Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No94
Themes: role models, and rites of passage
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It was one of our regular writers who spotted in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) the article all about the malign influence of ‘toxic male role models’ like Andrew Tate, the YouTube big mouth who spouts about what it means to be a ‘real’ man.
We’ll be looking at the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ soon; it’s a term I often think could comfortably be shortened to just masculinity at a time when, as ‘anti-feminist feminist’ Christina Hoff Sommers has noted, there is a War Against Boys.
It never occurs to our betters that the malign influence may be them, or that their ‘enlightened’ concerns about boys may be yet another part of the culture war, or part of an elitist project of trying to ‘change the culture’.
Following news that school exclusions in England are skyrocketing, even for primary-school kids, perhaps one of the ‘cultures’ that could do with a change is that of schools themselves and their seeming inability to maintain a disciplined environment.
We’ll be looking at this issue next week, not least because in all the talk about the problem of discipline in schools there appears to be a remarkable blind spot, one that can find all sorts of explanations for the problem except the most obvious one: the loss of teacher authority in the classroom.
Perhaps if teachers or writers for the TES are looking for role models for boys, they could start with themselves and ask whether their brand of therapeutic wellbeing management is going to inspire the men of tomorrow.
Last week, SUE supporters handed out our leaflet about transgender ideology in schools. They chose Downfield Primary in Dundee because it was the first primary school in Scotland to receive an LGBT badge of honour through the LGBT Youth Scotland award scheme. They found that it was best to do this at home-time and to give leaflets to parents in their cars or when they were walking away from the school with their children.
They received a good reception from a number of parents but not from the rather flustered headteacher who didn’t want leaflets to be handed out. Now at least many of the parents will know what is being taught in their school and we’ll see how things pan out from here.
It would be interesting to know what the people who are so concerned about ‘malign influencers’ think of this school and the many others like it that don’t appear to understand what a boy or a girl is, let alone be able to provide role models for them.
Last week, there was also a report that came out explaining that when it comes to useful information about education, Scottish schools are a data ‘black hole’. One of the heroes of standards in our schools, Professor Lindsay Paterson, explained that ‘it is effectively impossible to track learning or teaching, to assess the outcome of schooling for leavers, and therefore to evaluate government policies intended to improve schooling’.
Perhaps Professor Paterson could act as a role model for our educational establishment and give them a few ideas about how to resolve this problem. After all, as he notes, if we don’t know what’s working and not working, ‘we cannot credibly assess and remedy our problems’.
My advice for schools and headteachers as a kick-off would be to drop the badges, awards and honours, all the pats on the head for being an officially right-thinking school, and simply focus on the basics of reading and writing – all helped, of course, by teachers who know how to effectively manage the classroom and who don’t think that raising your voice is a form of child abuse.
We heard last week about how the agenda to sexualise childhood is being pursued in schools in Northern Ireland. There, as in Scotland, age-inappropriate sexual content embedded in lessons is becoming another distraction in classrooms. However, in Scotland there is some good news about an independent school that I suspect will have few of the problems I’ve touched on here.
Helped by Fotini Hamplova, who set up the brilliant Search Good Books website, a new primary school is opening next August in Edinburgh. With an ethos based on a belief in classical education, this school will actually be prioritising the education of children. Let’s hope that it can provide a role model for Scotland about what a school should be all about.
So, if you’re a teacher looking for some meaningful work, or a parent desperate to give your kids the best start in life, check out the leaflet about St Andrew’s Orthodox Church School – a school that one suspects will be creating a culture of learning, the only culture that really matters if we want to help the next generation and indeed to help Scotland create an enlightened education system to be proud of.
Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE
Children need freedom and leadership
Simon Knight has a PhD in Education from the University of Strathclyde. He has been working with children and young people in a variety of social care, youth work and school contexts for 35 years.
