In my opinion, one of the more positive things that Britain’s lockdown because of the Chinese Coronavirus has brought about is it has allowed the ordinary British subject to peep behind the curtain that various parts of the Establishment operate behind. For example: Most people in Britain have little or no dealings with the police and they were therefore unaware about how too many police officers are arrogant bullies who misuse their power and treat those non-criminal members of the public that they come into contact with quite badly.
Normally this sort of bad and arrogant behaviour is dished out to those who ask awkward questions about various matters such as those pertaining to migration, multiculturalism and Islam or the supporters of Mr Tommy Robinson for example. But now, because the government has given increased powers to a group of people many of whom I would not trust to sit the right way around on a toilet, the general public has seen and experienced much of the worst that the British police can offer. It has been easy in the past for the public to ignore bad or inequitable conduct by police because it didn’t happen to them, but now it does and people are getting rightfully angry.
Another area of the public sector whose details have been hidden from the public has been the State education sector and the underlying political and social attitudes of those within the educational establishment. For well over one hundred years, ever since the 1870 Education Act established the concept of state education, the vast majority of parents have sent their children to school without much of a thought as to what their children are being taught, the content of curricula or the attitudes and political views of educators. Now when the teaching profession and the educational establishment can be trusted and is providing a good product in the form of accurate, balanced, appropriate and intellectually vigorous education to our children, then that attitude by parents is all well and good. But the phenomenon of parents not taking too much of a detailed interest in the content of curricula or the standards of teaching and the conduct of teachers has in the last four decades or so, also allowed some seriously bad problems to develop in our schools. The two most serious of those as I see it is a drop in educational standards something linked in my view to schools having low expectations of pupils and the domination of the education sector and especially of entities charged with educational policy making, by the far Left.
The lockdown in Britain and the new requirement for parents to school their children themselves whilst the schools are closed has created a whole new cohort of parents who are not going to send their children back to school when they reopen. My wife, who belongs to a few ‘mummy’ type internet forums, remarked to me the other day that there seem to be a lot of people on these groups who are going to choose homeschooling, even when the state schools return to a state of normality. This to me strikes as a very interesting and possibly positive development.
The reasons that parents who are able to are choosing to homeschool are legion. Some parents may have a desire to have their child get a more personally tailored education experience or the child may have had previous problems adjusting to school or the school that the child attended may have bullying problems. Some parents such as conservative Christians and Jews may home school for religious reasons if there is not a suitable and affordable religious school in their area. Other parents may be unhappy with their experience with a particular school and think that many of the alternatives that the state is offering are not up to much either.
Some parents make the decision to home school because they believe that the education sector is biased and for them too ideologically dogmatic both in how it is administered and in what it teaches children. Every family is an individual unit and every child needs the education most suitable for it and this education may not have to take place in a state school setting.
What appears to be happening is that parents who may never before have considered homeschooling are now doing so because the Coronavirus lockdown has given parents and those with an interest in education access to a lot of stuff, such as lesson plans and policies that may previously have been hidden from parents or at least hard to get hold of. Parents are starting to see school policies on things like sex and relationship education to give a first example and they are not happy. They are not happy with the idea of teaching primary school children the complete fiction that your sex or gender is a choice. We have in UK the appalling situation where vulnerable and malleable children are being taught stuff this is completely and scientifically untrue such as birth sex is irrelevant and indeed completely fluid. We also have the idiocy of ‘Drag Queen Story Time’ being brought into our schools by the far left and political indoctrination of children by teachers who are overwhelmingly of the political Left.
Parents who are getting this peep behind the educational establishment’s curtain are also finding out that bias and propaganda are not just to be found in controversial areas such as sex and relationship education, but also in other subjects as well such as History. The Daily Star has carried a story which seems to be based on a study carried out by the Campaign for Real Education that some history lesson plans and curricula seem more intent on trashing and denigrating British history than teaching it in a balanced and accurate manner.
What the Daily Star has claimed has happened is that an educational organisation, TES, has allowed parents and others to download lesson plans for use with their children whilst the schools are not operational. One of these lesson plans denigrated Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and said that modern often vacuous celebrities are better than Sir Winston. Another lesson plan on the 1945 Victory in Europe celebration day, was put together with no mention of Winston Churchill. Whilst anyone with any historical knowledge would agree that there were times in his career when Churchill was either a failure or was controversial, what these lesson plans do is denigrate Sir Winston to the point of demonising him. These lesson plans also encourage children to see Sir Winston’s avowed anti-Communism as a bad thing and accuse him of wanting to start World War III with the Soviet Union. How can being a democratic anti-Communist and be an opponent of this monstrous and murderous ideology called Communism be bad? The fact that some teachers feel that Sir Winston was bad because he opposed an ideology that they are steeped in and have no qualms about propagandising children to think as they do.
