Racism

2 Aug 2020

The Education System that Lost its Purpose

Teachwell Education Debate, Education Policy, Humanity, Progressive Education, Race, Teaching and Learning, Traditional Education behaviour, progressive, racial politicisation, Racism, teaching, The School That Tried to End Racism, traditional 1

Many people, including me, would have found watching Channel 4’s The School that Tried to End Racism distressing and disturbing.

The documentary exposes what still remains utterly rotten within the comprehensive education system as fashioned by the middle class left radicals in England. Despite a decade of Conservative reforms, Gove’s optimistic vision for an education system that gives all children equality of opportunity and access to the same high quality education remains an unfinished task. But for all the schools and teachers who are trying to enact this vision, this programme was a reminder of how far we still have to go.

The Experiment

From the activist education academics who envisaged the experiment to the teachers who stood in a classroom and delivered it, the ‘progressive’ orthodoxy clearly still operates without responsibility, without accountability where it matters and any kind of moral compass as its adherents are so infected by their own politics. Covid has undoubtedly allowed the unrepentant members of the ‘blob’ to slither out again. The opportunitunists have wasted no time in attempting to use a politicised version of ‘antiracism’ to try to promote their already failed ideas to those who are not familiar with the inner workings of the education system.

We remain in a system where the personal politicised concerns of education academics are considered more important than the educational needs of the children and issues that face teachers in their classrooms. Unknown racism which we may or may not carry around in our unconscious is hardly a priority in an education system where our best efforts should focus on improving reading and writing and reversing the vocabulary and knowledge gap between the disadvantaged and the advantaged.

The research itself was not based on the reality of racism in schools, or even that particular school or group of children, but the need to test out the pet ideas of education academics. It was they who needed to conduct this experiment to justify their own questionable, and from my perspective, pointless existence in academia in the first place.

Why was such a morally and ethically questionable experiment on children even allowed? Kevin Rooney outlines the dubious nature of the research in this article. The ideas underpinning the training are from critical race theory (CRT) which is a hard left postmodern social justice theory – let’s make no bones about that. This was an experiment in racially politicising young children, not ending racism. It’s not the first attempt. Black History Month, which should have been about teaching black British and world history, descended into this at times. I outlined my concerns in a talk and a series of blogs a few years ago. No one should be fooled. There is teaching of the history of black people around the world (which I did) and using historical narratives to racially politicise children.

The System

Dodgy scholarship from out of touch academics seems standard in education. It doesn’t surprise me that something as basic as the fact that people have different ideas and beliefs about race isn’t even known, never mind taken into consideration, in the creation of the test or the training programme that was delivered. Instead they relied on CRT with it’s US centric ideas and assumptions. Yet the assumption that all of our racial beliefs stem from some form of race essentialism is unverified and unevidenced. A cursory glance at wikipedia would have shed light on the complexity of potential beliefs about race. A training programme based on the assumption that we all hold race essentialist beliefs, which then aggressively tries to root it out and confront it to eradicate it, does something else instead – teach it as fact to children – so many of whom clearly did not believe in this concept initially.

The ‘progressive’ leftwing groupthink in education is so pervasive that the headteacher of the school in the programme trusted these academics without questioning the hard left ideology driving their research and may have failed in his duty to his staff and children. I say may because we do not know all the facts in this case. This is the same person sending his staff on Prevent and safeguarding training but didn’t see the danger of racially politicised left-wing radicalisation in the training programme being delivered in his school. I can see why principals under stress and pressure might have sent out newsletters using information and materials from BLM the organisation in response to the murder of George Floyd without checking. That is not the case here. This would not have been a snapshot decision.

The teachers who should have questioned the need for this experiment, again in my opinion, failed to do so. Not out of malice but because the teacher recruitment process still fails to recruit a cross-section of society which would act as an internal safeguard against the extremes. I don’t want to play into the Marxist teacher trope but that most teachers are left-leaning is true. That some of them fall prey to more radical left-wing thinking, to the point that they don’t question it, is also true. It’s also true that their training does not seem to adequately outline their professional duties to them when it comes to being politically neutral. While we refuse to allow members of the far right in teaching, we don’t do so with the far left and it’s time we fixed this.