The majority of normal people in the UK still think of childhood as being different to adulthood – as a time of growth, learning and development, when children are travelling towards something qualitatively different to what they currently are. A time when they are in need of instruction and direction, as well as protection from malevolent adults. A time when they are not able to consent to rash, life-changing decisions and can experiment and get things wrong without having to face the full consequences of their actions.
How then do children progress to adulthood?
It has to be much more than simply a natural process of gradually getting older. Some of the journey is under instruction from adults through formal and informal education, the transmission of knowledge accumulated over generations. Other areas involve moral guidance from parents, extended family members, officially sanctioned adults and, to a significantly lesser extent now than in the past, members of the wider community and strangers, upholding social norms and mores.
All these processes have declined in recent decades. In schools, for example, we find that the idea of educational leadership has changed, and that ‘educational theorists and academics involved in teacher training’ have increasingly ‘promoted the idea that the good teacher is child-centred rather than knowledge-centred’. [1]
Of course, this idea of child-centred learning is both true and also untrue. Educationalists like to pretend that kids lead the way in education, but we all know that this is a ruse – educationalists only pretend that the curriculum is co-created.
While children’s egos are being massaged, top-down ‘progressive’ agendas are being delivered – sexualising children, feeding them fantasy stories about being born in the wrong body, and teaching them that they are the truly enlightened generation, who are to be tasked with educating their racist or oppressive parents.
One problem with the child-centred approach is that it can encourage a form of narcissism – the clue’s in the name.
Being self-centred is limiting, and in reality the individual emerges by joining – not separating – their ‘self’ from the established adult world. Becoming part of something enables children to subordinate their immediate desires, allowing them to think about ‘doing the right thing’ rather than the thing that is simply about themselves and how they feel.
Developing a conscience is a social process; the metaphorical angel and demon sitting on your shoulder don’t magically appear by themselves.
But if the role of adults as leaders appears to be declining, there is also another important part of childhood that is doing the same, and that is the realm of relative freedom, where children and then adolescents experience what used to be called rites of passage.
Helped by a growing climate of uncertainty and a declining sense of trust in society, safety – and the safety of children in particular – has become a growing concern that impacts on children and indeed upon childhood.
Our rites of passage in the past came in a variety of forms: the walk to school, the wall you climbed, the scary jump from one wall to the other – there were myriad little things we did every day, away from adults and any form of supervision. It’s impossible for this to be entirely taken away from children, but I suspect the extent to which it happens today is miniscule compared with just a generation ago.
Schools are not oblivious to this shortfall in important opportunities for lessons in life. But some things need to be learned through experience and cannot be taught. As we turn play into ‘safe play’, and as free time becomes time monitored by adults, there is in a sense no ‘passage’, or at least the nature of this process and experience is transformed.
So too with moral decision making. Space is truly the final frontier. Allowing children the space to make their own rules, to explore their own world, and to make their own mistakes is a vital part of being a child and growing up.
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, for example, understood that ‘children need to coordinate current beliefs with alternatives’. Arguing with peers ‘is the only social context that can generate authentic coordination’, he said.
Having an adult present, acting as umpire, fundamentally alters the discourse and precludes negotiation and joint concession followed by cooperation. Children may well act in a civilised way, but ‘acting’ is precisely what they are doing.
For many boys, scarier than jumping walls were girls! Adults can never replicate the private and very personal first steps in forming relationships. But today they appear to be trying to do just that.
Just imagine the torture, or at least the strangeness, of the ‘sex survey’ in schools or the RSHP lessons that Scottish children are almost compelled to participate in.
Actually, we don’t have to imagine, because at SUE we get reports of the uncomfortable or ‘weird’ lessons kids receive. One parent even explained how their child started crying when some of the sexualised subject matter was shoved in front of them. And as Dr Carlton Brick explained last week, there is no actual evidence that any of this intrusive education does anything that it is supposed to do.
So, what is an adult?
This is a question that is too big to answer. Indeed, it is one that changes over time, but crucially it would appear that to answer this question we need to have a good idea about what culture and what type of society we want to create.
