It is no secret that populism is a very successful political strategy. It can be described by different terms like Nazism, Far Right ideology or White supremacy but it essentially is the same. The underlying concept is us vs them. It is always about how ‘we’ are superior and the ‘other’ is inferior. The exact reasoning can vary. Sometimes it’s simply hatred of other race, something it’s governed by economical reasons or perceived lack of availability of jobs and sometimes it is even ridiculous to the level of considering others uncivilised and even inhuman. In fact, research shows us that one of the first stages of warfare these days is to dehumanise the enemy. The far right rhetoric of demonising Jews, Immigrants and non-whites was very prevalent during the two World Wars. The Nazis then mastered this dark skill. But they were not the only ones, our own Prime Minister Winston Churchill was responsible for causing the Bengal famine which caused millions of death in Asia. The good thing however after the end of wars was that this rhetoric generally weakened around the World particularly in the Western World.

However, things changed again dramatically at the start of 21^st century. 9/11 happened and it became a feeble excuse for dangerous populist movements all over the World. Cunning evil politicians found their new bogeyman. Muslims were the new Jews. Because of anti-Semitism laws, populist far right politicians were not able to attack Jews anymore, so they instead targeted Muslim minorities in sharp contrast with the rhetoric of previous century. In fact the same movements and politicians that in 20^th century would not have considered Jews human now were saying they are friends of Jewish people and that they needed to be saved from these foreign evil Muslims. Millions of Muslims in the West were rounded up by various Western agencies on mostly drummed up whimsical charges of terrorism. Special courts were created to terrorise Muslims. Hardly anyone in the World today wouldn’t have heard of infamous torture centre in Guantanamo Bay run by Americans. In UK, so many Muslims were targeted in these special courts that the lawyers for Muslims were not even provided with charges against the Muslim victims which made it impossible to defend the accused!

Newspapers used to be full of stories of FBI raiding Muslims homes in cover of darkness. UK saw laws like PREVENT being enacted to specifically target their Muslim minority community. Several European countries banned mosques, minarets, hijabs, burkinis. Then came invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria which are all predominantly Muslim majority countries. Eventually Trump came into power in USA and placed a Muslim travel ban. Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson (real name is Stephen Yaxley Lenon) became popular in UK and made regular protests in UK against supposed ‘Islamification’ of UK. France and other countries also had similar xenophobic and Islamophobic issues. Brazil, India and Israel elected far right populist politicians. So all in all, it’s a bad time to be Muslim or Black in most of the World when Xenophobia and Islamophobia are at the peak.

So how does Curriculum fit in amongst all this doom and gloom scenario? Well one of the major reasons these populist movements and leaders can garner support amongst the masses is lack of education or rather lack of diverse and inclusive education! When your formal education only tells you about the positive points in history and either hides dark part of your history or worse glosses over it like it was normal, then this breeds a generation of kids who will grow up thinking themselves as superior and always correct and others as being the opposite. In case of UK, for example most students barely know anything of our dark colonial past. In fact our young generation is exposed to propaganda that we Brits actually build trains and railways systems for these colonies to help them progress whereas the bitter truth we did it to easily move the resources we stole from their land!

But History is not the only part of the British curriculum that needs correcting. We need active efforts to combat modern day racism, xenophobia and in particular rising islamophobia in the West. We need to stress on the message of love, inclusiveness, strength of diversity in our curriculum. We need to tell our children how all humans are equal. We need to educate our kids on what inclusiveness means and its genuine benefits. We need to warn our next generation about the dangers of racism and islamophobia. We need to warn them that racism and islamophobia can have a huge detrimental impact on the society and in particular its cohesion. Our curriculum should not also shy away from educating our kids on sensitive topics like White Privilege and inspirational global movements like Black Lives Matter.

As mentioned earlier dangerous right wing rhetoric is again on the rise and one just needs to look at the two World Wars and how much damage this toxic ideology did in the last century. But together we can counter it no matter what race, religion or creed we belong to by spreading the message of love, inclusiveness and diversity. But this means educating our society and most importantly our young children about this and the most important step in it is to transform our curriculum. This is what MCPS Curriculum is striving daily to do.