Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No32
Newsletter Themes: badly interpreted statistics, critical race theory, and American ‘anti-racism’
Parents tend to trust schools to teach children to be fair to others. We expect our children to treat others as their equals, because the need to treat people as individuals and without prejudice is a basic understanding on which our society is founded. As children approach adulthood and learn more about the world, they see that although the principle of equality is enshrined in law, it doesn’t always work in practice. Secondary school teachers in modern studies, geography and literature can help pupils to make sense of inequality and prejudice, but ultimately this is a political issue to be addressed in the adult world.
Schools can’t really teach anti-racism any more than they can teach us how to have faith or what party to vote for in an election. Each pupil’s understanding of the world needs to develop over time in relation to their peers, their families, their teachers and their experiences. The Scottish government’s ‘anti-racist’ education programme might work if we could guarantee teacher impartiality, but racism is a political issue and teachers have different views on immigration, national identity and ‘affirmative action’. So it’s not really feasible to write a coherent anti-racist curriculum, unless of course you tell teachers what to think and encourage them to do the same to their pupils. Consciously or unconsciously, the Scottish government and its education quangos are telling teachers to preach critical race theory (CRT), a divisive and reactionary ideology imported from academia.
This week, Stuart Waiton deconstructs some of the arguments about racial inequality being promoted among Scottish educationalists, Rachael Hobbs explains the origin of CRT and its limitations, and Kate Deeming looks at the discussion on race and education in the USA.
Everyone’s a racist! Oh, wait a minute...
Stuart Waiton is Chairperson of SUE
Racism is everywhere, or so you would believe if you listened to the authoritative voices echoing around our institutions, not least of all our educational institutions. The arguments justifying this understanding of ‘racist Scotland’ often ring hollow, but then we get the statistics that appear to prove the point.
Reading an article by Rohit Rao, an ‘anti-racism youth worker specialising in employability’, we find these two dimensions to the ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric. For example, Rao talks about the first ‘Empire Day’ that ‘took place in British classrooms 121 years ago’ and embodied ideas of racial inferiority. But then, in the next sentence, he unconvincingly jumps to today and explains that:
‘As a researcher into structural racism in Scottish schools I have been observing what this process has done to the generations originating from those colonised nations. Black students are still made to feel themselves to be inferior and less intelligent, and are often regarded as more criminal in the eyes of peers and those in authority.’
A seamless link is created by Rao between what happened in schools 121 years ago and today, as if in the years inbetween there has been no change, development or progress in the way we relate to black students – a seamless link that appears to lack any serious attempt to understand either history or the world we live in now.
However, Rao then gives us the statistics and explains that given this racist state of affairs, it ‘perhaps comes as little surprise therefore that there is a near 12 percentage point gap between White and non-White unemployment rates in Scotland, as of 2021’.
Rao is right about this, but if you bother to read the Scottish government report where this figure comes from, you will find something quite interesting. Here it is explained that the ‘ethnicity employment rate gap for women was estimated at 23.1 [percentage points]’, while ‘the gap for men was estimated at –1.5 [percentage points]’.
In other words, non-white men have a better employment rate than that of white men in Scotland. One would think that this may be a cause for celebration, perhaps even a statistic that would be heralded by our politicians as showing that Scotland is in fact far less racist than we may think.
Looking at these figures, it would seem that the issue is not race at all, but rather, sex: it is ethnic minority women who lag far behind in employment. Why might this be? We don’t know for sure, but it may be that for some non-white groups, more traditional and family-based ways of living have an impact on employment for women, and consequently, racism and ideas of racial ‘inferiority’ have little or perhaps nothing at all to do the 12-percent figure cited by Rao.
