A lot of what I learnt at school has vanished from my memory now. A lot of the time, we were learning specifically for our exams. I retained things like the Pythagoras’ theorem for short periods of time, allowing it to leave my head as soon as my maths exam was done.

This week when I found out that the government is planning to take feminism out of the politics A-level curriculum, my first thought was, come on! And then I was reminded that actually there were some things I learnt at school that I will never forget.

Big things like, what’s feminism and why does it matter to me?

In the first politics lesson we had on feminism, there was a chorus of adolescent groans from my fellow classmates who were desperate to know why we were learning about feminism before anarchy.

Despite having grown up with two very feminist women in my life, my mother and my grandmother, I don’t think I’d ever really learnt what feminism really meant before that term at school. I had seen feminism as a radical word, which had never resonated with me personally, because I had had no need for it. Or so I thought.

Of course I quickly discovered that feminism wasn’t the ‘bra-burning veganism’ I’d been warned about by my ignorant mates at school but simply a fight for gender equality, throughout society. Mind blown. I would never be the same again.

Since then, I've come to believe that if I could change one thing about our educational system, I would make feminism a compulsory subject in schools. To think that, unless chosen at A-level, students are never going to be given that vital education is absolutely absurd.

Airbrushing feminism out of the syllabus means denying a whole generations of young minds vital information about the fight for gender equality. We need more information, people, not less.

#MoreWomen (not fewer, please!)

Sign the change.org petition to add more female thinkers to the politics syllabus

Words by ELLE Video Editor Grace Campbell