Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No77

Newsletter Theme: a draft manifesto for Scottish education

Jun 27, 2024

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Below, SUE Chair Stuart Waiton has drawn up a draft manifesto on Scottish education. As a build-up to the Holyrood elections in 2026, SUE is determined to make education the number one issue. This is a first attempt to raise some of the issues that we feel must be addressed if we are to turn education around, give parents more influence in this process, and encourage the best teachers to make Scottish education into something that is the envy of the world.

This manifesto should be read in conjunction with Julie Sandilands proposals in Substack 74.

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A draft Manifesto for Scottish education

( 1 ) The best that has been thought and said

Education is, or should be, about passing on the depth and breadth of human knowledge to the next generation. At the moment, the knowledge content of education is being suffocated by a variety of issues, sentiments, and confusions about what education is. In teacher training and educational ‘theory’, there are key dimensions to this problem:

The historical problem of a loss of faith in what used to be called Western civilisation, or simply civilisation.
With a diminishing belief in civilisation, the focus on education as a remarkable and necessary thing in and of itself has declined.
As result, wider adult societal problems have been dumped onto and into education: education has been used for purposes that have nothing to do with education.
Over recent decades, education has been further undermined by the rise of a therapeutic culture and by confusion regarding the roles of teacher and parent, and indeed the separate realms of adulthood and childhood.

These issues mean that teacher training, and therefore what being a teacher or a headteacher means, has been transformed. Rather than a good teacher being considered an individual with a thorough understanding of their subject and an exemplary ability to transmit this knowledge to pupils, today’s idea of a ‘good’ teacher is one who is constantly adopting new ‘educational techniques’, understands their role in terms of social justice activism, and uses therapeutic manipulation to engage with and control pupils.

Teachers need to once again become knowledge experts.
Primary teachers should enter the profession only if they have an excellent standard of numeracy and literacy.
Secondary school teachers should enter the profession only if they are experts in their subject.

These goals can be achieved through the creation of a genuine curriculum that is based on a profound understanding of the need to pass on to pupils the best that has been thought and said throughout human history. With the building blocks of education having been conserved and established in primary school and the early years of secondary school, education in subsequent years at school and at university should be based on liberal principles of open discussion, scepticism and debate.

Through the process of revitalising a subject knowledge–based education system, the authority of teachers will be re-established. This authority will be based not on the therapeutic and supposedly ‘caring’ nature of teachers engaging with (i.e. manipulating) the ‘whole child’, but on their expertise, their keen sense of the importance of their role in society, and the creation of discipline not as a thing in itself or a ‘technique’ but as a vital and necessary part of creating a structured learning environment for children.

( 2 ) Subject knowledge, not political activism

Part of the diminishing sense of, and indeed opposition to, the idea of civilisation has resulted in a corruption and corrosion of the curriculum. An embarrassment about civilisation, and also nationhood, has resulted in the transformation of subjects like History and Geography. With a diminished belief in human progress, History has lost a chronological sense, and national history has been diminished and/or become a framework for pushing an ideological agenda:

Pupils are being made to feel ashamed of their country’s history through the teaching as fact of the highly contested narratives of critical social justice (CSJ), in which different groups of people are assigned to the reductive categories of ‘oppressors’ or ‘oppressed’, based on a simplistic and dehumanising set of ‘identity markers’ (characteristics such as skin colour or sexual orientation).

Today’s so-called anti-racism, which – like the racism it purports to be against – promotes prejudice and intolerance by judging individuals by the colour of their skin rather than their character, has become another CSJ project pursued within schools, with the divisive critical race theory doctrines on which it is founded being taught as incontestable fact:

Not only are children are being ‘educated’ in ‘anti-racism’ through the teaching of History (e.g. in single-perspective discussions of the ‘legacies’ of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, collective guilt can be ascribed to white people and Britain is branded as systemically racist), but it is being embedded in every part of the curriculum (with ‘anti-racist’ Maths, for example).

Geography has moved away from a knowledge of world and national places, and of geographical processes, to become increasingly focused on ‘sustainability’ and environmentalism.

Political activists, especially around the issues of sexuality and gender, have helped to create parts of the curriculum and have embedded transgender ideology in schools (with the creation of LGBT clubs and membership of the LGBT Youth Scotland Charter for Education scheme, for example).

All this should be understood to be part of the politicisation of education.

Modern political activism within schools degrades education, degrades past achievements, and replaces a balanced and sophisticated understanding of social and individual accomplishments through a narrow, unbalanced and often philistine perspective (Shakespeare = racist, David Hume = racist, Athenian democracy = slavery, industrialisation = global warming, and so on).

This is not education – it is a form of self-loathing indoctrination.

Teacher training should be focused upon developing expert teachers, not social justice activists. Activist led education should be removed from the curriculum, and from the ‘ethos’ or culture of schools (where they are usually but erroneously framed as ‘our values’).

( 3 ) A confusion of roles

( a ) Activism

Various factors have led to and demonstrate a confusion of roles within schools. These include:

The rise of political activist education (as discussed above).
The downgrading of teachers as authoritative experts.
The confused idea of ‘children’s rights’.
The therapeutic involvement of schools in children’s relationships, sexuality and ideas of identity.