Rao goes on to note that only 1.6 percent of teachers are non-white. Given that 4.5 percent of the Scottish population are from ethnic minorities, this again appears to prove his point. But he has ignored the impact of sex differences, and given the fact that 89 percent of Scottish primary school teachers and 65 percent of secondary school teachers are female, perhaps we can again partly explain this statistic more in terms of ethnic minority women’s low employment rate, rather than this being to do with a supposedly racist education system. There may be other cultural factors that explain the smaller percentage of ethnic minority teachers that could well have nothing to do with an imagined racist education sector – a sector I work in and arguably one of the least racist places imaginable.
Unfortunately, the reality appears to be that our educationalists and race ‘experts’ will use statistics to fit into their pre-existing ideological belief that Scottish children and parents are racists and need to be made aware of this fact. In the process, new educational tools are developed, like this one, which has been produced by Scotdec and funded by the Scottish government.
Here we find a document developed through critical race theory, an ideological framework that many see as being divisive and racist, and once again we find that education turns into a form of political indoctrination, where white pupils are looked down on as embodying ‘white fragility’, and black students are separated off and represented as victims who need extra care.
In the process of developing this new form of ‘anti-racism’, the imagined structural or ‘systemic’ racism of Scottish school children is then addressed through the protection racket of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and the behaviour, language and values of pupils (and their parents) are made the focus of attention. Additionally, we find that teachers across the UK face potential disciplinary proceedings – or even the sack – if they question aspects of this ‘anti-racist’ education.
What starts out as a seemingly progressive and tolerant approach to education ends up as a new ‘caring’ type of authoritarianism, where only one view – the view that white children and parents are inherently racist – is taught as fact. Teaching contentious political ideologies as fact to children breaks a basic standard of education, and once again, we find that the Scottish government could be breaking the law by transforming schools from places of education to centres of indoctrination.
Critical race theory and the vested interests of division
Rachael Hobbs is a parent who works in education
There is something distinctly odd about the toppling of statues in quiet, leafy UK towns and cities. What’s odd is that this iconoclasm takes place in the absence of policed resistance, and years late to any battle. The self-indulgence of the woke when they collectively attack concrete and stone is irritating to anyone old enough to recall previous generations marching in real peril for real-time causes. Causes such as the miners’ strike, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, anti-apartheid, the Brixton riots, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall sometimes included the cathartic toppling of despots’ sculptures and monuments, often by impoverished masses.
Today, social media and academia are responsible for a rise in truly divisive and inflexible social justice–based ideologies driving or driven by identity politics, which ignite racial division and dogmatic thinking for a new generation with little experience of civic struggle.
The emergence of critical race theory (CRT) as a dominant identity politics is radicalism dressed as overdue morality; it is a narrow, vested interest and lazy distortion that the world is organised racially, with white people as oppressors and black people as permanently oppressed. It upholds that racism is embedded in all political and legal structures, and that this automatically disadvantages non-white people. All white people are oppressive, whether they are aware of it or not, due to these ‘structures’, hence the idea of ‘unconscious bias’ as a central belief, as well as ‘white privilege’.
The younger generation’s slide into the black-and-white thinking promoted by CRT has led to the historical racialisation of public and individual psyches. Terminology such as ‘microaggressions’, ‘minoritisation’, ‘positionality’ (position) now spring up in quite normal conversations. ‘Intersectionality’, a word which makes a crossroads of subcategories between inequalities, is used to make CRT appear less like the exclusive racial theory it is.
CRT has permeated UK schools in recent years. It is an unrequested import from America, where mainstream activism knows no bounds. It’s a subject lacking in any solidity and which conveniently adapts itself to whichever country’s particular history it needs to fit its doctrine. It was born from smaller scholarly roots, including ‘critical legal theory’, in the seventies, as well as aspects of the civil rights movement seeking tangible legal and political changes in American society.
During this era, it was increasingly understood that the category of ‘race’ was indeed a social and oppressive construct used to wield power over non-white people across different national histories. A consensus in favour of unity and a common humanity and equality emerged as central to western liberalism. However, in its modern form, CRT has become entirely rehinged on ‘race’ categorisation. This is because its belief that white supremacy continues in all western societies assumes that racialisation must be articulated and maintained in order to identify it. No matter how hard it tries to present itself as fact, CRT is horribly loaded and subjective. It is something that belongs within the parameters of graduate-level analysis, if anywhere at all, and yet it has landed in our schools. It has landed alone, with exclusion of other political theories.