And here’s the rub. When our ‘experts’ tell us they’re being ‘child-centred’, it may be a bit of a ruse but it also embodies a certain loss of leadership, of adult judgement, and of a world where children are given a clear, coherent and inspiring sense of what it means to be an adult – an adult who is part of something bigger than his- or herself.
Ironically, it seems that only when adults have a certain confidence about their values and their society do they also feel able to allow children, and especially adolescents, the freedom they need to mature. Some things must be taught by adults and other things can never be taught by them. Both are vital, yet both are being undermined by our somewhat empty and intrusive ‘child-centred’ educators.
References
[1] Joanna Williams: ‘In defence of standards in education’
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
Amanda Kovattana, Growing Up as a Tomboy in Thailand. We understood that wearing clothes of the opposite sex meant you were a kathoey. 18/11/24
https://archive.ph/2024.11.18-010506/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/sex-education-programme-blamed-for-rise-in-number-of-trans-children-2zszmg22h George Mair, Sex education programme blamed for rise in number of trans children. Critics of the government’s relationships, sexual health and parenthood education programme, introduced in 2014, say it has promoted transgender ideology. 18/11/24
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/11/15/put-climate-change-and-diversity-at-heart-of-school-curriculum-oxford-and-cambridge-exam-board-tells-labour/ Dr Nicholas Tate, “Put Climate Change and Diversity at Heart of School Curriculum,” Oxford and Cambridge Exam Board Tells Labour. 15/11/24
https://archive.is/5yQMY Ben Rumsby, Teenage girl banned over transgender remark appeals with help of group assisting Allison Pearson. Exclusive: Free Speech Union appoints barrister to fight ban amid outrage over punishment for 17-year-old’s comment to ‘bearded’ opponent. 18/11/24
Malcolm Clark, What Did the BBC Know About LGBT Youth Scotland? Rosie Millard's resignation is hugely important. Now Children in Need must reveal what checks it ran into LGBT Youth Scotland after the group's CEO was jailed for child abuse. If any… 23/11/24
https://archive.is/JyGm3 Gwyn Wright, Children in Need chairman quits over payments to scandal-hit LGBT charity. Rosie Millard accuses BBC charity of ‘institutional failure’ in scathing letter to chief executive. 21/11/24
https://freespeechunion.org/school-removes-christmas-references-from-panto-to-make-children-feel-safe-and-valued/ Frederick Attenborough, School removes Christmas references from panto to make children feel ‘safe and valued’. 20/11/24
https://archive.is/lO1aY Neil MacKay, Scottish teachers plan bold classroom revolution to ‘save childhood’. 24/11/24
https://archive.is/aDWK3 Jim Norton, Meet the feminist ex-punk backed by Labour to change your child’s education. A supporter of Starmer’s pledge to break the ‘class ceiling’, Becky Francis has made it her life’s mission to level the playing field. 20/11/24
https://archive.is/6h3BE Robert Tombs, Labour will leave our children ignorant about Britain’s past – making us all more divided. A Left-wing sociologist is now in charge of the school curriculum. This does not bode well for our social cohesion. 22/11/24
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"there is no actual evidence that any of this intrusive education does anything that it is supposed to do."
Bizarre untested and unassessed sex education is the tip of the iceberg. The Scottish education system marks its own homework. Very little accountability and massive bags of money being thrown around, that generally amounts to SFA.
Have been speaking to some teachers recently who have gone through teacher training. They feel utterly unprepared for the classroom. The current training regime is doing a great disservice to teachers who cannot navigate classrooms and teaching with the 'smoke' that has been provided to them as pedagogy. As far as I can see what is being pushed as a 'training course' is no more then a philosophy degree. Perhaps interesting but utterly useless in practical terms. Which is another layer to the disaster of our current education system. I have heard from other (older) teachers who are still relying on the old curriculum. Pretty soon most of them will be retired out - and then what will we be left with. Insanity.