I remember how it was -- JR
Children need to fight back against political indoctrination
There’s something troubling happening in our schools. In art class, my children have been instructed to make Black Lives Matter posters. Assemblies in recent years have been a dreary parade of presentations on sexuality, identity and race politics. They have been subjected to workshops involving LGBTQI+ flash cards and printouts of tweets about transgenderism, and taught that Sam Smith – who is obviously overweight and wears provocative bondage clothing – is a shining example of ‘body positivity.’
The government, until very recently, has effectively conceded the education system to a cabal of zealots
It’s not that I object to them being exposed to this stuff at school. I’d be quite happy for identity politics to be presented critically and examined alongside competing philosophies. They are teenagers and it’s an unavoidable part of contemporary culture. But there’s a difference between teaching and preaching. In too many British schools, a fashionable creed is presented as an ideological certainty, brooking no opposition. Independent thinking is discouraged and dissent, however reasonable, is suppressed. You thought that story about a pupil being rebuked for refusing to accept that it was reasonable to identify as a cat was an outlier? Think again. This stuff is all over the education system like a drag queen’s make-up.
Last week, a report by the campaign group Don’t Divide Us looked at the way schools have allowed organisations to teach controversial ‘anti-racism’ theories. The materials they looked at included ‘unconscious bias’, ‘privilege’ and ‘micro-aggressions’. The teaching profession is being ‘radicalised’, the report’s author, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, said. This is social engineering – no, social experimentation – on a massive scale, using our children as the monkeys. And there has been zero democratic consent.
At a sixth form college near where I live in Winchester, teachers have been given training sessions in which they are forced to play ‘privilege bingo’ and bombarded with the latest in ‘neurodivergent’ ideology. Wall displays promoting the creed of ‘EDI’ (equality, diversity and inclusion) are ubiquitous. This is the intentional seeding of social contagion.
In the children’s section of my local library, a display of books includes titles like Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity; Princess Kevin; and Black Artists Shaping The World. Clearly, the rise of dogmatic moralising is reflected in the demise of quality fiction. Milan Kundera, who died last week, put it best. ‘All over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties,’ he wrote.
Parents are powerless in the face of this rising tide. They are locked out of the school system, with the government only just getting round to issuing non-statutory guidance stipulating that they should be informed if their children are ‘socially transitioning’ (official guidance is expected this week). All well and good, but King Canute himself would have scoffed. This is heart-breaking, and to a parent it feels like a personal and societal failure.
As for the teachers, those who harbour private alarm at the spread of the cult are intimidated into silence, fearing for their careers. The best they can manage is delivering mandated ideological instruction in a half-hearted or subversive way. (Though I do know one or two souls who carry the torch online, using pseudonyms.) Meanwhile the government, until very recently, has done woefully little to counter this disturbing trend, effectively conceding the education system to a cabal of zealots, fanatics and ideological cultists who seek to mould the future of our country by moulding the minds of our children.
The tragic conclusion is clear: the only ones capable of saving society are our children themselves. Just as the treatment of the year eight pupil arguing about feline self-identification was not an outlier, the bravery of the child herself was not entirely unusual. There aren’t that many of them, but there are some courageous souls who are determined to go down fighting.
Only our children can stand up for their friends. It is as depressing as it is true. A larger and larger number of youngsters are sliding into confused introversion as they try to work out which of the umpteen different sexual identities they should ‘identify with’, rather than just getting on with living their lives and working things out naturally as they go along. Many are taking on different genders and playing with fantasies of disfiguring, painful and life-changing surgery. Mental health difficulties are soaring among young people, and even those who have not succumbed have been left ill-equipped to deal with the cut and thrust of the real world when they grow up. Teachers – who themselves benefited from childhoods free from all this stuff – expend much effort providing emotional support to anxious and mollycoddled teens. This is like poisoning them while cushioning the symptoms; given the amount of time they spend enforcing gender and race ideology, it’s a wonder they get any teaching done at all. The remaining children who, usually as a result of good early years’ parenting, still have brains and hearts intact, are increasingly distressed. And with the government coming too late and too weakly to the fight, they are starting to shoulder the burden.
Recently, after a particularly galling lesson about the number of ‘genders’ that apparently exist – was it 46? 200? 1,000? – my son engaged his teacher in debate. You’re not supposed to be promoting political views at school, he pointed out. ‘It’s not political, it’s politicised,’ the teacher nonsensically replied. In response to this word salad, my son simply remarked: what’s the difference? That won him the argument. Thankfully, he wasn’t sent to the headmistress.
But maybe there is something parents can do. If your child had decent early years that were not saturated with television, mobile phones and junk food, but instead played with Lego or dolls, read books, engaged in sports, built dens, climbed trees, bashed around on musical instruments and played imaginary games, they may be showing signs of courage now. If so, equip them with the arguments and material they need to fight back. To start with, familiarise them with Section 406 of the Education Act 1996. Entitled ‘Political Indoctrination’, it states: ‘The governing body and head teacher shall forbid (a) the pursuit of partisan political activities by any of those registered pupils at a maintained school who are junior pupils, and (b) the promotion of partisan political views, in the teaching of any subject in the school.’ Tragically, the rest is up to them.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/children-need-to-fight-back-against-political-indoctrination/
***********************************************PETER HITCHENS: I’ve learned one precious lesson... our expansion of universities has failed
It is just 50 years since I graduated from what was then the shiny new University of York. I and a few hundred others had spent three years on a wooded campus entirely divorced from normal life.
