Laudator Temporis Acti

Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 331:

Education, he [Michael Gove] said recently, is about 'introducing young people to the best that has been thought and written'. And you can't get much more Arnoldian than that.

Think of it — 'the best'. And no 'Who are you to be telling me what's best, sunshine?' To which the answer should always have been: 'Your teacher, you little bastard, so sit down and listen.'

Cf. Josh Thompson, an English teacher at Blacksburg High School in Montgomery County, Virginia, quoted in Brian Stieglitz, "Virginia high school English teacher faces calls to be fired for claiming on video that telling kids to sit still is 'white supremacy': 'Sitting quiet and being told stuff is not a thing that's in many cultures'," Daily Mail (September 14, 2021):

[W]e have to ask ourselves, "Okay well what are those positive behaviors?" And it's things like making sure that you're following directions, and making sure that you're sitting quietly, and you are in your seat and all these things that come from white culture.

Id.:

The idea of just sitting quiet and being told stuff and taking things in, in a passive stance, is not a thing that's in many cultures. So if we're positively enforcing these behaviors, we are by extension positively enforcing elements of white culture. Which therefore keeps whiteness at the center, which is the definition of white supremacy.