Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No50
Newsletter Themes: converting our children, the love of a good book, and the destruction of libraries
Earlier this month the Scottish government launched its consultation on its proposed legislation on conversion therapy. The proposals, like so much of Scottish government lawmaking, are not driven by a real social need but a desire to show the world that Scotland is ‘progressive’. As Malcolm Clark has reported, there is very little evidence of any conversion therapy taking place in Scotland or the rest of the UK. Given that conversion therapy is largely a phantom of the policy-makers’ imagination, the new law instead refers to ‘conversion practices’ – a term that could encompass any act of non-coercive and potentially beneficial therapy, persuasion or argument.
Some therapists and churches are very concerned about this legislation criminalising exploratory psychotherapy (see, for example, the position of the UK Council for Psychotherapy) or prayer. The new law, if passed, may seem marginal, but it strikes at the very heart of the family and informal relations between adults and children. SUE urge you to go online, read the proposed law, and respond to the consultation. The deadline for responses is Tuesday 2 April. We will be carrying articles on the proposals and how we can stop them over the next two months.
This week we’ve been thinking about reading and the importance of good books. Our schools seem to have very low expectations about what children should and can read. And when it comes to the classics, the plans to ‘decolonise’ lessons and libraries mean that children are increasingly deprived of access to good and great literature. Reading Jane Austen or George Eliot and reciting Burns or Byron is not just an educational task, it’s about self-reflection, and more importantly, it’s a way to see the world through the eyes of others. The chance to rise above your own individual experience is at the heart of education. The ‘decolonisers’ who want to remove the classics from teaching and libraries just because they were written by people who were not downtrodden at a time of societal inequality don’t understand literature or education.
Kate Deeming is making plans to produce SUE booklists for parents to give to their children and their schools, and Diane Rasmussen McAdie reports on the move to decolonise libraries in Cambridge.
Penny Lewis, Editor
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Launching SUE READS
Kate Deeming is SUE’s Parent and Supporters Group Coordinator.
I have often heard, ‘it doesn’t matter what your child reads, as long as they read’. This is not strictly true. My son is stuck in a Diary of a Wimpy Kid loop. In our ‘child-led’ model of learning, it’s the only book he seems to reach for. I like Diary of a Wimpy Kid well enough, but let’s not fool ourselves – it’s not introducing him to a vast array of ideas, vocabulary or depth of experience from a reading perspective.
At the time I was growing up in Philadelphia, we had school booklists we had to choose from. We got to decide, but our chosen book just had to be on the list. This was good; it meant I had to read things I didn’t think I would like, and sometimes – surprising even to me – did. But even when I didn’t like what was on offer, it made me stretch myself and my perceptions. And let’s be honest, in life you don’t always get to pick your reading. We need to learn to follow other people’s instincts at times. This teaches genuine diversity of thought.
In the six months I have been in post as SUE’s Parent and Supporters Group coordinator, I have spoken to dozens of parents and individuals concerned about the failing state of Scottish education. I have heard copious horrific accounts of parents’ individual problems with their schools – in both lesson content and engagement. And I have also heard about the aspirations they have for children.
As I’ve observed in my son’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid loop, many can see that their schools’ educational standards have being downgraded. Some can see how children in other countries are faring much better. My one German friend has his niece staying with him for a high-school exchange. She says that the school she has been placed in (a very high-achieving school by Scottish standards) is two years behind what she is learning at her (standard) German high school. Another father I spoke to with dual Nigerian–UK passports tells me he is considering taking his child back to Nigeria for high school, where (at least) they can find and pay for good schooling. Personally, I can see the huge knowledge gap between my own son and my nieces and nephews in the States. And I could go on.
If the copious amounts of blarney being provided to our children is akin to junk food, perhaps we should focus on giving an ‘educational vitamin boost’.
With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to SUE’s latest initiative: SUE READS. SUE will be compiling lists of good reads for children. These will be books SUE thinks every child should have on their metaphorical (or actual) bookshelf. We hope these will provide an island in the storm of the ideological drive and failing standards corrupting our children’s lives, and that parents, schools and organisations can utilise them as a valuable reference to buoy up Scottish students.
Over the next four weeks, we will be compiling book titles with the aim of launching these lists on World Book Day, 7 March 2024. We would love your help! Our four-question survey asks what book or books YOU think should be on every child’s bookshelf.
Please complete it as soon as you can:
Together, we can get our kids reading more, reading better, and improving education one book at a time
#SUEreads #ReadingScotland #ScotlandReading
Decolonising the library
Diane Rasmussen McAdie, a professor of social informatics, reports on the decolonisation of our university libraries.
Following Rachael Hobbs’ review of Doug Stokes’ book Against Decolonisation (Polity, 2023) in SUE Newsletter No48, I thought it would be useful to examine some real-life decolonisation activities within UK education to demonstrate its impact on our students and our society.
