4th December 2015 5:00
By Blue Tutors
Educators and students have been outraged this week over the government’s plan to drop feminism from the A level politics syllabus. The section on feminism has been removed completely, as have the topics of sex, gender, gender equality and patriarchy. In addition to the removal of the topic, only one woman remains on the list of political thinkers that students are required to study. Teachers and students have expressed dismay at the fact that Nicky Morgan, education secretary and women’s minister, has supported the proposed changes.
While teachers and students are launching campaigns to deal with this ill-conceived move on the part of the department for education, tutors have a role to play in ensuring that the government doesn’t completely erase students’ access to vital social, political and historical material. The decision to remove feminism from the politics syllabus isn’t an isolated example of removing material discussing social justice and oppression from the school curriculum. Former education secretary Michael Gove pushed to remove American literature from the English syllabus including To kill a mockingbird and Of mice and men, both texts which deal with questions of oppression. The latest move is part of a worrying trend, which tutors should address where they can with their students.
Whilst tutors cannot teach an alternative syllabus, they can broaden students’ reading, and make them aware that there are significant gaps in the school syllabus. Additional reading in American Literature and feminist politics will broaden students’ understandings of their subjects, and benefit them personally as well as academically. As such, tutors should try to make time to introduce these texts and place them in the context of the works which did make it onto the A level syllabus. Of course there are only so many books or theorists that can be studied at A level; it’s one thing to leave out an influential writer or thinking, but to remove vitally important schools of thought and whole sections of literature which deal with injustice is extremely worrying, and something which tutors, in addition to teachers, need to address.