Why did all this happen? Because the head teacher and teachers are part of a still distorted education sphere where the most powerful people in the institutions play the radical revolutionaries against the system that they themselves control. Propping up the remnants of this charade of progressive education system is a thick layer of charlatans, hustlers, game-players, apologists, bluffers and haranguers. They act almost unanimously against the interests of the very children the left wing claim they changed the system for – those of the working class. Unable to convince the working class of their Marxist ideology politically, they helped create a system in which treating children as ideological playthings is considered the norm to the point that barely an eyelid is battered or a question raised about such experimentation on children. It was precisely the far left academics who started this process of attempting to indoctrinate because they didn’t understand, or possibly want to understand, the difference between socialisation and politicisation.

One of the reasons why this occurs is because we don’t have a national system of testing in all subjects and our national curriculum – which is infinitely better than previous versions – still lacks thought about granular detail and at times sequencing. Too often we rely on outside materials because we as a profession are time-poor. We can’t always check everything we teach, especially in primary where we are teaching many subjects in which we have varying levels of subject knowledge. As someone who feels strongly about the knowledge rich curriculum, I am acutely aware that we are still at the beginning stages of developing CPD to meet the subject knowledge needs in primary. This does leave teachers and school prey to the charlatans out there whose materials seem sound but contain a political agenda, which those without a strong knowledge or understanding of politics and political trends may not immediately be able to detect. Parents wouldn’t know what had been stripped out either for the same reasons and because they have no frame of reference.

The hypocrisy and betrayal by the left and the indifference of the right, which created the education system that Gove tried to reform, have been outlined in detail by Melanie Phillips and Robert Peal. Anyone who thinks this education system is traditional and conservative at this point needs to just look at the struggles that Katharine Birbalsingh had to go through and still endures at times. It’s a lie and one that is told repeatedly and very well as it still continues to hold sway. Yes there has been academisation but this started under New Labour and they did not have it in them to actually tackle the far left in the education as they should have done.

We need to see the system as a whole for what it is, otherwise teachers and schools will always be caught in the crossfire of vested interests and government. The vested interests in the education system – including the NEU, far left academics, the local authorities and unregulated, unaccountable consultants (and yes that has included me at times in my career and yes I should have been accountable and regulated) continue to play teachers and schools off the government of the day in order to pursue their own pedagogical and ideological agendas unfettered. They rightly call the government to account when they get it wrong while steadfastly sweeping their own failures under the carpet. We can’t keep being blind to all this because of personal political preferences.

Racial Politicisation

So what is it that we all saw in the programme? The slow but sure racial politicisation of eleven year olds at the behest of academics who were gleeful when they saw children sobbing. I’m a strict traditional teacher and not easily moved. Those were not children upset and crying because the realisation that they’d done something wrong had hit them. These were children upset and crying because they were being made to experience something they should not have had to. It’s the kind of boundary that if a teacher crosses they need to reflect on seriously, they should apologise to the child, they should explain to the parents, they should refer themselves to SLT to say that they have made a mistake. And what were the children made to experience? Real racialisation and racial segregation. What justification is there to ban the far right now? The danger they pose – politically racialising children – is the same. Why would we want to make the children feel guilty and unhappy when we can give them the joys of shared knowledge, communication and a vision of how to move forward with the ability to cope with each other and the challenging aspects of our history?

Were the parents consulted on all this? I find it hard to believe that if they had known how contested the ideas, the test and the training programme are for adults, nevermind children, that they would have agreed to it. This education system seems more concerned with parents who don’t trust us than the ones who do. I can understand that to a point (just not the lies about why they don’t trust us), but we should value those who do too. I found it hard, with one parent illiterate and the other only educated until 14, to see the extraordinary way that the beliefs and values of people like my parents were ridden roughshod over without a second thought. That does not mean that their beliefs and values should be given priority over those of society – they chose to come and live here after all. But that is not what was happening in this case. It was the racially politicised ideas and beliefs of hard left CRT that were being promoted in the classroom.

