that looks horribly like a new version of a very old tactic: blame the victim
Summary
To cite this article: John Yandell (2017) Culture, Knowledge and Power: What the Conservatives have Learnt from E.D. Hirsch, Changing English, 24:3, 246-252, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2017.1351231 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2017.1351231
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