Bernard Coard's Failure Of The National Curriculum

There isn’t many black students in university due to the fact that they make a small part of demographic in the UK. Black students are under-represented, even if they were equally represented there would be a few of them comparison to other groups. Bernard Coard (1971) published a book “How the west Indian child is made educationally subnormal” he argues that this was preventing black Caribbean children from reaching their potential. In his book he highlighted how the word ‘white’ was associated with good and the word ‘black’ with evil. For example, a children's book was called the white unicorn where's another children book was called Black pirates. Unicorn are known as good creatures but pirates are normally the villains. Failure of black
It covers what subjects are taught and the standards children should reach in each subject.”(gov.uk) Looking at the curriculum for history I realised that majority of the subjects are British History. Looking back at when I was in secondary school I didn’t really learn enough about slavery or any other non-British history. Miriam David (1993) describes the national curriculum as only British curriculum due to the fact that it only teaches the culture of the host community. They ignore non-European languages, literature and music. I think that the national curriculum is racist to a certain extent. They do cover different cultures but not going into depth like how they would go with British History. This is a problem that the government need to work on and stop degrading other ethnic groups. Do you think that the National Curriculum is an ethnocentric
Stifling (2003) found that race often featured as a background issues and schools think that they treat their pupils the same. Black pupils are more likely to be excluded and the school doesn’t take in account the factors which caused this behaviours. Majority of the time it is racial remarks being made by another student from a different ethnicity. She concludes that during her research she found evidence to prove that there is open racism established by staff in schools is uncommon, however racism is coming from white peer pressured