CRT contains vehement activist philosophy which views liberalism and liberal society as racist ideology. One key tenet of CRT includes ‘interest convergence’, which cynically poses that white rulers only allow token change to improve racial inequality when it suits them. This ignores monumental changes in overcoming of racial oppression in history, and only looks at power through a narrow focus on self-interest. CRT patronisingly demands that white students examine their own white ignorance and become active ‘anti-racists’. A school of thought that demands activism is not really a school of thought – it is just activism.
So why are we teaching it in schools? There is no public consensus on the teaching of its ideology, and we face an inability of educators to grasp that (one-sided) ‘critical thinking’ for children during their school years is way beyond their stage of understanding, and that they should only be learning uncontested facts – not contested theories.
Parents are often unaware of how CRT has permeated school topics, including outsourced materials written by activist organisations. Don’t Divide Us (DDU) argues that the entire educational profession is saturated with ideology based on CRT, which endorses an extreme description of our society and history as systematically racist. This is not the same as presenting contested concepts in an objective way: ‘it is legitimising a radical ideology about race ... by delegitimising established, liberal ideas and practices about race (rooted in Enlightenment values and democratic politics).’ [1].
CRT is being used in schools across school policy, curriculum, professional development and associations (including exam boards). In Scotland, this is engrained within teacher training requirements; in order to qualify, trainee teachers must adhere to ‘social justice’ principles including, remarkably, ‘intersectionality’ [2].
CRT is inserted into teaching guidance. An example cited by DDU is Oxford Press guidance for teachers as part of a French language course: ‘Amplify new narratives. Of equal importance to representation is the acknowledgement of past history. The decolonisation of curricula to amplify new narratives is important for all educators today. When talking about French, it’s important to talk to students about how French came to be spoken in parts of the world other than France. We must lean into these conversations about colonisation, and ... bear in mind that issues discussed may be triggering for some.’ [3]. This is obviously partisan advice. Furthermore, 10- to 14-year-olds need to be taught about the language and culture of France rather than teaching them ‘Eurocentrism’.
‘Anti-racism’ children’s literature available within primary schools often now simplistically states that society is inherently racist – and this in libraries! DDU argue that this is a breach of the Education Act 1996 – to teach with impartiality. ‘Young minds cannot fathom social systems, racisms or systems of power; anti-racism stories and narratives further assume British racism as endemic and this is being conveyed via literature to children.’ [4]
The think tank Policy Exchange carried out a poll of young people’s political and cultural views. Nearly 60% of British school leavers said they had either been taught about at least one of ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘systemic racism’ – three concepts associated with applied CRT [5].
CRT’s critics are often accused of manufacturing a ‘culture war’; really, it is activists engineering this war and happily creating racial tension by ignoring, among other things, social inequality and telling a ‘race’ they are privileged – tell that to council estates and struggling families.
The outcome is a class-rooted backlash, wrongly diagnosed as racism or ‘hate’ whenever poor white kids react to the pious snobbery. In England, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has said that teachers who present the idea of white privilege as a fact are breaking the law and described CRT as ‘an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression’. [6]
Few would deny that black and ethnic minority people have historically faced diverse injustices, and it is not something that has ceased to exist now. However, CRT activists, with the help of the establishment, seem to be creating racial hatred from nothing except their own vested interest. CRT is such a reductionist approach to understanding racial inequality; it does not empower anyone. It undoes much of our history’s precious gains for equality. It is a dogma, and once adopted it is not questioned; it’s the exact opposite of critical thinking.