These politicised ‘antiracist’ ideas (which are doublespeak for racist ideas) were foisted on children despite the fact that the majority of this country voted for a party that does not stand for them and in a society that has not had the ideas explained to them so they fully understood them, nevermind accepted them. This is despite the fact that even within the political party where some hold these ideas, they are not held by all. No matter how deluded the twitter woke want to be on this issue, my parents, like many others, did not stick an X in the ballot for the Labour Party because of an ideology. They, if they understood it fully, would abhor it. They voted Labour because they were unaware of it or voted despite the Labour Party containing such ideas. This has always been the case in the Labour Party. The Corbynista myth-making that their far left and current hard left ideas are those of ‘true’ Labour supporters does not hold for anyone with any kind of knowledge of the labour movement or the Labour Party in this country. It’s propaganda told to woke middle and upper class students whose votes the Labour Party are so desperate to gain and retain. I have simply never accepted that my duty as a teacher is to provide my preferred political party with voters even when I was a card carrying member of the Labour Party.

That is not to say there was nothing of importance in the training programme – examining stereotypes, discussing how race might affect oneself and others, honestly discussing experiences and interactions between children are all vital in understanding racism and how to behave towards one another. I’ve done all of these things and it does not require racially politicising children. This requires having a safe, calm classroom in which adults and children trust each other and where adults can teach and navigate a class on such personal and sensitive issues. This would be the kind of classrooms and relationships that the progressives decry because some authority is required. Well it is actually – teachers need benign authority in the classroom to ensure that they can exercise their moral, ethical and professional duties.

Duties which include asking questions like the following when an education academic proposes unconscious bias training in their classroom:

What will the psychological/social/emotional impact of this training be on children?

What impact will it have on their relationships with each other now and in the future?

What impact could this potentially have on the relationships between children and their parents, as well as their extended families? (Yet another way the ‘lens’ of race distorts is the assumptions it makes about multiracial families – they come in many different forms which they don’t take into account. Even basic maternal and paternal bonds are discounted. This should deeply trouble us all but especially those who teach the youngest children in the system).

These questions are after all the reason why I took the risk of questioning the politically racialised narratives in resources for Black History Month that I came across. Teaching is not the arts or media where behaviour like questioning BHM is considered edgy and to be applauded. It’s a profession where a teacher would only ever take such a risk because of genuine concerns about the wellbeing of his/her pupils. I had studied politics, I could strip the politicised aspects out, I could retell the same stories with the missing knowledge which had been removed to create a racially politicised worldview. That’s not most teachers and it’s not their fault either.

Where is the training on how to spot politicised narratives? And no this isn’t a call yet another pseudo-intellectual consultant to make money. This is something that needs to be provided for free and should be part of our training if we are going to teach politically contested ideas and concepts on the curriculum.

Where is my evidence base for all of this? Well do we need research and experiments to tell us that radicalising, racialising or politicising children is wrong? There are many real world examples of this happening around the world – be it the racialising of children in society under slavery and Jim Crow in the United States, the radicalising of young children by ISIS or even far right groups in our own society. We should not be shifted from this position of opposing the imposition of political ideas easily out of fear of being called prejudiced. There is a difference between socialisation and politicisation – what CRT adherents choose to believe.

Also it’s time to challenge the ‘colour-blind’ doctrine that keeps being trotted out by CRT supporters. Where is the evidence that this is being taught either at home or in school? I have taught many PSHE lessons exploring race and ethnicity. The approach is not ‘colour-blind’ but it’s about exploring stereotypes and ideas about colour, ethnicity and culture. It’s a chance to learn and understand that meaning can not be attributed to skin colour as it doesn’t contain any. It’s a perfect opportunity to dispel the myth that all people of the same skin colour are the same culturally or ethnically. This does not require racialisation of the children first or for them to have segregation imposed on them. Of course this ‘non-colour’ blind approach to anti-racism does not serve the political purposes of CRT.

The Solution

The far left, like the far right, are too ideologically driven to be trusted to act morally or ethically when it comes to children. It’s clear that the majority operating in the education academic field don’t have the first idea about teaching and they have no interest in solving the issues in schools because that would involve admitting to their own mistakes. Michael Young remains unique in his willingness to accept some responsibility for the failures that have occurred and present solutions to them. But this is the exception to the rule. It doesn’t matter on what basis they want to politicise children into an identity – class, race, sex, gender or sexuality – it’s wrong and all attempts need to be met with resistance.

