Welcome to the Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No1
Newsletter Themes: Why we need a union, What is education for?, Scottish government policy on gender and sex education in schools, News round-up.
Dr Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
Welcome to the Scottish Union for Education Substack; if you become a subscriber you will receive a SUE email every Thursday. In each of these weekly newsletters you will find articles by leading activists and thinkers, together with a news round-up. If you would like to contribute, please email editorial@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
In our first Newsletter Emeritus Professor Lindsay Paterson, one of Scotland’s leading educational experts, explains some of the fundamental problems with Scottish education. He describes an education system driven by a therapeutic obsession with ‘personal fulfilment’ and a very prescriptive approach to understanding and learning.
We are delighted to hear from Catriona Taylor, an ex-headteacher who campaigns against changes to the sex education curriculum. Catriona shares with us the passionate speech that she delivered to a large demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament in January.
To begin, Dr Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education, explains why we need a union.
Why we need a Union
Stuart Waiton is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology, an author and a journalist. He has a particular interest in the over-regulation and policing of everyday life.
Some have noticed the falling standards in education, while others have watched as the curriculum itself has changed and morphed into a form of indoctrination. Most recently, groups of concerned parents, grandparents and teachers and ex-teachers have raised the alert about the worrying trend within schools to ask children intrusive questions about their sex lives. They have pointed to the new sex education curriculum and noticed the increasingly inappropriate materials being used. If you think they may be overreacting, check out the Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) website and make up your own mind.
If you think the idea of education becoming a form of indoctrination is overly polemical and unjust, try reading The Standard for Headship document produced by the General Teaching Council for Scotland. Here, you’ll find little related to what most of us would think about as education, and an awful lot about the need for headteachers, teachers and schools themselves to become centres of ‘social justice’.
Part of this promotion of social justice, which starts in primary schools, is the belief in the need to make children aware of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘protected characteristics’, and the need to understand ‘the influence of gender’. Indeed, the Scottish Government and education authorities are now ensuring that embedding anti-racism and race equality into all aspects of school life is central to our children’s learning.
In the Education Scotland document Promoting and developing race equality and anti-racist education, we find the argument being made that, ‘As the child grows, they can see diversity for example in worked examples in mathematics, in literature and through interdisciplinary learning’.
As someone who first got involved in politics to stop racial inequality, even I find myself scratching my head trying to work out how and why ‘anti-racist’ maths lessons have become part of the curriculum. More worrying still in this new anti-racism is the divisive talk of ‘white privilege’, something that is not being raised as part of a debate but as a central and unquestioned dimension of the curriculum itself.
What a generation ago would have been discussed in adult politics is now being instructed to children as ‘education’, reflecting not only a confusion about what politics is and should be, but also a wider confusion about the difference between childhood and adulthood.
If this is not confusing enough, we have the Scottish Government promoting a form of transgender ideology in their schools’ guidance document Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools. Here we find the highly contested idea that sex and gender are interchangeable, and that sex, rather than being an immutable biological character, is something that children can choose as part of their personal identity.
Some may agree, others disagree, but the guidance document for Scottish educators assumes that it is a fact that sex is not fixed and that, even further, that this concept is a new form of moral good that must be accepted and even promoted to children. The same document explains that when a child as young as 12 says that they are a different sex, this should be of no concern for teachers. But if a parent questions this 12-year-old’s ‘sex change’, this is a concern. Moreover, if the child does not want the parent to know about this life-changing decision, schools and teachers are encouraged to hide this information from the parents or, ideally, to help re-educate them about the ‘true’ sex of their child.
So, if a 12-year-old girl approaches a teacher and says that she is now a boy, the school is being directed by government guidance to both endorse this ‘sex change’ and understand that any concerns raised by a parent should be treated as a potential danger to the child!
With these concerns in mind, the Scottish Union for Education has been set up to involve parents, grandparents, teachers and lecturers, and communities across Scotland, to have their say.
The education curriculum is something that the education authorities must decide, but when education starts to look like indoctrination, and to undermine parents, we believe members of the public have a right, and a duty, to have their say.
In this respect, SUE is for you. Much of the good work identifying the trends described above has been carried out by concerned Christians, but you do not have to be religious to recognise that there is a serious problem. I’m an atheist on the left of politics, but over the past few years I have worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds who recognise that something needs to be done. This Substack is the start of a process of involving as many people in Scotland as possible to help understand what is going on in schools. We will be inviting academics and experts to try to explain what school, and university education, should be all about.
