Are schools indoctrinating our kids?
The join the battle over education at the Battle of Ideas festival
In one way or another, most of my life has been involved in education. Yet I can hardly remember a time when education felt so contentious, so politicised, and, if I am honest, such a cause for despair. Today, I wanted to outline my position on some of the major debates in education, debates that we will be going over in detail at the Battle of Ideas festival, where we have a whole series of debates dedicated to the topic. (If you’re a student reading this, please remember we have amazing ticket discounts for you, and if you are a school pupil or teacher, we even have FREE tickets for you.)
Decolonising Seamus Heaney
Hardly a week goes by without some controversy in the world of education, almost always about what, who, or how we teach. One recent example was the OCR exam board announcing it has replaced literary giants Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Wilfred Owen from its English syllabus in favour of ‘exciting and diverse’ ‘poets of colour’ and ‘disabled and LGBTQ+ voices’. I found the ensuing debate deeply frustrating.
On the one hand, those defending this move simply replied (extremely disingenuously) that this was only about ‘broadening the curriculum’ and increasing the number of viewpoints that children are exposed to in their education. But it is obvious that those advocating for these ‘poets of colour and disabled and LGBTQ+ voices’ are not doing so out of an interest in adding great new writers to the canon; instead they adopt a deeply instrumental attitude where such ‘diverse’ writers are used to promote the ideology of identity politics. Perhaps even worse, they undercut the whole point of education - which is to open young people to something beyond themselves - by assuming that young students or ethnic minorities can only be moved by people who talk, look, write and think like themselves.
But many of those defending a ‘traditional’ education are in fact equally uninterested in real education. They object to changes to the curriculum on the grounds either that they don’t equip children with the ‘serious’ skills needed by the jobs market (!) or invoke a deeply regressive idea of what a ‘British’ education is. I am all for cultivating a healthy sense of national identity, celebrating the achievements of radical British democrats and pioneering writers, but I baulk at some people who seem to think that the ideal of education is something like Eton at the time of Empire.
Climate Change on the curriculum
Another controversy is around the politicisation of the curriculum and how we teach topics with a big political component. Whilst the headlines are often about the teaching of BLM or Black History Month, we often overlook how much of the environmental agenda is being imported into the world of education. I am still getting over the brazenness with which former education secretary Nadhim Zahawi claimed that ‘education is one of our key weapons in the fight against climate change’, earlier this year. What a deeply regressive and one-dimensional view of education!
This goes far beyond groan-inducing lessons about how to use less water or why saving the whales is so important. This is part-and-parcel of an educational environment that assumes education only exists to transmit ready-made lessons onto young people. Environmentalism is of course the cause célèbre, and so the new elite are busy trying to saturate education with ‘lessons’ from environmentalists.
At the same time, I do recognise the difficulties that teachers must find in this area - it is hardly like you can ignore climate change and the debates about environmentalism in the classroom. I tend to err on the side of trusting teachers to introduce contentious issues and handle the debate (indeed, I launched and remain a vigorous supporter of the great project Debating Matters, a competition for school pupils). But it is hard for teachers to approach this even-handedly when the entire educational establishment expects you to be using your lessons as a ‘weapon’ to ‘fight climate change’.
Beyond the birds and the bees?
Any discussion of the controversies in education would be well incomplete without a mention of the battles around sex education (or “relationships and sex education”, as it is now known). If once sex education meant ensuring pupils were given access to basic biology and the mechanical details of reproduction, today it has become mired in the Culture Wars.
I am sure many people are familiar with some of the more extreme examples that have been picked up in the press: discussions on masturbation with children as young as five, LGBTQ+ concepts – from queer to kink – normalised on the curriculum, key words introduced to children as young as eight, including cisgender, pansexual, asexual, intersex, non-binary and gender fluid. The fear that children are being exposed to over-sexualised concepts has been stoked-up by schools introducing Drag Queen Story Hour, in which men dressed as women read stories and perform to children aged from three to 12.
To think that bedroom preferences are not a proper matter for primary schools seems almost laughably old-fashioned in today’s educational environment. Yet it sometimes seems that contemporary educationalists are more concerned if children can name 60-odd genders than if they can name Britain’s 60-odd monarchs. At a time when schools are more concerned with ‘safeguarding’ than ever, it is odd that so much questionable sexual material finds its way into classrooms.
Some parents report the Kafkaesque struggles they have had to engage in to see the material being taught to their children. Invoking everything from GDPR privacy concerns to copyright, some schools and local authorities have behaved with an almost KGB-like amount of secrecy about what is going on in classrooms. I wrote about the topic for TeachWire, and noted that “My worry is that teachers are being encouraged to draw negative conclusions around parental queries, as though it’s a school’s role to ‘protect’ pupils from the alleged bigotry of grown-ups, including their own parents.”
young people have always found avenues to challenge adult society, and I am sure that for many of those ‘exploring their identity’ feel some of the thrill of challenging mainstream opinions. But (a bit like the climate school strikes) when these ‘alternative’ identities are so widely promoted by adult society, there is a whiff of indoctrination about the whole affair.
Revolting parents and the fightback against indoctrination
But it is not all cause for despair. I am hugely interested in the growing pushback against faddish educational trends - much of it lead by parents. Perhaps taking some inspiration from America, where a combination of wildly extreme covid restrictions in schools and almost caricatured versions of ‘inclusive’ education led to something of a parental revolution in many places, many parents in the UK are starting to pay much greater attention to what is being taught to their children.
But as the news about the degree to which educational fads like identity politics have displaced anything resembling a real education seeps out, more and more parents are joining a fightback.
But - and this is a big reservation I have - it is hardly like we want parents to just dictate what goes on in schools. Traditionally, people thought that schools should exist apart from both political fads and the dictates of ‘concerned parents’. The enduring truth of this position was shown all too clearly in the case of the Batley Grammar School teacher, who was forced into hiding for fear of his life after protests led by muslim parents at his school - all because he had attempted to teach children about the controversy surrounding cartoons of Muhammed.
This tells us that we have serious intellectual work to do to distinguish between a legitimate degree of concern about children’s education and a censorious attempt to infringe on educational autonomy.
The battle has only just begun
Across all these areas, then, there is a huge need for debate and open discussion about the way forward. I have my position on these topics, but I would never pretend that the answers or obvious or easy. I recognise that across all these areas, we need to win the battle of ideas in society - because that it the only way to reach an enduring consensus in society and allow education some room breathe again. Education is always a flashpoint in society - this was as true in Socrates’ time as it is now (Socrates, remember, was sentenced to death for ‘corrupting the young’ through his philosophical teachings). Yet in our times, it seems especially contentious and therefore especially important to get to grips with openly and honestly.
This is why we always have a large number of debates on education at the Battle of Ideas festival. This year, we’ll be dealing with all the issues outlined above (and many more) - with the help of our friends from Don’t Divide Us, the Free Speech Champions, and the Education Forum. We have a great line up of speakers, too. Check out all the education debates here, then go get your tickets.
See you next weekend!
Read more
As I said above, I wrote more about these topics for an article over at TeachWire, in an article titled RSE lesson content – Why parents should get to see the resources teachers are using