Decolonisation operates on the belief that everyone who is not white is disadvantaged because they are not white. That white people violently colonised non-white societies and forced them to become Westernised. And that white people, the ‘colonisers’, are the ‘oppressors’ or the ‘settlers’, and non-white people are the ‘oppressed’.
The former British Empire is presented as a prime example of colonisation. Some left-leaning academics believe that white people must acknowledge their ‘white guilt’ and compensate non-whites for their ‘white privilege’ by ‘decolonising’. Decolonisation does not involve other characteristics that some academics identify as marginalised, such as gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, or disability; only ‘whiteness’.
How is decolonisation performed? Stokes outlined some of Cambridge University’s decolonisation work, which deserves further investigation. Decolonise Sociology @ Cambridge, the oldest decolonisation group at Cambridge, works to ‘decolonise’ the sociology curriculum. This means prioritising non-white/non-European authors in required reading lists, for example. Almost any educator would likely see including a range of perspectives on a social science reading list as an advantage to any course design, but prioritising non-white authors at a university established in England almost 1000 years ago seems to fly in the face of the proud and distinguished history that the University holds.
Cambridge’s museum system has been undergoing decolonisation as well. Replicas of sculptures from ancient Greek and Roman times made from plaster of Paris, a practical substance that is white by its nature, have been criticised for their ‘whiteness’ and are now accompanied by signs explaining that their white colour draws needed attention to diversity.
As a librarian by profession, I have been following the decolonisation efforts within Cambridge’s libraries for some time. Informed in part by the University’s Race Equality Network, the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group works on supposedly racist concerns to be found and repaired within the libraries’ services, catalogue records, and library collections. According to their website, ‘there is a huge and arguably endless amount of work to be done’.
Some of this group’s efforts have been highlighted through a book chapter in Narrative Expansions: Interpreting decolonisation in academic libraries (edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt, Facet Publishing, 2022). A chapter authored by the Cambridge University Decolonising Through Critical Librarianship Group, explained that the move to decolonise library collections originated from student groups. Cambridge has 31 separate subject-based libraries, and these libraries have been approaching decolonisation locally. For example, the chapter presents the localised classification scheme that has been developed recently for the needs of the Scott Polar Research Institute’s library, because:
‘… it was founded 100 years ago, at a time when geography as a discipline was being institutionalised under British imperialism ... the tools of geography have often been used for colonial purposes, and this colonial presence endures at SPRI, not least in the library, whose space, collections, and cataloguing systems reflect the Whiteness and imperial history of the Institute.’ (p. 183)
The same chapter explains the work done on Cambridge’s Cartonera collection. In this case, librarians have added the original language of the authors and the books (mostly Portuguese) to their corresponding library catalogue records, primarily written in English. According to the chapter, the libraries’ English-based cataloguing practices and standards comprise…
‘… a system created by and for White English-language speakers in the Global North, so using it to deal with material created and consumed by non-English-speaking communities in the Global South reinforces White supremacist colonial structures and narratives.’ p. 181)
Some performative acts of decolonisation, such as land acknowledgement statements, will be unfamiliar to British citizens because the British were the settlers. In a land acknowledgement statement, someone with settler ancestors, such as a white academic born in Canada, will provide in an email signature or at the start of a conference presentation, an acknowledgement that they live on settled or stolen land. The text provides some guidance for white Canadian residents on how to write a land acknowledgement statement, along with an example. I saw a white Australian recite one of these statements in relation to Aboriginal land in front of a mostly British audience at an event in London last year; it seemed evident that most audience members did not understand the relevance of this statement.
Bringing this into a very current context, I have seen academics claiming they ‘stand with Yemen’ in response to the past week’s UK and US–led attacks on the Houthis, a Yemeni militant movement, which were a sudden response to a complex situation. In reality, the UK and USA have been supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen for the past decade.
The pro-Palestine demonstrations on university campuses that ultimately led to the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill have been driven by university decolonisation activists. They believe that Hamas members are freedom fighters, Palestinians are the oppressed, and Israelis are the oppressors, so Palestine must be decolonised, thereby justifying the Hamas attack on 7 October last year.
The University and College Union (UCU, the trade union for UK academics) has officially condemned violence on both sides but has taken a largely pro-Palestine stance on social media, which led a frightened London-based Jewish academic colleague to ask me why UCU cannot simply focus on education and stay out of politics.
The answer, of course, is academia’s decolonisation agenda, not the interests of the British public. Stokes cited a 2021 Independent article entitled ‘Less than a quarter of people agree with decolonising curriculum, poll suggests’; the poll also found that 31% disagree with decolonising the curriculum, and 33% did not have an opinion. The article quoted Jo Grady, UCU’s General Secretary, a white woman: ‘The level of hostility towards decolonising activity in UK higher education shows just how far we have to go to tackle systemic racism.’