Policy Exchange recommends that Ofsted be made more accountable and that it must issue clearer guidance over impartiality in the curriculum. It also recommends that parents have the right to view curriculum content on request, and that external agencies must consent to this before they can be engaged by any school. Crucially, it proposes that Ofsted and the Department for Education define ‘structural’ critical theory as political, not moral, making it something which therefore cannot be taught as fact without breaching the Education Act. Policy Exchange proposes ‘A rebalancing of the curriculum from an equalities/harm perspective toward classical liberal ideals of free expression and tolerance for opposing political beliefs.’ [7]
Cynics see huge vested interest in the movement, which can also be said of all modern social justice theory nightmares gripping our young: ‘The academics, experts and workplace trainers that comprise the burgeoning diversity industry make a good living and find an important sense of purpose in revealing our unconscious bias, hearing penance and holding out the promise of absolution. They are morally invested in the existence of racism and cannot afford for it to ever disappear.’[8]. In the end, CRT dismisses and derides the personal dispositions and integrities of everyone, and cannot stand up to challenge, hence the refusal of its adherents to rise to any, preferring instead to tell the young to simply obey.
References
1. https://dontdivideus.com/partisan-politics-in-schools/.
2. https://www.gtcs.org.uk/professional-standards/professional-standards-for-teachers/.
3. https://dontdivideus.com/examples-of-politically-partisan-content-practices-professional-development-in-schools-part-2/.
4. https://dontdivideus.com/examples-of-politically-partisan-content-practices-professional-development-in-schools-part-2/.
5. The-Political-Culture-of-Young-Britain.pdf (policyexchange.org.uk) (p. 7).
6. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/nov/13/education-experts-counter-government-attack-on-critical-race-theory.
7. https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/the-political-culture-of-young-britain/ (p. 9).
8. https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/27/critical-race-theory-a-ruling-class-ideology/.
Review
Heather Mac Donald, DW Books (2023)
Kate E. Deeming is the SUE Parents and Supporters Coordinator for the Parent Support Group. She is also a solo mother to a P6 child, a dance artist, a child advocate and a community organiser. She has developed dance programmes with children in educational and community settings globally for three decades. Originally from Philadelphia, USA, she has been based in Glasgow for 23 years.
Where does ‘anti-racism’ get you? Decades ago, I worked in North Philadelphia in an area nicknamed ‘the badlands’ and populated by predominantly black and Latino residents. Pre-Internet, the neighbourhood was plagued by a raft of issues, including drug dens and gang drive-by shootings, but none of it made the news. The purpose-built community centre was a concrete bunker without windows (to protect its inhabitants from stray bullets). And the city was pumping millions of dollars into programmes in the area (one of which I was part of) to offset the endemic issues. I did – successfully – create an island in the storm for kids by developing theatre and performance programmes that I was proud of. The kids would come into the centre with stories of child pregnancy, shootings they had witnessed (maybe their friends had been caught; a particular time resonates when a group of them were cackling about a kid’s eye being shot out – the ricochet was particularly comedic I guess), family abuse and general dysfunction. Many did not have stable or even permanent homes.
Decades on and millions if not billions of pounds later, has there been an extraordinary transformation within these communities? Is it amazing? Is it safe? Turns out it’s worse. The good intentions, funds and government programmes have not provided the magic bullet as was intended, as was hoped. I hoped it would be so; certainly from within my concrete room, we at least had a pause.
Many of us grew up with resonances of Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Because I, as most, care and want to live in a world free of racism where people are not judged by the colour of their skin but the content of their character.
And when here in Scotland I saw the new so-called ‘anti-racist’ policies being implemented post George Floyd, with no sense of criticality, I paused. First, I did not see how adopting an American system here would be relevant. Second, having lived, worked and implemented many successful projects in the most culturally diverse area of Scotland (Pollokshields), it made no practical sense.
I have a quiet ‘dis-ease’ with the new mantra coming from the likes of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and ‘anti-racism’ emitting from every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) department not because I have some secret identity as a white supremacist but because, inherently, I know it does not make sense. With no widespread critical thinking to this approach to their efficacy and goals, what does one do?