We need parents, teachers and others on the ground who want to see change to step forward and help to create a real living, breathing union, one that the authorities and the politicians cannot ignore. If you want to report issues in your local area or to get actively involved, email us at info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
What is Education for?
Lindsay Paterson is Emeritus Professor of Education Policy, School of Social and Political Science, Edinburgh University.
The purpose of education has always been subject to debate. Today there are two key controversies, and they are often confused. Working out which controversy we are talking about is a first step to making up our minds on what education is for.
The most prominent controversy today is between ‘personal fulfilment’ and ‘social contribution’. On the face of it, in Scotland, the personal angle is winning. There is much talk of personal wellbeing, of education’s contribution to mental health, of encouraging young people to be self-reliant, confident and autonomous. The main obstacle to these goals, it is claimed, is self-doubt. Education, it is suggested, ought to provide guidance on how to overcome that.
The academics Katherine Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes have called this ‘therapeutic education’, and they claim that it is dangerous. They argue that focusing on emotions just makes bad emotions worse. A search for the sources of victimhood, far from being empowering, merely reinforces the emotional dependence. A culture of self-revelation degenerates into narcissism, out of which self-reliance never grows. As this emphasis on personal vulnerability has been going on for quite a long time in education – at least since the 1990s – it has now allegedly created a society in which young people obsess about things that make them feel bad. That very obsession makes them feel even worse.
The other pole of this first controversy is to direct students’ attention to what they can do for society. Much rhetoric is still devoted to this, but in practice the actual scope for developing social purpose has been so fundamentally undermined that we barely remember how it worked in the past. All versions of ‘social contribution’ as it was understood for Scottish education now seem quaintly out of date. Perhaps the most familiar might be the work developed by early–twentieth-century socialists, through the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), the Labour Colleges, and, for children, the Socialist Sunday Schools. Here, the aim was to use education to create a better society.
In some of these organisations, this was indoctrination. The Labour Colleges’ explicit purpose was the teaching of Marxist ideas to adults. The Socialist Sunday Schools, flourishing at much the same time, had a children’s version of that. The Labour Colleges were always far smaller than the popular WEA, which aspired to build a better society but firmly eschewed propaganda, believing that its social goals would be best achieved by widespread public enlightenment. For the WEA, if the workers could have access to the same quality of teaching and knowledge as the social elites, democracy and thus enlightenment would ensure that social reform would come about gradually.
We can recognise these traditions of social contribution or purpose in Scotland partly because of the political inclinations of majority opinion here, and because the WEA did allow for personal fulfilment as well, even if justifying it in terms of the social choices that the personally fulfilled would then make, but other social purposes have now long gone.
Creating a godly commonwealth was the reason the Protestant Reformers founded Scotland’s advanced system of parish schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that goal now strikes as us belonging to theocracies we associate with places such as Afghanistan. Training children to be docile workers was a common rationale for better schooling in the aftermath of Scotland’s initial industrialisation in the early nineteenth century, but that aim of inducing conformity was already becoming unfashionable by the late nineteenth century. Educating children to be faithful servants of the Empire was discredited by the catastrophes of two world wars and destroyed by colonial liberation.
Some version of these social purposes for education has dominated for so long that today’s emphasis on personal fulfilment still can seem quite novel. However, it too emerged from the eighteenth century, grew to prominence with the development of the mid–twentieth-century welfare state, and became official policy from the 1960s and with increasing insistence since the advent of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Oddly, the longevity of the idea of personal fulfilment means that today’s advocates can find arguments against all previous examples of social purpose – personal authenticity against religion, or workplace conformity, or imperialism. Even socialist ideas can be rebelled against through a mildly disruptive anarchism. Starting in the 1960s in France and the USA, this idea came belatedly to Scotland in the 1980s. Out of all these versions of a history of struggle against social goals comes the now dominant sense that personal fulfilment is revolutionary.
The second controversy cuts across the arguments on social purpose and personal fulfilment: it’s the debate between liberal education and vocational education. On the one hand there is education for its own sake. On the other, education is for use, not only narrowly vocational in the sense that is now common, but more broadly education serving any kind of purpose that is not intrinsically educational. This might seem to be the same as the first debate, but it isn’t, because this one is about what is taught and learnt, not about the students themselves.
Liberal education has an ancient pedigree and has changed its meaning so much over the centuries that we might doubt that it is a single idea at all. Is the liberal learning of Cicero – the distinguished Roman lawyer, politician and writer – really the same as that of, say, Frederick Douglass, the leader of the slaves of the southern US states, ally of Lincoln in the civil war? Douglass found liberty in the capacity to read the bible: ‘from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom’. Nevertheless, there is a common thread in the sense that learning for its own sake is liberating because learning for any kind of extrinsic purpose constrains our freedom.