We had full grants and our fees were paid. I had no debts. And it was the modern world, before it existed. We did more or less exactly what we wanted, and did not do what we did not wish to.
For several reasons I did not enter fully into the spirit of things. People used to say that I and Harriet Harman were the only two York students in that era who did not smoke marijuana, but I cannot vouch for this. There may have been one or two others.
The novelist Linda Grant, who was there around the same time, described the experience of her generation leaving York as like a lorryload of baby koalas being tipped out on to an ice-floe in the Arctic and left to fend for themselves.
I fended. I had been brought up (literally) in hard schools. But I am not so sure about the others. Imagine. We had to re-enter a world where laws were still more or less enforced, where people believed in respectability of many kinds, where food and rent were not subsidised and where employers expected us to turn up on time and not leave till the job was done.
More than that, they had never heard of the ‘inclusive’ opinions we had on everything, which in those days were not called that.
Banks, for instance, were highly conservative institutions and, while they hoped that we would one day bring them fat accounts, they were stand-offish about our lifestyles. No wonder so many of us devoted ourselves to turning the world upside down, so that we could go back to being free.
It was people like me who infiltrated the banks, not to mention the schools, the BBC, the law and the police and turned them into what they are today. For, as somebody once said, the main purpose of a university education is to teach a man to disagree with his father, and our universities have certainly achieved that successfully.
I have often wondered since whether the three years I spent in that dream world might have been better spent at work, or perhaps before the mast in a sailing ship, or learning the military arts of which I now know nothing.
I reckon I was about ready to be a university student when I turned 45, by which time it was not an option. Even at almost 19, my age on entry, I was far too young to benefit properly.
And as my older brother got to college before I did, I have never been able to make the Neil Kinnock boast that I am ‘the first from my family to go to university’.
Not that it is much of a claim.
Mr Kinnock and my brother and I went to university in those years because a wealthy country made it easy for us to do so. It is not much more of a claim than saying you were the first in your family to wear polyester, or eat fast food.
I am not quite sure how I ended up assuming (as I must have done from around the age of 14) that I would automatically go to university. The word glittered in my mind, conjuring up a picture of stars shining in the night sky, which I still haven’t quite shaken off.
The Monday morning reality in my first week was very different. In retrospect, I am grateful to them for being tactful enough to award me a degree at the end, though, typically of my generation, I never turned up to collect it, or scrambled into a mortarboard and gown, as people do nowadays.
It is not just a matter of ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’. The whole idea of mass university education is wrong, especially now that it lures the young into debt. Universities, by definition, are for the few, who can get the most out of them – and that means a tough, highly selective education system based on merit – which we destroyed in 1965.
Good secondary schools, good technical and vocational colleges, good polytechnics are what this country really needs and has not got.
While I think (and know from the experience of others) that the Open University is a wonderful thing, and favour all kinds of heavily subsidised access for those who later in life feel inspired to study, I think the great expansion that began in the 1960s has been a mistake. I was lucky with it. Others are not.
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Australia: Fix the schools first
Labor knows that better educational outcomes do all manner of good, for the national economy and social cohesion. It also fits neatly within the party’s ethos, which is why if the Albanese government does become a long-term one, education reform could be one of its central achievements – if it sees this reform process through.
But we do need to ask hard questions. How well qualified are prospective university students for the studies they are about to embark on? Sadly, the answer too often is that many simply are not. Not in terms of basic literacy and numeracy, just for starters.
This points to the need to prioritise improving standards within the primary and secondary schooling sectors, but that doesn’t have to come before embarking on higher-education reforms.
The Australian Universities Accord interim report points out that the expected uplift in university students needed to fill the jobs of the future will largely happen in the 2030s and 40s, not this decade.
That leaves a small window to fix primary and secondary education in time to get prospective university students to where they need to be. It also allows time for university reforms to be carefully crafted and implemented.
The most alarming revelation attached to this week’s release of the interim report was Clare’s observation at the press club that during the past six years there had been a decline in the percentage of high school students completing year 12. How that escaped greater attention during the life cycle of the last Coalition government is perplexing.
The public school system, outside of selective schools, is underfunded and underperforms compared with the private sector. This affects the disadvantaged students the minister wants to increasingly usher into the university system. He’ll be setting them up to fail or lowering tertiary standards if they get that opportunity without the groundwork of first lifting standards at school. So we need to watch closely what happens there.
Once at university, what’s the purpose of obtaining a higher education? Like it or not, learning for the sake of intellectual advancement ceased to be a national priority long ago. The state simply sees universities as an extension of the school education system and a prerequisite to getting a job. Or, put differently, as degree factories with the purpose of giving the workforce the skilled applicants it needs and wants.
I don’t want to be too negative in making this point. It’s a global reality that is a consequence of the sector having been opened up; had it not happened most of us never would have received the benefit of access to higher education in the first place. And there are still areas of study offering classical learning.
Indeed as we survey recent ethical breaches across the business sector it’s not a stretch to see vocational benefits of learning philosophical principles at university, perhaps even the need to embed such units into courses not automatically linked with such study.
The interim report is light on when it comes to the important role of universities as institutions of higher research. We are told there is more to come on this front. It is the research that goes on in these so-called ivory towers that accounts for not only all manner of innovative advancement to benefit the modern world but also dictates the global university rankings of our institutions.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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