Going back to our roots...

Over the last few weeks at Hogwarts Academy we have been watching Alex Haley's Roots with our students. It's several years since I spent one Easter holiday watching it from end to end and many years since I watched it when it was originally broadcast on television. It's an extraordinary series considering it must be around 35 years old. Obviously the production values are very much of their time and the mores of mid seventies American television are well to the fore but the attempt to portray the central issues of the whole story of slavery in what became the USA is, in my view, very successful. It steers well away from a facile 'good guys/bad guys' approach and gets across the economic nature of the system very well.

It also manages to show the appallingly corrosive effect such a system has on all the people involved and ends with an introduction to the rise of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan in the former slave states. We have been able to talk about the use of violence and the nature of one law for all as well as touch upon the Black Panthers and talk a little about John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics.

Our cohort has what society is pleased to call 'behavioural difficulties' but by and large they have been riveted and enthusiastically engaged in the many, many issues it has thrown up. (Oh and Ofsted, the curriculum areas covered were: History, Geography, Maths, English, DT, Food, Citizenship, PHSE.....do you even know what I'm talking about? Look it up).

The really nourishing thing about all this is the way that the rich and powerful (and their yellow, running dog lackeys) produce their own gravediggers generation after generation; each time better educated, more worldlier and angrier than the last. It's no wonder that the current crop of hyenas is lashing out with such fury, particularly at any young people who have the cheek to question their rule. These people must lie awake at night sweating; wondering if it is they or their children who are going to pay the price for the terrible cruelty and suffering they inflict on the majority of the world's population whilst they hoard more wealth than they're ever going to be able to use in generations. There's nowhere to run. And nowhere to hide.

I think 'War Poetry' is next.....for instance:

                                 "...rise like lions from your slumber
                                     in unvanquishable number
                                     shake your chains from you like dew
                                     ye are many.....they are few"             (That's Shelley Ofsted. Look it up)