Another aspect of Labour Party Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s decolonization-based “review” of the U.K.’s state school curricula is how art lessons should be taught.
Akin to various science organizations voicing their support for such efforts in their discipline, the National Society for Education in Art & Design union says part of “anti-racist art education” should involve teachers “challenging whiteness,” according to The Telegraph.
Teachers should “ask about the ‘colonial narratives’ and the ‘Western lens through which art, craft and design is often viewed,’” the NSEAD advised.
The union also suggested ways to include art “from Nigeria and Ethiopia,” as well as “crafts created by Native American and Aboriginal peoples.”
“Art education must not be racist,” the NSEAD said, and “every educator [must] critically review and revise their curriculum.”
Last year, NSEAD endorsed a report which noted that only about two percent of artists in art exams have black or South Asian backgrounds, and less than 11 percent of the works in those exams come from outside “the white, Western canon.”
The report was issued by the charity Runnymede Trust, which “spends millions to ‘challenge structural racism in Britain.’”
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In addition to providing this advice for art teachers, the society has also urged the leaders of Labour’s curriculum review to ensure there are “standards for inclusion and diversity in GCSE assessment materials” and that teachers are versed in “racial literacy”.
The guidance urges teachers to examine the “exclusionary historic portraits of white, wealthy, powerful men” compared with more equitable deceptions of “‘all’ lives lived”.
Meanwhile, teachers are urged to question whether the material they use might perpetuate “negative African, Asian or other tropes”, including impoverished Africans being “rescued by ‘white-Western saviours’”.
As reported last month by The College Fix, here in the U.S. government entities like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities fund university art projects “that further ‘progressive, revisionist history’ and ‘promote obscenity.’”
“It’s mostly in the form of professors asking for research grants to write a book or to perhaps produce in the arts side, produce a particular exhibit or to even create the art itself that has a highly ideological character,” said Intercollegiate Studies Institute President John Burtka.
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