I mean she replies to one comment with:
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Which feels a tinyyyy bit silly because even GCSE history and english will have had some discussions about politics. I'm pretty sure if you choose to do GCSE history one of the topics is specifically English history
Her bigger problem may well be mostly that she studied A-level subjects which are generally right/wrong answers and don't include much discussion about society. Anyone who has studied sociology, English, history and other similar subjects will likely have been exposed to those discussions more
Yes, I agree. But then this is why I'm not shocked that someone could come through the UK education system politically illiterate. It's fairly easy to do. a lot of my peers were, and a lot of people in this country are.
English history isn't necessarily on the GCSE history syllabus. I did Medicine, Surgery, The Troubles (so Irish history) and The American West. Our school ran it as two streams, so there was Cold War as one, and American West+Medicine as the other. The other American West + Medicine class didn't even do The Troubles as their coursework module.
I would also be surprised if the Cold War/WWII module also got terribly into British "left Vs right" as much as international "Communism Vs Capitalism" (though I would be surprised if it even got that far, I think it spent a lot of time fannying about over events rather than considering driving ideologies). Remember: Left and Right are very relativistic terms. Neoliberalism is a rightwing idea today, but during the war it would have been anathema. The EU is considered a leftwing allegiance in the UK, but it's a neoliberal trade club that to whom membership was originally opposed by the left.
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I’m afraid I disagree. Right and left are fixed terms- admittedly within their own context. You can also look at it based on historic differences e.g. privatisation vs nationalisation. Yes there are crossovers, especially when you consider centrist policies but there are clear left and right wing ideas in my view.
Back to Jade, I do think it’s poor that she had no idea what left vs right meant. English and History curriculums are designed to help students explore this and not to mention pshe and politics classes (assuming she had those). She went to one of the best state schools in the country so I’d be shocked if it just never came up.
It’s also possible she forgot or just didn’t care or is exaggerating for engagement. I would love for someone to do some digging and find her referencing left vs right lol.
The problem with saying "left and right are fixed terms" is that it might be true in a global sense (not sure that it is but thats irrelevant), but it certainly isn't in a local sense. If you're talking specifically in the locality of British politics, what is left and what is right shifts quite dramatically over the years. There are many things that red Tories do today that would horrify post war labour politicians, and things regular Tories do that would horrify post war conservative politicians. And honestly? Vice versa.
You could argue this is overton window shifting, but when the average person says leftwing or rightwing, they're not talking in a global fashion, they're describing a local property.
(Global and Local are being used here in the mathematical sense, in that global means true everywhere, and local means true in some defined neighbourhood of the point)
It definitely is poor that she wasn't really aware of what British left Vs right politic was, but as I say in my post: its not surprising and this user is wrong to be surprised that someone came out of the UK system politically illiterate. That's the point of my post, that you have to have your head fairly deep in the sand (and quite frankly you have to be pretty politically illiterate yourself) to not know the majority of this country is politically illiterate.
Also: you think the British curriculum is in any way designed to make students question and interrogate politics? Did you go to a British school?