This meaning is not denying purpose, but rather saying that learning is its own purpose. In practice, what liberal education has come to mean in the modern period – since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment – has been the immersion in a tradition of rational thought. The English liberal Matthew Arnold put this most famously in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy: liberal education is the ‘pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know the best which has been thought and said in the world’. The belief was that by understanding the best that human creativity has produced, the student’s own creativity is inspired.
This view is currently very unfashionable, but it was the motivating ideal of all the reforming educational projects of the twentieth century: the expansion of secondary schooling, the widening of access to universities, adult education, self-education encouraged by municipal libraries and galleries, inexpensive paperback books, and television. In particular, contrary to the more recent view that respect for tradition is inescapably conservative, it was the aim of radical politics, and especially in the twentieth century, socialist politics.
A typical example is the socialist intellectual Harold Laski, professor at the London School of Economics and left-wing gadfly to Attlee’s Labour Party. Radical socialist though he was, Laski had no time for relativistic rejection of the great traditions. Knowledge was universal, and the purpose of education was solely to acquaint people with it. He wrote in 1930 that ‘the business of a university is teaching students how facts are converted into truth. What it is seeking is the method whereby experience in any branch of knowledge can be connected with the structure of the universe. The pathway to that end is, above all, a training in scepticism.’
A more graphic statement of essentially the same position came from Ellen Wilkinson, a radical socialist and feminist who was Minister of Education in Attlee’s government. She hoped in 1946 that proper secondary schooling would provide a haven from the drudgery of the lives that most working-class children were destined for: ‘can’t their three precious years of secondary school be at least a relief from all that? Can’t Shakespeare mean more than a scrubbing brush – can’t enough of a foreign language be taught to open windows on the world a bit?’
The contrast with vocational learning here is explicit, but often, from advocates of liberal education, it is merely implied. In reply to those who asserted that education should be for work, the argument was that the place to learn how to work was at work, education was an escape from that. Equally dubious in this tradition was any idea that the purpose of education was to overcome inequality, or to encourage social mobility, or to achieve social justice. All these extrinsic aims belong to the first contrast of purposes – social or personal – not to the value of what is studied. Indeed, in the liberal education tradition, there has also been the view that being liberally educated was itself the best preparation for work, or for citizenship, or for living with other people. In this view, education for freedom is also education to be a good person, but this outcome is incidental, not the main purpose, because to educate directly for anything other than sceptical understanding is to narrow the content of what is learnt and is to distort the meaning which the student takes from it.
Today that view of liberal education is barely even recognised in education policy. It’s not just a matter of politicians’ wanting to use education to promote economic development or social justice. It is also the intrusion into the very content of education of specific political programmes. Most inimically to the universal ideals of liberal education has been the belief that there is no universal tradition of thought, so that each cultural group must find its own truth in its own traditions. The ultimate result of that view is that each person must do this on their own.
This brings us back to the first kind of controversy, because in ideologies of these kinds, the actual content of education matters little. The whole purpose is to sort people for jobs, or to give them the chance to better themselves, or to do these things in a way that overcomes some identified social evils. Because education has indeed always had these functions, adjusted to suit the dominant ideologies of each age, the claim that these are what the purposes of education ought to be seems quite plausible. Today in Scotland, it is seemingly radical and apparently to everyone’s taste. Education for its own sake says nothing about building a better society.
Education has always found public favour from the belief that it can serve those ideologies which are currently widely accepted by policy makers. Today, these ideologies would be summed up as the aims of social justice and personal fulfilment. Astute liberal educators have known how to take advantage of this dependence on political fashion, persuading those with power and money that an education that is about unfettered freedom of thought is in fact a more effective way of achieving social and personal goals than educating for these aims deliberately. That is probably then the best way to revive truly liberal education.
Personal fulfilment, mental health, social mobility, the creativity required for a flourishing economy, the social liberation that overcoming social injustice offers: we can learn from the very long history of liberal education in all its many varieties that all these extrinsic purposes can be served by trusting students to reach the appropriate conclusions for themselves. The best way to equip them to do that is to immerse them in the great traditions of intellect and practice.
Enough is Enough
Catriona Taylor delivered this speech on 12 January 2023 outside the Scottish Parliament as part of the growing campaign against government policy on gender and sex education in schools.
My name is Catriona Taylor and I’m a retired headteacher of a Catholic Primary School in Edinburgh. I do some supply cover in a few primary schools across the city, both Catholic and non-denominational schools.