My own political leanings and desire for a knowledge-rich curriculum aside, I recognise that governments will change but this issue is too important to belong to just one. It’s time all of the mainstream parties agreed to put an end to this progressive education academic to child in the classroom pipeline once and for all.

31 Oct 2017

Statues Must Fall – Erasing History or Righting Wrongs?

Teachwell Ethnicity, Humanity, Other Events, Race critical race theory, history, Racism, sjw's, statues 2

It was a pleasure and privilege to be invited by Claire Fox to take part in the debate on statues alongside Patrick Vernon OBE (@ppvernon), Dr Cheryl Hudson (@HudsCheryl) and Dr Nicholas Draper.

The link to the debate and initial readings is here: https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/statues-must-fall-erasing-history-or-righting-wrongs/

Here is my 5 minute introduction speech that I made (the focus of which was the UK more than the US, as were my responses during the debate):

One of the most interesting aspects of this issue is how little it is about the statues involved, the past or the current state of race relations in either the US or the UK.

Are wrongs being righted here? What’s done is done and it can’t be undone. You can remove all the statues, street names, symbols, etc and it won’t make a jot of difference to what has actually happened in the past. The dead can neither be punished nor compensated.

What we are witnessing is a casual re-racialisation of society by critical race theorists unable or unwilling to process changes in society which they are removed from in their academic echo chambers and the need of pampered, insecure middle class students who want to recreate the sanitised world they have become accustomed to at school and home in the world at large.

What is striking is the lack of debate not the quality of it.

I tried to find reasons why removing statues would lead to some tangible improvement in either race relations or in society and what I came across was just a script.

The script goes like this:

Racism is rife in our society.

There is a statue from the past linked to slavery/colonialism. This statue is venerated or celebrated/not known about (often both are claimed by the writer about the same statue – particularly in the case of Rhodes in the UK).

A sentence referring to suffering of people during slavery or colonialism.

Repeated assertions (as much to convince themselves as anyone else) that institutional racism and prejudice are real with little or no evidence (what evidence there is, is vague and not clearly related to race)

Statements about how society is also ridden with prejudice regarding gender, disability, LGBTQ, etc.

The statue being removed is essential to ridding society of prejudice and part of the journey to creating a utopian world where everyone is safe and feels included.

The SJW movement is just a set of about 15 statements which they repeat and expect everyone to agree with without question or thought. These are the articles of faith of a secular religion where victimhood is sanctified and whose main goal is to embed a caste system into society based on divisions.

They remind me of the Dothraki in Game of Thrones who make statements about the world, which they follow by a simple “It is known” as they have no reason or explanation for their beliefs:

We live in a white supremacist state – it is known.

Statues cause us harm – it is known.

Power plus prejudice is racism – it is known.

I can understand why they demand safe spaces and refuse debate because a cursory examination of their ideas and beliefs demonstrates a lack of evidence, inability or unwillingness to develop historical perspective and an authoritarian stance which does the very things they claim they oppose – marginalise and silence individuals and groups.

The whole movement is a case study in hypocrisy, replicating so much of what caused the problems they state they wish to change.

The dismissal of universal humanist concepts as racist means that we now have a situation where the model of race proposed by Linnaeus and others is unquestionally accepted by racists and anti-racists alike. The core tenets – racial categories, biological determinism, necessity for separation of the races is agreed upon. Where they disagree is simply how they divvy up human characteristics between the different groups and a minor re-naming of terms – coloured people becoming people of colour.

Both rely on a stunted, sanitised and conflated versions of history, in which slavery and colonisation is the only history that matters. Yet such a focus serves to shore up the idea of white European exceptionalism as much as it does the narrative that history is just non-whites being subjugated by evil white people.

Racism and prejudice exists, just not in the same way and with the same intensity of the past in as many places. It says something when the NUS spent a whole report burying the fact that 93% of BME students had not experienced any racism at university.

The exaggerated claims of harm end up trivialising what happened in the past.