Does the perceived need to decolonise the curriculum only reside within left-leaning academics’ minds, or is it a real need that resounds with the British public, our students, and their future employers?
I have worked at universities in the USA, Canada, and the UK, and I have taught numerous students from countries with supposedly ‘oppressed’ majority non-white populations; they were eager to learn at Western institutions, seeking a better education than they believe they can obtain in their native country. Imagine an overseas student coming to study literature at a UK university, only to find that studies of Shakespeare and Chaucer have been set aside in favour of non-English writing. Non-English writing certainly has tremendous value and should be studied, of course, but it is not what students at Cambridge would expect to prioritise.
Decolonisation advocates believe the process is anti-racist, although it is difficult to see how it can be anything other than reverse racism, with all the blame for oppression placed on white people, regardless of how long ago, or if, their ancestors may have been involved in ‘colonising’ and stealing land from indigenous, non-white populations.
Opponents argue that decolonisation erases Western culture and civilisation. Stokes concluded, ‘Failure to grasp the importance of this [philosophical deconstruction and decolonisation] means that the precious flame of freedom may be fully extinguished’ (p. 150). In October 2023, responding to the Israel–Hamas conflict, James Lindsay labelled decolonisation as ‘violence’ and blames it for the ‘strange death of Europe’.
Last week, I wrote about plagiarism at the highest level of academia and how it posed a real threat to the quality of education throughout the world; decolonisation also poses a threat to the foundation of Western education. As overseas students continue to travel to Western universities, will they see it as a disadvantage if the decolonising of the curriculum continues and they are not exposed to Scottish Enlightenment–style approaches to seeking truth and objective reality? Will employers in the UK, as well as employers abroad who hire UK university graduates, want to know that everything they have been taught is from other countries?
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, and its long-standing educational traditions should not be replaced, as the critics of decolonisation fear they may. The exposure to a range of ideas and perspectives should already be present in university curricula. That said, decolonisation ties in directly with equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and other leftist ideals that detract from subject-based education, scientific research, intellectual debate, and free speech. If these continue to infiltrate our institutions and indoctrinate our students, then Stokes will prove to be correct about the fully extinguished precious flame of freedom.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://nypost.com/2023/12/12/news/seattle-high-schooler-marked-incorrect-for-saying-only-women-can-get-pregnant-on-quiz-report/ Allie Griffin, Seattle high schooler marked incorrect on quiz for saying only women can get pregnant: report. 12/12/23
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/24/observer-view-schools-guidance-gender-identity-could-help-us-move-on-from-toxic-debate Editorial, The Observer view: schools guidance on gender identity could help us move on from this toxic debate. 24/12/23
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/more-than-70-children-aged-3-and-4-referred-to-nhs-gender-clinic-5553817 Rachel Roberts, More Than 70 Children Aged 3 And 4 Referred To NHS Gender Clinic. The NHS has called for a minimum age of seven for child referrals for therapy following revelations about a London clinic, which will close next year. 27/12/23
https://substack.com/home/post/p-140167703?source=queue Dave Clements, Making sense of educational success. In 2023, concerns about progress and well-being, parent power and a little optimism. 29/12/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/viewpoint/24011859.scottish-schools-pupils-lack-basics-literacy-numeracy/ Michael Gregson, Scottish schools: Pupils lack basics of literacy and numeracy. 28/12/23
Joanna Williams, Labour plans bring politics into the nursery. Real choice means also helping parents who want to stay at home to raise their children. 01/01/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24028519.new-scots-teachers-leaving-profession-citing-classroom-violence/?ref=ebln&nid=1220&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=050124 Catriona Stewart, New Scots teachers leaving the profession citing classroom violence. 05/01/24
https://archive.is/ahm9N Helen Brown, Johnny Ball: ‘The BBC has destroyed children’s television’. The former TV presenter on his time in the RAF and his relationship with his daughter, Zoe. 07/01/24
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1853950/snp-latest-news-humza-yousaf-transgender-laws Max Parry, Outrage as SNP proposes ‘seven years in jail’ for parents who refuse kids’ gender change. Parents may even be prosecuted pre-emptively, before any refusal about their child changing gender takes place. 10/01/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/viewpoint/24034762.conversion-therapy-will-scotlands-next-culture-war/ Neil McKay, Conversion therapy will be Scotland’s next culture war. 09/01/24
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I think what many of these decolonisation proponents don’t realise is that a big part of their frame for bringing about this movement comes from the very thing they criticise. Like Rob Henderson’s writing on luxury beliefs. The real problem will be when with no foundation how society moves forward. With no broad knowledge, with the expulsion of western texts ... I cannot even imagine. Was thinking about this a few years ago in relation to the Bible. Most kids will have no knowledge of the writing in the Bible. Now religious or not this is a significant absence culturally and historically speaking