What I’m going to share with you is probably very difficult and controversial for some of you to hear, and you might not agree with all that I say. Many of you may not even be aware of what is happening in your child’s school in terms of sex education material being taught. Not just in Edinburgh, not just in Scotland or even the whole of the UK, but across the globe. I have a number of concerns, and parents and grandparents or carers should be concerned too.
Firstly, I’m concerned because parents have been kept in the dark. The 2001 Education Act was replaced in 2014 when the Scottish Government introduced a new Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools. This revised guidance was introduced following the Marriage and Civil Partnership Act 2014 where both opposite sex and same sex couples can marry.
My concern is that the Scottish Government has surreptitiously refreshed the 2014 RSHP (Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood) programme and introduced new sexually explicit materials into primary and secondary schools to support the ‘health and wellbeing curriculum’ in 2019–2020. This was at a time of lockdown and when parents had no access to schools or materials and therefore were kept in the dark.
Parents have not been made aware of these changes to this resource, which now includes new explicit and highly inappropriate material which our children are being exposed to. Most parents will presume it’s much the same as what has gone on before ever since 2001 and certainly no different from when the pilot of RSHP was introduced in 2014. This is not the case.
Historically parents have been seen to be the first educators of their children. According to the document Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools (2014), parents are a child’s first teacher, a role that continues for life. When in 2006 the Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act was passed, it stated that schools had a responsibility to improve parental involvement in the education of their child; it recognised ‘the vital role that parents play in children’s learning and development’. So what has happened since then? How can there be parental involvement when you don’t know what your children are being taught?
Remember, you are entitled to find out what your child is being taught in school – it is your right, and you have the right to ensure that your own expectations, your values, cultural identity, and language are met accordingly. Don’t be marginalised; let your voices be heard loudly! I have set up a parents support network where parents can meet face to face to share any help and advice.
My second concern is for teachers. Some teachers are afraid to speak out against this programme for fear of losing their jobs! They may be suspended if they don’t positively affirm the child’s chosen gender and instead use his or her correct given name and correct-sex pronouns. It may be by mistake or for wittingly refusing to do so. But either way they fear losing their job! So, silence is golden! Teachers need to be brave, let their voices be heard, and refuse to teach this unacceptable material.
As a teacher, the content of the material now being taught in schools under the auspices of ‘health and wellbeing’ goes against my morals, my religious principals, and my values as a teacher, a mum and a granny. So, I have refused to share with the children the unnecessary language and terminology and the explicit worksheets and derogatory slides and films. These children do not need to be aware of the explicit sexual plumbing practices of their heterosexual mums and dads or homosexual parents either, be they gay or lesbian. Some of the material verges on the pornographic and is, in my opinion, tantamount to grooming. So come on teachers, it’s now time to stand up and be counted!
Most importantly I am concerned for our children, who are having their innocence and childhood taken away. From nursery age, children are taught and encouraged to be ‘anyone they want to be’, which in itself is good. We want our children to be confident youngsters; however, nurseries now tend to be ‘gender neutral’ and adopt the premise that a child can be one gender one day and another tomorrow, be it a boy or a girl. They suggest that children can change their gender from day to day if they so wish. This approach in the primary school setting, promotes a transgender ideology. Children are taught ‘Love is Love’ regardless of who you love or whether you are same gender or a different gender. It promotes the idea that children can change their gender or identify as multiple genders and explore other diverse gender identities too. So effectively children are taught they can be any gender they choose to be on any given day – an idea that can lead to experimentation and confusion.
This ideology fails to teach that dressing up, experimentation, and pretend play as a nurse or a pirate is a natural part of growing up. It fails to recognise that given time, most of children’s curiosity and gender confusion will be resolved naturally. Body dysphoria is a common condition experienced by many adolescent girls, but again this confusion with the way their body is changing and shaping up usually disappears by adulthood.
I am increasingly concerned with the growth of some children rights. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have 42 rights, and these must be available to all children without any discrimination. Included in the list of rights is the right to an education, the right to be heard and listened to, the right for their views to be taken into consideration in all matters affecting them, and the right for privacy and confidentiality. Thus, the choices that children make in school regarding their gender expression and sexual orientation must be positively affirmed by the teacher or the adult present, so the child has the right to privacy and confidentiality.
While these so-called rights and confidentiality may sound good when applied to adults, they have serious implications when applied to children. The questions that beg to be asked include Confidentiality from whom? And privacy from whom? Children are exposed to the RSHP sexuality programme without the knowledge or consent of their parents. What does this do to the parent–child relationship?
