The British education system is notoriously arrogant. Teachers and academic educationalists have a ‘we know best’ attitude towards teaching and often hold political and social views that are very much at odds with those held by their pupil’s parents. This has led to the situation where the professionals working within the British education system too often do not treat their pupils as customers, which they should be doing, but instead either as pawns to be moved across a chessboard or as subjects for experimentation. In Britain, it is in the schools where outrageous political, religious and social propaganda or educational experiments are forced on children by the educational profession and the educationalists leave very little room for principled objection to such propaganda except by outright revolt by the parents.
There is a solid example of the arrogance of the teaching profession and a parental revolt against it, which has cropped up recently in Bristol. According to press reports, the headteacher at Parson Street Primary School decided to hold ‘Drag Queen Story Time’ events at the school as part of the World Book Day strand in order to teach the children, all aged under 11, about tolerance. This event involves bringing in adult drag artistes into primary schools to parade around and tell stories.
This Drag Queen Story Time was an event put on by the headteacher Jamie Barry that some parents considered to be a step too far and went to the local newspaper the Bristol Post to complain. Quite rightly in my view, some claimed that Draq Queen Story Time was age inappropriate and that the school was overstepping their authority by using their power to promote transgenderism to the children. It appears from reading the Bristol Post story that many parents had been pretty tolerant to Mr Barry’s overt and obvious enthusiasm for LGBT issues. This enthusiasm has been manifested in such actions as scattering LGBT books around the school for the children to read, but having blokes in dresses teaching their children was the straw that has broken the parental camel’s back.
The parents, unhappy at their school teaching the mental sickness of transgenderism as being somehow normal, have complained to both the school as well as the press, but they are being rebuffed with the sort of arrogance that we have come to expect from Britain’s education system. Rather than listen to the concerns of the parents and maybe reconsider the idea of putting on educational events that looks ill-judged at best and aggressively ideological at worst, Jamie Barry basically told the parents to sod off.
Jamie Barry told the parents who were objecting to Drag Queen Story Time, that if they don’t like the idea of the event then they can take their children out of the school on ‘unauthorised absence’. But, as every British parent knows, unauthorised absence of a child from school is something that parents can be punished by the courts with fines ranging from £60 upwards and even with prison terms of up to three months. In other words, Jamie Barry, this arrogant and ideologically obsessed headteacher, has said to parents that they must accept his dodgy Draq Queen Story Time idea or face the legal consequences.
This school and its senior management team have treated those parents with valid objections to Drag Queen Story Time with utter contempt. The head has basically told parents that they can like it or lump it when it comes to this appalling pro-trans propaganda. Quite rightly some of the parents look as if they are going to protest about the behaviour of Jamie Barry and about the imposition on their children of Drag Queen Story Time.
The story of Parson Street School and the pro-trans propaganda that it is imposing on its pupils is I’m afraid a microcosm of all that is wrong and has gone wrong with Britain’s education system. It is a system that is not only dominated by left leaning ideologues or special interest hobby horse riders like Mr Barry, but is also one where the vast majority of parents get very little choice about how their children are educated. Educational and sometimes political diktat comes down from the remote educationalists in Whitehall which is then implemented by local educational authorities and subsequently teachers. This highly centralised system with its prescribed ‘standards’ and national curriculum is highly vulnerable to various forms of ‘faddism’ especially left wing faddism such as the pro-Trans, pro-Islam and ‘diversity’ propaganda that the Department of Education is increasingly forcing on schools and on children. This has led to the sad and worrying situation where young people are leaving school with their heads filled with tons of left wing guff but very little solid knowledge of Britain’s culture or history. These young people are often also leaving compulsory education without the skills, both hard and soft skills, that they will need in order to succeed at life.
The centralisation problem and the issue of educationalists leaning firmly to the Left is compounded in Britain by the fact that the vast majority of children are educated by the State in schools that parents have virtually zero control over. In other jurisdictions, such as in parts of the United States, parents do have some control over the curricula taught in schools and also have input into the ethos of particular school districts. This doesn’t happen here. In Britain your child normally goes to the school that covers the catchment area in which they live and any choice that the parent has between local schools is extremely limited by the local authority.
The lack of choice and lack of parental input into the education system is in large part the reason why ideologically driven individuals like Jamie Barry rise to the top in schools. They have no master other than the civil servants in Whitehall or local politicians who share the same twisted views as he does when it comes to certain political issues such as transgenderism. I’m pretty sure that if the parents were the masters of their children’s education then we would not be seeing the age inappropriate abomination that is Drag Queen Story Time being put on at Parson Street Primary or any other school.
Those parents who are protesting about having adult drag queens coming into the school are right to protest. It’s not bigotry to not want your child exposed to inappropriate individuals or subjects or even to keep them away from propaganda or brainwashing, it’s called being a good parent. Good parents want what’s best for their children and I fail to see how shoving heavily painted drag queens in front of young children qualifies as something good for children.
The protesting parents are right to protest but are also running the risk of being turned upon by our increasingly politically correct State and its allies. They risk fines, imprisonment and intimidation and insult from members of the political Left. These parents risk this because they want what’s right for their children and not what Jamie Barry and other ideologues want for them instead. Because of that I urge the readers of this blog to support the Bristol parents who are resisting this pro-trans propaganda and also to support all those other parents who voice objection to Britain’s increasingly politicised school and education system. It’s time that these arrogant teachers and equally arrogant educationalists worked for us and for our children for a change and not, as they have been doing for years, to further their own rancid and damaging political ambitions and to promote their dogmas.
