I was pleased to see an extract from The Myth of Racist Kids deployed as a component in a teacher training ‘online discussion activity’.  Prepared and piloted by Jane Davies of the University of Sunderland for the Multiverse ‘teacher training resource bank’ the exercise asks students to read the extract and consider some of the counter-arguments.  Its slightly disappointing that the counter-arguments turned out to be the pedantic, rather besides-the-point protest posted by Robin Richardson (who felt the government ‘TeacherNet’ guidance he’d authored had been misinterpreted), and the even more grumpy IRR piece by Jenny Bourne.

As I point out elsewhere on this site, neither Richardson or Bourne get past their angry feelings for long enough to realise there really is something to debate here.  Both hint that my report might raise some interesting points but their over-riding concern is to warn the reader that criticising state administered anti-racism is inherently “dangerous”.  What, for example, will happen if the tabloid loving lower-orders, always itching to go-racist, read such arguments?  It’s careless talk right?

In a buttoned-down atmosphere where the accusation ‘you can’t say that!’ can pop out at any moment, I can only imagine how independent thinking students survive this exercise without being cast as ideologically unsound.   Happily, in the pilot, there seem to have been a few.  In the test run of the exercise students posted their responses to the set-readings on the University intranet discussion forum.  Although we get an account of this teacher training activity on the Multiverse site, we don’t get to see how the discussion went. But its interesting how the exercise is described almost as though students were guinea-pigs in their tutor’s own experiment.  The “online/independent” nature of this activity (comments Jane Davies) provided tutors with an opportunity “to get a better idea of the ideas and views of the particular cohort”.  Of the students she notes “some admitted being ‘seduced’ by Hart’s ideas until they had read the counterarguments …”.   She also notes “The online discussions which ensued as a result of the trainees' reading were sometimes heated and, in some cases, exposed the work that is still left to do …”.  Hmm … well, I suppose it must be tough getting the ideas and views of future teachers properly ‘trained’ and in-tune with state-policy? (Damn those independent thinkers!!)

Despite students being steered (not all that successfully it would seem) toward the orthodoxy favoured by the tutors, the fact that The Myth of Racist Kids is being put on display as modern heresy is no bad thing.  Heated discussion that actually engages with ideas, subjects them to scrutiny and over-rules the gagging order implied by ‘you can’t say that!’ puts the squeeze on dogma.  And that’s exactly what this particular issue needs.