We have been given, by the reaction of government to the Chinese Coronavirus, a good look at what is going on in our schools, what is being taught and how propaganda is replacing fact even in subjects such as History. Many parents are not liking what they are seeing and I don’t blame them for being disgusted at how our schools are managed and how far the Left has managed to infiltrate and control the education of British children.
Unhappy parents are connecting with each other in a manner that would not have been possible just twenty or twenty five years ago. They are sharing stories about education, discussing it and coming to conclusions that the Left dominated educational establishment are really not going to like.
There are a number of things that will change when the Coronavirus lockdown ends and the country tries to rebuild. The first is that there are now a whole lot more people who now do not trust or respect the police or consent to being policed as we are currently. The second thing that will change is that parents will have found their voice and more of them will raise it against the educational establishment and the ideologies that dominate it. This will create much more pressure on schools to treat parents like paying customers and not, as too many did prior to the lockdown, as a nuisance or scum. It could also drive a greater interest and take up of homeschooling and this could end up being very good for children and families and maybe a first step in driving the ideological and far Left out of their positions of undue influence over the state education sector
The reflex bias of the BBC is also utterly sick-making – the presenter of Desert Island Discs introduced actor Brian Cox as having played “…villains and heroes from Churchill to Sir Matt Busby…..”
A great analysis.
If nothing else comes after CV19 panic subsides, more home-schooled children will be a very positive result.
State schools are infested with Common Purpose indoctrinated lefties. C.P. = Common Purpose or Communist Party – take your pick, I can’t see much difference.
Thank you for the compliment. It is indeed looking like parents are starting to take more interest in what or rather what not is being taught in their children’s schools. It’s quite possible that this could have the very positive effect of both increasing home schooling and encouraging parents to stand up to lefty teachers and schools.
I served 4 stints as a school governor two as a parent-governor and 2 as a Councillor. The teachers unions are disgusting. They really didn’t like me. One example was we had a governors meeting with parents and teachers. In thecromm we were using, was a map of the UK, I spotted my chance. “Would anyone here like to tell me where England is on the map.? “What do you mean?” It’s very clear, where is ENGLAND on the map? “Why do you ask?”, Well, it’s interesting that the country of ENGLAND isn’t mentioned on this map, Wales, Norther Ireland, Scotland, but no ENGLAND. “So what (said the Union rep)?”. I then went for her… SO WHAT, SO WHAT, what we have madam, is a COMMUNIST like you, twisting and corrupting naïve innocent children, to erase the past and replace it with your vicious rubbish. How dare you, perhaps you need to find alternative employment, in a Gulag perhaps. Oh and by the well, if you report me for “not showing respect” I’ll plaster you’re face over ever newspaper, don’t think I won’t? She went ballistic making all sorts of threats. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is corrupting your children, I think headmaster, you need to consider said NUT rep’s suitability to be within a mile of a school”. The shit REALLY hit the fan, demands for apologies or there’d be a strike. My Council Leader demanded I apologize, I declined his kind offer and thanked him for his support (sarc) and said in no uncertain terms that He’ll will freeze over first, let them strike and I’ll go to the media and organize a public meeting of parents to tell them how their children are being groomed and corrupted. Result, no action, no strike, got some shit at the next meeting and the dished it out to the lot of them, calling them child abusers. I really, really despise these child abusers.
Agree with you on the awful left wingery in schools. Now I had a poor education mostly down to the effects the extremes of naive child centred Plowdenism which created such teaching strategies as ‘grammar and structure is less important than creativity’, but I still came out of compulsory education with a fair deal of respect for teachers as workers and professionals. That took a hit when I was called into a school as a temporary unqualified teacher to teach as a teaching assistant, a specialist technical subject that I had a good reputation for at the time, to a class where the regular teacher had had a nervous breakdown. Yes the kids were awful but I managed to get most of them through their exams. However it was the staff room attitudes that bothered me. The Left had an iron grip on nearly all the teachers on the staff roll and even senior staff members were heavily involved in far left education groups outside of school. There was no place for right wing or even centrist thought and what was then the National Union of Teachers really did call the shots and made reform and improvement very difficult.
Your experience does show the left to be readily willing to bully dissidents both staff and in the wider school community. It’s interesting to know that they backed down when you held your ground. It makes me wonder whether this tactic of threats to others has silenced other critics and maybe they might have had a better result if they’d stood their ground?