‘Teach pupils about reasons for Grenfell fire’ says academic
Pupils need to discuss disasters such as the Grenfell Tower fire and the reasons behind them, otherwise they are being failed by schools, a leading academic has said. American academic Henry Giroux, regarded as one of education’s foremost thinkers, warned that if school ignore the root causes of such disasters then “school becomes irrelevant – it becomes dead time”.
Professor Giroux, who was speaking at an event following the presentation of his honorary doctorate by the University of the West of Scotland, said: “What happens when you’re a student in a school and you turn on the media after you leave and there’s a building burning in your neighbourhood and peo- ple are jumping out of the windows?” he said.
He added that students should not be returning to school the next day to be greeted with “a kind of silence about a form of violence that has taken place” and needed help navigating a “fast-changing world”.
Based in Canada, Prof Giroux was named as one of the top 50 educational thinkers of modern times in terms of educational research by the publisher Routledge.
Diarmuid Mcauliffe, education lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland, said Prof Giroux’s comments showed schools how events like Grenfell could make concepts such as citizenship and democracy “real and meaningful” for students.
Mr Mcauliffe added: “For Giroux, no curriculum – including Curriculum for Excellence – should ever be simply passively received, but instead should be critically responsive to contemporary events such as Grenfell.”
Iain Gray, Labour MSP for East Lothian, said of Prof Giroux’s call: “It is certainly the case that our schools have to ensure that the next generation have an understanding of the wider world.
“To do that we must do what we can to give them the ability to understand what is happening around them.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “Under Curriculum for Excellence, all adults who work in schools have a responsibility to support and develop mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing.
“It is for the local authority and schools to decide how to develop their own approaches to ensure staff have the appropriate skills to implement curriculum for excellence, based on local needs and circumstances.”