V A L U E S

Jan 13, 2023

The Scottish Union for Education aims to involve more people from communities, including parents, grandparents and educators, to improve Scottish educational establishments as places of learning rather than sites of activism.

In particular, we aim to promote schools (and wider forms of education) as places to develop education and subject-based knowledge, rather than as places for the government and education authorities to push their values onto children: Values that often run counter to those of parents and communities.

In government and educational documents, such as Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools and The Standard for Headship, and in approaches that promote ‘embedding race equality in schools’, or that promote new forms of sex education (often encouraged by advocacy groups), we find that being a teacher is less and less about being an educator and increasingly about ‘committing to social justice’.

Rather than promoting schools as places of learning, where subject knowledge is central, we find that schools are becoming places where age-inappropriate materials and messages are pushed onto children, and where highly contested ideas of gender fluidity and transgenderism are promoted from primary school onwards.

Contested ideologies and political causes, including Critical Race Theory that demands that we ‘decolonise the curriculum’, embed anti-racism in ‘all aspects of school life’ (indeed in every subject), or that promotes a problem of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’, are developing in schools and in higher education as an unquestioned doctrine. Instead of opening the minds of pupils and students to different perspectives, this approach appears to be closing them down.

Rather than parents being involved in what is happening in schools, they are often excluded, or we find that the role of the teacher as ‘corporate parent’ is to educate the parent in the new, ‘correct’ values. This is not part of an open education; it is closer to a form of political indoctrination.

We believe that the role of school as educator and the role of parents as governors of children’s private, personal, and moral life, is being confused. Indeed, as one educational expert noted, ‘When it comes to the politicisation of the curriculum, Scotland stands at the forefront of turning education into a form of mass social engineering’.

These developments risk having a detrimental effect on children, parents and indeed on teachers. These values are not only pushed onto parents and children but also onto teachers who risk losing their jobs, or at the very least, are unlikely to be employed or to be promoted if they do not champion these prescribed social justice values.

All the while, standards of education in Scotland are going backwards, helped at least in part by a school system that is losing a sense of a knowledge and subject-based form of education: the very approach that has the advantage of encouraging young people to look outwards into the world rather than encouraging them to look ever inwards, into themselves, and their ‘identity’.

The Scottish Union for Education - Education Not Indoctrination.