One purpose of this comprehensive sexuality education is the sexual liberation of children, which is not only lucrative for businesses but also coincides with political ideologies that could have the aim of liberating children from their parents’ conservative or religious views and values regarding sexuality. It could mean indoctrinating them in a new worldview that coincides with various liberal political ideologies of the Scottish Government and the NGOs (non-government organisations). So be aware that this is a global initiative and part of Agenda 2030, not just a Scottish initiative! Nicola doesn’t work on her own initiative.
I am concerned for children’s safety. Children have the right be kept safe from ‘mental or physical harm, violence, injury or abuse, neglect, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse’. As a teacher, I am certainly not against sex education in schools, as children need to know how their bodies are changing as they grow up and they need to know how to keep themselves safe. Schools have a responsibility to keep the children safe from harm, and children need to be equipped with the skills to do so.
While it’s a child’s right not to be abused in any way, shape or form, I would argue that this insidious RSHP material indoctrinates children and therefore is a form of abuse. I have had reports of children going home crying, upset, traumatised, distressed and anxious, cutting off their hair after RSHP health and wellbeing lessons and not wanting to return to school. These children are questioning if they are in the right body; a boy questions should he be a girl and vice versa.
Some children have been asked in class if they would prefer to be gay or lesbian, with a show of hands for the results. A school in Inverness conducted a written survey asking children between 5–12 if they identified as transgender or gay. Should the little ones even understand what ‘transgender’ means? For goodness’ sake – let the children be children. I’m finding that our children are very confused!
I am very confused, because talking sexually in the workplace to adults considered sexual harassment but talking about sexuality to children is considered essential? What will the consequences of the new RSHP be? In my opinion these new teaching resources are one of the greatest assaults on the health and innocence of children. Unlike traditional sex education, the RSHP sexuality education is highly explicit and promotes promiscuity and high-risk sexual behaviours as being healthy and normal. Where will it lead to? Sexualised children who are desensitised and curious? Will it normalise anal and oral sex? Will it promote early sexual autonomy and eventually lower the age of consent? According to a sex survey done in schools last year, the age of consent is now unofficially 13! Will it undermine traditional values and beliefs? Right now, it is certainly undermining parents and eroding their parental rights.
So come on parents, stand up for your right to protect your children! They are our future!
Teachers, be brave and stand up for your right to fight for your values and principles and stand by your moral compass. We have to let them (the Scottish Parliament) know now that enough is enough!
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories related to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-authoritarianism-stalking-ireland/?fbclid=IwAR1eaRVbP0QgoOG48-K2O0m9j68f9sLXLW0r0x0nhvyvTXln9Hkea-j6LUg Denis Russell on the secondary school teacher who refused to address a gender transitioning student as they. 26/12/22
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11085685/Why-councils-spending-taxpayers-cash-drag-queens-read-children-Asks-KATHRYN-KNIGHT.html Kathryn Knight on council funding for drag queens’ storytelling 5/08/22
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/02/we-need-a-parents-revolt-against-woke-indoctrination/ Lauren Smith on why parents should revolt against the politicisation of education 02/01/23
https://wingsoverscotland.com/raise-all-of-the-flags/#more-134015 Rev Stuart Campbell on some of the legal implications of the GRRB should it be passed. 04/01/23
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teachers-to-strike-despite-hints-of-improved-pay-offer-698wghf56 Kieran Andrews’ discussion on the teachers strikes. 07/01/23
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/susan-dalgety-who-will-stand-up-for-scotlands-children-3976788 Susan Dalgety exploring threats to children and if professionals stand up for them or not 07/01/23
https://www.childinthecity.org/2023/01/03/four-strategies-to-improve-community-services-for-unaccompanied-children-in-the-united-states-draft/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%20week%202022-52&gdpr=accept Child in the city, children’s rights and child participation in political structures 03/01/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11656145/Nicola-Sturgeons-SNP-plans-ask-children-male-female-transgender-survey.html Michael Blackly reporting on further attempts by the SNP government to make school pupils participate in an explicit sex survey 20/01/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/nicola-sturgeon-and-the-truth-about-transphobia/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2021012023%20%20House%20ads%20%20AC+CID_57be1d257a3058cd1a56a9b0dc0b48f8 Brendan O’Neill explores some of the contradictions and philosophical problems with how the Scottish Government presents the trans issue. 17/01/23
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/snp-equalities-officer-threatened-beat-28189613John Ferguson’s article detailing some of the bile and hate coming from so-called ‘progressives’. 09/10/22
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Thank you for organising. I found you through an article in the Times today. We need you so much! Keep up the good work. We can defeat this ideological nonsense! So proud of the parent in Menstrie 👏