The Education System that Lost its Purpose

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.