Enter Heather Mac Donald to make some sense of it all. A pre-eminent scholar on the effects of the new cult of anti-racism in America (with one chapter dedicated to Scottish Opera), her book tackles this issue in great detail. She makes the case that this superficial reckoning along racial lines is systemically bringing greater destruction in the fields of medicine, arts, crime and policing, academia, schools and government, where skin colour is treated as a scientific qualification, and is undermining the very bedrock of what makes societies stable. And in the aftermath we witness utter destruction to the very people we were purporting to ‘elevate’.
The theory on which current anti-racism theory sits is called ‘disparate impact theory’. Simply put, if a population is 10% black and 90% white then all jobs must represent this racial breakdown. If the workplace or institution does not have this particular racial profile, the only reason it does not ... is racism. There is no agency or personal accountability in this belief system. And there is no agency given to those who do achieve success in their field even with a particular racial profile. Heather Mac Donald shows with countless examples how this regressive, nihilistic and dystopian theory is destroying our world, elevating mediocrity and further destabilising communities. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Mac Donald’s examples include the following.
In medical schools, where:
Pure science courses are being replaced with credit-bearing advocacy training wherein doctors must be able to articulate their own ‘identities, power and privileges’.
‘Diversity in medical research’ becomes the main concern of philanthropic funders.
academic victim studies are elevated to such a degree that a doctor is unable to suggest that a black person could be responsible for his or her own health, because the only possible reason for ill health is racism.
In arts and music:
A costly diversity bureaucracy at the cost of not funding artists themselves, as seen by the Met Opera hire of a Chief Diversity Officer who was brought in with a six-figure salary and with no background in opera, let alone music.
Minority applications to music schools have increased but admissions stayed low because of lack of qualification. Mac Donald points to the fact that over the past 60 years two of the three main sources for exposing a child to classical music – a music promoting culture and music education – have dried up. Without exposure to music at home, children are unlikely to become musicians or even develop an interest in music.
In combatting crime:
Decades of successful crime fighting has been forgotten, allowing violence and predation to go unchecked. The idea of ‘systemic racism’ is so accepted, without question, that one might be surprised to find the reason the term was coined was because when they were looking for actual individuals in positions of power who were discriminating on the basis of race, they could not find any.
Mac Donald does a very thorough analysis of crime statistics, considering that it is not racism which is keeping these communities in states of violence and chaos but the culture within the communities themselves. As one example, she points to (as I had witnessed) the lack of family stability leading to higher rates of gang culture.
Black-on-black crime is something society does not want to address, although the repercussions are massive. Mac Donald shows how the inordinate attention given to mass shootings by white perpetrators is not representative statistically in any way of the behaviour of citizens.
She exposes, via facts and examples, the utterly feckless activism which is polluting our schools, cultural institutions and communities and which provides a salve to those in power – the illusion they are actually doing something but without making any change on the ground. Does this make black people healthier? Does this help the children from neighbourhoods like North Philadelphia, where I worked, to become doctors, opera singers, scientists? Does it make their communities safer? Does it make their education better?
In the end, she makes a case – a plea – for us to reclaim culture, reward achievement and hard work, and value beauty. This is a book for anyone who needs to make sense of the failures of our new ‘anti-racism’ frameworks with data and facts. For anyone who is actually interested in addressing inequality, read this:
‘Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.’
Malcolm X
Resource: ‘Anti-racist’ education in Scotland
One teacher has helpfully produced a summary of ‘anti-racist’ education resources provided for Scotland’s teachers. We welcome your thoughts on what is wrong with the curriculum content and ideas about what would be appropriate content for children on racism and anti-racism.
1] National Improvement Hub: the central hub for teachers
Promoting race equality and anti-racist education | Resources | National Improvement Hub
2] Education Scotland
Education Scotland is a Scottish government executive agency responsible for supporting quality and improvement in Scottish education.
