I’m going through one of those periods of serendipity regarding my current political reading and viewing habits. This is because at the moment I’m reading a book about how to reinvigorate Britain’s education system and remove the influence of left leaning ideologies whilst at the same time watching a series of videos sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation on the issue of leftist indoctrination in American schools. I’m finding that both the book and the videos are for me complimenting each other as they both speak of education systems that have, in the worst cases, abandoned the idea of teaching children how to think and instead are telling them what to think.
The book is ‘Class War’ by the late Chris Woodhead the former head of Britain’s education inspector Ofsted and the videos are by Sean Fitzgerald an American conservative activist. Both of them, but the book less so than the videos, deal with how teaching has been too often replaced by indoctrination of particular political views. What these sources say about the state of the British and American education system are profoundly depressing for those of us who want our children to be taught useful and factual things rather than be fed a diet of Left wing politics.
In ‘Class War’ (a more detailed review of this book will be going up here in the near future) Mr Woodhead speaks eloquently about how various progressive educationalists ended up becoming the educational Establishment and helped to bring about a decline in intellectual vigour in Britain’s schools. He also touches on the issue of how Left leaning academics working in the field of education have not only pushed left wing ideology in teacher training centres but have who have played a significant part in shifting the bias of the entire UK education system to the Left. He takes aim also at the Teaching Unions who have refused in the past to contemplate that some teachers may be bad or bent by accepting performance related pay for example. The failure to tackle the teaching unions, unions sometimes dominated by the Left, has been a roadblock in the way of education reform. The book also exposes the enormous levels of waste that went on in the Department for Education during the period of Tony Blair’s Labour government and he details how tens of millions of pounds were wasted on various failed initiatives that looked good in the newspapers but failed to raise standards in British schools.
Sean Fitzgerald’s videos deal with a similar situation as is happening in British schools but it seems that in America the far Leftism being peddled in the classroom is much less subtle and more aggressive than it is in the UK. I’ve experienced biased leftist teachers when I was growing up and I must say that what is going on in US schools is truly horrifying. In some, not all schools I might add, what’s happening goes way beyond what I experienced back in the late 1970’s where there were teachers who were openly Communist and were using East German propaganda magazines such as GDR Review as teaching materials. In the American schools featured by Mr Fitzgerald, we see teachers openly advocating for Antifa and recruiting pupils to become involved with them, extreme gender ideology being taught as fact in nursery schools along with promoting hostility to the Second Amendment to the Constitution and the promotion of a general ‘social justice’ agenda.
Watching the videos by Mr Fitzgerald led me to feel increasingly shocked at the levels of leftist extremism that are being peddled in American schools. When teachers are openly undermining scientific facts such as the fact that there are only two sexes, recruiting for controversial demonstrations and causes and pushing extreme left political views, then I think it is fair to say that some parts of America have schools that are letting down both children and parents. That this could happen in a country where in some states people have the right to elect their education authority is a shocking indictment of how parental apathy has allowed the Left to gain so much ground in the US educational system.
Without a doubt there is a similar problem with leftist indoctrination in the UK but it is not quite as open and sometimes much more subtle than in the UK. Such indoctrination although somewhat different from that which is going on in the USA is still unacceptable. Although there have been no confirmed incidents to my knowledge (but if I’m wrong please correct me) of 21st century British teachers recruiting for Antifa or similar extreme Left organisations or demos, there have been a number of press reports about the undue influence of the Left in British education. The Daily Mail for example in an article from 2017 written by a former teacher from North London outlined how there was such a staffroom culture of leftism that it was forbidden for this teacher to mention the Brexit referendum result in front of other staff. The teacher claimed that there was an ‘Orwellian group think’ culture in British schools where only one opinion, that of the metropolitan Left, was acceptable. We are also seeing an increase in schools and the establishment educational academics flogging the anti-science gender identification ideology to increasingly younger children. In addition we are seeing a phenomenon many people have noticed and complained about of schools promoting Islam as a preferred religious ideology when compared to Christianity or Judaism or any other faith.
Although the situation in the UK is not as bad as it seems in parts of the US education system, we should not be complacent about the future of the UK’s education system. Bad ideas that become educational establishment policy in the United States, such as affirmative action with regards teaching and learning and an obsession with diversity for diversity’s sake, have a nasty tendency to find their way via the Universities into British schools. It is unlikely that some of the lunacy that we are seeing in some US schools will not land on our shores sooner or later.
There is a lesson here to be learned over what has happened in American schools that we should apply to the schools in Britain that teach our own children. That lesson is that we cannot wholly trust the teachers or school leaders or the ivory tower academics to act in the best interests of our children. Only parents, with the fullest information about what is going on in their children’s schools will more often than not put their child’s best interests first. On the other hand, like many ideologues, those working in education are likely to prioritise the ideology over the rights of the child and the rights of that child’s parents. As parents we have a duty to protect our children from harm whether that be teaching them to cross the road safely or to swim or to evaluate information in order to sort out what is truth and what is dangerous bullshit. We also have a duty to protect our children from dangerous ideologies that will harm our children and ultimately harm our society.
Unfortunately, apathy about education and ignorance of what is going on in the education systems of both the USA and the United Kingdom has led us to a very dark place when it comes to education. We have a situation in the United Kingdom where our children know for example everything that the left permits them to know about a 7th century warlord and nonce called Mohammed, but may not be able to read or write effectively or even think or communicate in a logical and understandable way. This is a state of affairs that urgently needs to change and change for the better.
In Britain, unlike in the USA, we cannot vote for our local education authorities and thereby directly influence what is going on in schools. Maybe this is something that should be changed in Britain in the future. But for the present, we can do our utmost to become informed as to what is going on in our schools and link up with other parents who have concerned about how education seems to be being replaced by indoctrination. I believe that we are reaching a point where it is imperative that parents dig a little deeper into how their children are being educated and if they are unhappy with that to join with other parents to protest against the leftist excesses in our schools. However protest and removing our children from bent RE and PSHE lessons where the Islamic and gender indoctrination are at their worst is not enough. The only way we will get effective change is to use the information gathered about leftist indoctrination in schools to influence whom we vote for at election time and that matters whether it be a vote for parish, county and district councillors
or when we vote in General Elections. We need to vote for the politicians who will clean house when it comes to Britain’s education system because if we do not then we are likely to see the current bad situation regarding leftist influence on the UK education system becoming even worse than it is at present. .
