There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.
Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”
School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”
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