Rather than draw attention to and examine history, all that is happening is a middle class charade where ethnic minorities mine their ancestors suffering to barter with manufactured white guilt, which their middle class white allies are only too happy to provide. All of this allows their activist professors to continue peddling outdated models of postmodernist critical race theory without so much as a challenge to the core ideas or assumptions from their students.

Post-debate thoughts:

There is always points one wishes they had made

I was asked is there a half-way house or compromise between my view and that of Patrick Vernon in particular. My answer was no on the question of taking statues down because this is not a cost-free option and we do need to ask questions about whether this is the best way to spend money.

Patrick is an OBE and this is because of the work he has done to have black contributions to the UK seen and acknowledged. While I disagree with some initiatives (my objections to Black History Month as it stands can be read here and here), I would rather money was spent on erecting statues (which he mentioned but I can’t find a link to add to here) than removing them because that is about adding to this nation and enhances our historical knowledge and understanding of the past.

4 Feb 2016

Races or Geographical Groups?

Teachwell Ethnicity, Race Prejudice, Racism, Theory 1

Mia Culpa

A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to this programme on the subject of race.

There were a couple of assertions that Andrew Sabisky (@AndrewSabisky) disagreed with including black people are better at sports and that race does not exist biologically. He sent me the following paper to read:

Race by Sesardic. I have to say that I was not pleased with my reaction to his sending me this. My gut instinct was to discredit it before reading it. I evidently am no more resistant to bias on this subject than anyone else. Oh and I do apologise for that Andrew because I can’t ask others to look at the evidence presented if I am not willing to do so myself.

Sesardic’s arguments include:

a) The idea that there are biological races can’t be disproved. Fair enough, science can’t disprove there is no God either. Science has always been about probabilities after all. Popper’s swans come to mind – true one can not say that there are no black ones or that there never have been any.

b) We self-identify and identify the ‘races’ of others with a high degree of accuracy.

c) He cites that those arguing for biological races do not do so by one genetic marker alone – skin colour – but a number of them. These are accurate in identify biologically distinct groups.

d) The idea that race is purely a social construct is inaccurate and incorrect.

e) That there is dishonesty in the approach of how some philosophers and scientists themselves dismiss correlations between racial factors and IQ differences, greater likelihood to go to prison, etc.

Sesardic concludes:

My aim in this paper was not to prove the biological reality of race. Rather, more modestly, I have tried to show that typical attempts to disconnect the concept of race from genetics have too quickly and too uncritically been accepted by many ‘‘race critics’’, including most philosophers of science who have discussed this issue. The arguments for deconstructing race are fundamentally unsound because they ignore, misinterpret or distort relevant scientific facts. Therefore, it is time to abandon the mantra about the biological meaninglessness of race. Instead of wasting our time on ‘‘refuting’’ straw-man positions dredged from a distant past or from fiction, we should deal with the strongest contemporary attempts to rehabilitate race that are scientifically respectable and genetically informed. Philosophers (and others) have too long tried to destroy the scientific notion of race in different ways; the point, however, is to understand it.

What does this mean?

I wasn’t sure so I spoke to an evolutionary geneticist at Leicester University yesterday to set myself straight. If I am wrong, then I’m wrong but I would rather accept a difficult truth than an easy lie, even on this matter.

The fact is that both sides are biased, I am and so are those who argue for race.

What appears to be relatively undisputed are the following:

a) We are all human.

b) Species and sub-species are problematic definitions that scientists still can not classify with certainty. In fact, these ideas may not be useful as they were once thought to be.

c) Biological markers can identify the likelihood of your belonging to a particular group of people geographically.

What does this not mean?

That ‘race’ as conceptualised popularly is real.

Are there biological differences between us? Yes. Can DNA evidence classify us into groups using biological markers? Yes. Are these geographical? Yes. Are these races? No.

Why not?

Andrew states that certain geneticists do not tell the truth about biological differences. It is understandable why some are wary of being associated with being racist and chose, like I did, to critique rather than understand these biological differences. However, it is also true that those who are inclined to believe in race are dishonest in their interpretations of the clusters of biological markers constituting biological races such as white, black, etc. This is particularly in the case of the US.