An example video link from Education Scotland:
Story of the Building Racial Literacy Programme – Part 3
Find out more about the Building Racial Literacy programme: https://professionallearning.education.gov.scot/learn/programmes/building-racial-literacy/
And the new National Anti-Racism Framework and ‘anti-racist’ curriculum:
Launch of new National Anti-Racism Framework for Initial Teacher Education | News | Education Scotland
Breaking the mould: Principles for an anti-racist curriculum | Resources | Education Scotland
3] Government policies, reviews and groups
A group to help develop a set of actions which address race inequality in schools in Scotland:
Anti-Racism in Education Programme - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
4] Additional players who support the work, for example the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), unions (e.g. Educational Insitute of Scotland, EIS) environmental charities and local authorities
Entries open for Saroj Lal Award for a Pioneering Spirit in Equality and Diversity - The General Teaching Council for Scotland GTC Scotland News – The General Teaching Council for Scotland
Various useful new ‘anti-racist’ education resources from the EIS:
New Anti-Racist Education Resources | EIS
From WOSDEC, an organisation ‘supporting educators throughout the West of Scotland to develop their skills in Global Citizenship, Learning for Sustainability and Rights-based Learning’:
Anti-Racism in the Classroom: Global Citizenship Approaches Tickets, Wed 13 Sep 2023 at 16:00 | Eventbrite
‘This practical course explores ways to adopting an anti-racist approach within both primary and secondary contexts.’
5] Third-party (government-supported) organisations that give ‘credibility’ to the work
The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights works to ‘promote racial justice across Scotland’ and ‘structural racism in Scotland’:
Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER, www.crer.org.uk)
6] School policy
Building Racial Literacy | Newark Primary School (glowscotland.org.uk)
News roundup
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10768707/When-Britain-wake-danger-giving-puberty-blockers-children.html?ito=email_share_article-top Sue Reid, Leo’s shattered body and the horror story from Sweden that reveals spinal fractures, stunted growth and porous bones are linked to life-changing trans treatments ... so when WILL Britain wake up to the danger of giving puberty blockers to children? 30/04/23
https://unherd.com/2023/08/the-trouble-with-conversion-therapy/ Dr Anna Hutchinson, The trouble with conversion therapy. Anything other than affirmation is deemed abusive. 29/08/23
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/ John McWhorter, The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility. The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people. 15/07/23
https://thecritic.co.uk/its-wrong-to-lie-to-children/ Stephanie Davis-Arai, It’s wrong to lie to children. The Department of Education should learn this simple lesson. 30/08/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23759926.glasgow-city-council-scraps-essential-childrens-library-service/?ref=ebln&nid=1220&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=010923 James McEnaney, Glasgow City Council scraps ‘essential’ children’s library service. Glasgow City Council has scrapped its lending library for schools and plans to sell off the resources to educational institutions across the city, the Herald can reveal. 01/09/23
https://www.transgendertrend.com/17-yr-olds-fast-tracked-adult-gender-services-nhs/ TransgenderTrend, 17-yr-olds to be fast tracked to adult gender services by the NHS. 31/08/23
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00098655.2018.1533797?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab Mary E. Styslinger, (abstract free) Becoming Teachers for Social Justice: Raising Critical Consciousness.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-trans-ideology-took-over-iceland/ David Gunnlaugsson, How trans ideology took over Iceland. 29/08/23
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66693802 Thomas Mackintosh, Suella Braverman: Home Secretary orders review into police impartiality. 02/09/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sex-education-scandal/ Clare Page, The sex education scandal. 31/08/23
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This, ancient, delve into what worked in US inner cities always sticks in my mind. What I seem to recall as the central insight is, that young people, for whom the prognosis was either death or jail by the age of 18, survived by having what she calls a 'Wizard' in their lives. Pre Harry Potter, what she means is an adult with a real cogent sense of purpose and authority; regardless of their particular 'specialism', basket ball, Scouts, dance, whatever.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED371056