PETER HITCHENS: It’s the duty of every parent to ask what’s REALLY going on in our secretive schools
Whatever do they teach them in these schools? How do we find out? How can we change it if we do not like it?
In the past few years it has become clear that the schools of this country, state and private, have been invaded by Left-wing dogmas, dogmas it is dangerous to challenge.
For they are enforced, hard, with the backing of a supposedly Conservative government.
For example, you do not need to like or agree with the former Oxford state school teacher Joshua Sutcliffe. I think he may be a bit of a pain. Brave people often are a pain.
But every civilised person must be scared by the fact that he is now forbidden to teach at all – by a body called the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), which ought not to exist in a free country.
Whatever do they teach them in these schools? How do we find out? How can we change it if we do not like it?
The decision to ban him from teaching was made on behalf of Tory Education Secretary Gillian Keegan by the TRA’s decision-maker, Alan Meyrick.
This is not just because Mr Sutcliffe supposedly ‘misgendered’ a pupil. It is also because he let slip some deeply unfashionable opinions about homosexuality and masculinity.
He first ran into trouble at The Cherwell School, which serves the Rich People’s Republic of North Oxford, the densest concentration of wealthy, self-righteous Left-wingers outside Hollywood.
But I suspect he would have faced the same problem in Barnsley or Cowdenbeath, because a vigilant thought police are ever watchful in all our schools and universities.
The schools I attended in my prehistoric childhood were run by conservative men, often military or naval types who had served in the Second World War.
But also teaching alongside these Captains, Commanders and Majors were men and women with heretical, Left-wing ideas.
They didn’t keep quiet about them and nobody tried to stop them. On the contrary, they greatly added to our knowledge and understanding of the world, bless them all.
Most of us were tiny Tories in those days but we would never have thought of snitching on them. And if we had, I suspect we would have been told sharply to go away.
For all those Navy and Army officers might have been crusty reactionaries but they had recently fought in the cause of freedom and this meant a lot to them.
I am myself hugely uninterested in the transgender debate and all that goes with it. It looks to me like a ruse to tempt moral conservatives into a battle they are bound to lose.
I am more interested in the use of what was once sex education to promote the new morality and abolish the old Christian one. But what most concern me are the harder politics of what is being taught – and how it is being done.
The decision to ban the former Oxford state school teacher Joshua Sutcliffe from teaching was made on behalf of Tory Education Secretary Gillian Keegan (pictured) by the TRA’s decision-maker, Alan Meyrick
In a fascinating new pamphlet by think-tank Civitas, called Show, Tell And Leave Nothing To The Imagination, Jo-Anne Nadler has tried to get to grips with this problem. She concludes that there has been ‘a revolution that has been delivered largely by stealth’.
She says it has ‘injected political ideology into schools, both organisationally through the adoption of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies relating to hiring, admissions and the wider school culture, and directly into the classroom through curriculum initiatives’.
This has replaced education as we once knew it with an ‘illiberal, uniform worldview on contentious social issues’.
Of course teachers are not openly urging their charges to vote Labour or Green. But beyond doubt the effect is to create a Left-wing consensus, reinforced outside school by broadcasting and social media.
In my experience, schools are among the most secretive institutions in the country. There is no formal means by which a parent can find out what really goes on inside most of them.
The new fashion for ‘academies’, whatever they may be, has made schools, if anything, less accountable than ever.
Many of the worst propaganda schemes are run by outside companies which claim that they will endanger their copyright by letting us know what is in them.
And a lot of children aid this by clamming up the moment parents ask them anything about their school lives.
But unless we ask, we won’t find out. My advice is this: Ask and keep asking until you find out. And if you do not like it, find others who agree with you and protest, systematically and doggedly, until it stops.
Education remains a Secret Garden in which things are done that we would not support if we knew.
What a world without God could look like…
I have at last found the time to watch the best thing on TV. This is Trauma Zone, and you can only watch it on the BBC iPlayer.
Hundreds of hours of forgotten recordings, made during the collapse of the USSR, were found in a cupboard in the BBC’s Moscow office.
The quirky genius Adam Curtis has gone through them to knit together a profoundly moving, surprising and disturbing picture of this colossal event.
I can vouch for the accuracy of the atmosphere and direction, having lived through many of these moments in what was then the filthy, desperate and exhausting city of Moscow.
I also managed to get outside the capital, to remote places where the water came out of the taps brown and stinking, or where fresh meat was an event.
I have at last found the time to watch the best thing on TV. This is Trauma Zone (pictured), and you can only watch it on the BBC iPlayer
But this goes much further. Three things are especially well done. They are the Western rape of Russia under the drunk Boris Yeltsin, and the USA’s complacency when Yeltsin (long before Putin mattered) smashed Russia’s young democracy by ordering his tanks to fire on Parliament, and telling his police to shoot down unarmed demonstrators.
And we smiled, and helped him win re-election in a shamelessly rigged poll.
Next is Yeltsin’s barbaric war on Chechnya, designed to bolster his shrivelling authority, likewise winked at by Westerners who later prosed moralistically about Putin’s war in the same place.
And third is the portrayal of Soviet and Russian women who, as usual, had to endure the worst while their menfolk sank into a vodka coma.
Look out for the courageous, determined mother who rescues her soldier son from the Chechnya war by sheer force of personality; and for the other mother, frantic to find the vanished body of her soldier son, because if she cannot find it she will not get a pension.
God save us all from such fates but do not be sure you are immune from these things. I constantly asked myself what I was being told during my time in Moscow.
I now think I was being warned of what the world would be like without God and that such a world was only a few mistakes away.
I am starting to loathe those green-striped car number plates which boast that the vehicle is electric.
Their drivers all too often seem to think they are so virtuous they have no need to behave well.
The other evening I was riding my pushbike home along a narrow, quiet street and stopped to allow two old people (I mean, even older than me) to totter across the road.
I was immediately blasted by the sound of an enormous horn, as if the US Navy’s biggest aircraft carrier was behind me and trying to get through.
No, it was one of those big, fat Teslas, with the green flash on its plates. I urged the two old people to totter more slowly, if they could.
I am pleased to say that they got the point, and did as I asked.
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