Samples count: You can pre-load your data to give you answers. We know this and it is scientifically dishonest. If you select a sample with 30 people from Norway, 30 from Uganda, 30 from China and 30 from India and then state that lo and behold there are four biological distinct races well, then that is to be expected. You have built in the answer into your data.

Wade’s book ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ uses data that did just this. He deliberately used a pre-loaded sample and then asked for the five best clusters of biological markers. As it turned out these corresponded with the different continents. But he had already built this into his data. Why 5? So he could prove his idea of race. When he interrogated the data and asked for 7 clusters – the algorithm provided him with this too but he dismissed the idea of there being more than one Asian race. In fact, he stated that if he had asked for the same number as his sample size, that would have been presented to him too, which would mean that individuals would constitute a race. The only reason to dismiss his results is that it did not fit the argument he was trying to make and the conclusions he wanted to present about race.

Sesardic cites a paper by Rosenburg which does the same – it came from 52 populations and found that it.

“did allow an inference of group structure and that, furthermore, five clusters derived from that analysis of purely genetic similarities corresponded largely to major geographic regions.”

This suffers from the same issues – why 5 and not 7? Would the analysis have allowed for seven groups? Ten groups? 52 groups? The answer is yes; it would have given him the number of groups he asked for. Sesardic did not attempt to critique this study despite the fact that it suffers from the same problems of bias based on belief that he accuses the philosophers of promoting.

While I would like to believe that scientists are neutral, or, at least, check their biases, the reality is they don’t always. Wade and Rosenburg are examples of just that.

One last point – how can we accurately find the race of skeletons as Sesardic points out? Well, he should know better – we are not doing any such thing. We are identifying the geographical group they are most likely to belong to based on biological markers. The ‘race’ is defined socially.

Self-classifying as races: Hispanic was not a race classified in the old taxonomies, neither is Viking, neither is being an Ashkenazi Jew. If those who posit race is a reality want to prove their case then they need to interrogate why their definitions of race shift based on social constructs themselves.

Neil Risch’s study (Risch N et al (2002) Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease. Genome Biol 3:1–12) is cited by Sesardic, in which

“The subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of the four racial groups (white, African American, East Asian and Hispanic). The genetic cluster analysis of the data produced four major clusters, whose correspondence with the four self reported races was near-perfect: the genetic cluster membership and self-identified race coincided in as many as 99.9% of the cases.”

Hispanics are not a racial group. They are classified in the US as an ethnic group. Yet Risch finds they are a racial group. How? Well clusters of biological markers do allow them to be identified as a group. His use of race is socially constructed. If Hispanics were still classified as white (which they were initially in the US) and he was looking for three groups, not 4, would he have found three groups?

If race theory is correct, then he should not have found four groups as the Hispanics would have been part of the white group. What this is evidence for is two races of white people not proof of biological races.

How many races are there?

Socially it depends on the country and how they choose to define race. Biologically? How long is a piece of string? Biological markers show the likelihood of you belonging to a certain geographical group of people. If we were to interrogate a sample of Europeans, we would find the biological markers would enable us to identify them into separate groups. Do these groups constitute separate races then?

No.

Aha – the last cry of the racists – but white people are still more similar to each other than they are to other races. If this were the case then Risch’s study would not have thrown up four groups, it would have thrown up 3.

This is the bit that, if I am honest, I am still trying to get my head around. There are greater intra-group differences than inter-group differences. This is something that those who promote race scientifically don’t seem to wish to explain.

Conclusion:

Biological markers show there are biological and not just social differences between people. This does not mean that racial groups are a biological reality. In fact, black becomes meaningless because the greatest genetic diversity exists in Africa so the idea that there is one black race is nonsense. You would expect there to be multiple races identified. So why resist this idea other than the fact that it doesn’t give scientists who want to ‘prove’ race exists the succour they wish for.

Over to you Mr Sabisky. I promise to read before I comment. Equally, I ask those who accept the concept of race as biological and not social, why is it difficult to accept more than one race of White/Black/Asians, etc? Why are the racial group ‘found’ based on existing social constructs of race when these shift over time – e.g. Hispanics?