Part of the political activism in schools reflects the political culture in Scotland – one that sees the purpose of government, law and policies as being about ‘changing the culture’. What is essentially a form of social engineering is taking place in schools, places where the idea of liberating children has developed. The idea of liberating children, in part from their ‘culture’, and from their parents, creates an underlying institutional form of tension and opposition between teachers towards parents. The idea of liberation for children is a confusing one. Like the idea of children’s rights (children do not have rights/freedoms – they have protections), the idea of liberation is an adult concept and when used in terms of children’s lives should be understood as a confused form of adultification.

Politics and political liberation are adult activities and therefore have no place in schools.

( b ) Colonising the private lifeworld of the child and the family

With the rise and rise of RSHP (relationships, sexual health and parenting) ‘education’, coupled with a more therapeutic educational ethos, teachers are being encouraged to colonise the private world of children and to encroach upon family life.

Outside of teaching children the basics of how to behave, relationships cannot be taught, and other than in exceptional cases in which there is a valid safeguarding concern, the values and relationships children have with their parents, their families, and the wider community are their business, not the schools’; it is not for schools to impose a set of values or try to interfere with these personal relationships.

The confusion of roles can be seen most clearly in the teaching of age-inappropriate sexuality education and in the promotion of transgender ideology. Teaching primary-aged children about the clitoris, for example, is again a reflection of the adultification of children and a confusion among teachers about childhood and their own selves as adults.

At the same time, the dismissive attitudes of many teachers and headteachers towards parents who raise concerns about these issues reflect the loss of a distinction between the role of a teacher and the role (and respect) of parents. In the promotion of transgender ideology, we find political activism, mixed with a fetishisation of ‘identity’, and a confusion of roles, where teachers take over the role of directing the personal and private development of children, often behind the backs of parents.

The confusion of these roles necessarily leads to the confusion of children.

Taken together, this adultification of children results in the encouragement of children to see themselves as political and cultural activists and as educators of their ‘backward’ parents.

It undermines childhood by introducing young children to sexualised ideas and material that is age-inappropriate, confusing and potentially upsetting.
It helps to promote a preoccupation with sexuality and identity at an age when children are immature, unable to give meaning to their ‘selves’, and are therefore open to manipulation.
Normalising discussions of sexuality at school risks giving children the impression that exposure to sexualised discussions and sexual activity is normal.

There is a need to separate the roles of parents and teachers. Let parents parent and allow teachers to teach their subjects.

( c ) Constructing the vulnerable child

Underpinning many of these developments is a growing sense within schools that they are there to protect the ‘vulnerable child’. Part of this development incorporates the therapeutic culture that understands childhood and adolescent anxieties through the prism of mental wellbeing: note that ‘health and wellbeing’ is one of the four ‘areas of learning’ within the Curriculum for Excellence. As a result, children are being educated to understand themselves and any difficulties they have through the language of mental health. The ‘mental health crisis’ of children is not a reflection of the ‘stress’ of school or of exams. Nor is it due to the ‘trauma’ of not having their ‘identity’ ‘respected’. It is a new way of thinking that has been constructed by so-called experts who label children through psychological categories.

Again, reflecting a confusion of roles, we do not need teachers to be therapists, nor do we need schools to be mental institutions. This psychologisation and psycho-labelling of children needs to stop. Where anxiety, or perhaps more usefully, the less psychological label of simple sadness, is growing among children; this can be understood as a by-product of the confusion of roles within schools.

The myopic focus on ‘wellbeing’ within schools results in the therapeutic manipulation of children. The manipulative and self-limiting dimension of these practices is often hidden by the apparent ‘caring’ nature of them. The result is that children are constantly flattered through a diet of empty praise, a meaningless focus on ‘self-esteem’ and through psychological boosterism.

The constructed idea that all children are essentially vulnerable and need psychological support infantilises children, limiting their and their teachers expectations. This pathologises the necessary pressures of education and undermines the hard work and self-discipline needed to become educated.

( 4 ) Disaster education

Activist educators are dumping the real and imagined problems of the world onto children. This is creating:

Pupils who are ‘shocked’ by lessons on climate catastrophe.
Pupils educated to become disconnected from their country and community and from past generations, who are implicated in the ‘shames’ of the past.
Pupils who are further shamed by the notion of the problem of their ‘whiteness’.
Pupils, both boys and girls, who are educated about the ‘toxic’ nature of masculinity and relationships.
Pupils who are encouraged to see and feel that there is something limited or even degraded about what is called ‘heteronormativity’.
Pupils who regard stereotypically masculine traits in a girl, or stereotypically feminine traits in a boy, as signs of being ‘transgender’ rather than aspects of personality.

As a result of this, and with the colonisation of the private and personal life of children by ‘experts’, actual identity formation, or what is perhaps better understood as the development of character, is warped.

The development of personhood that comes from hard work and achievement, coupled with a sense of one’s past, and with the development of self-discipline and strength of character, are all undermined by the inwardly focused flattery associated with therapeutic manipulation and identity preoccupation.

( 5 ) Conclusions

With almost every example and issue above, the sentence could end with the simple note: Just teach your subject. Additionally, we should not confuse the problem of adultification of childhood with the understanding that we need to take children seriously. Children have more potential, resilience and capacity than they are given credit for. As it stands, the obsessions with being ‘caring’ and with the idea of childhood vulnerability are leading to the infantilisation of children, where flattery and an inability to be critical and to push children to strive to achieve are leading to a profoundly limited form of education in our schools. Rather than learning the best that has been thought and said, most children leave school without knowing many, or often any, of the great writers, thinkers and achievements of humanity.

Parents do not want or need quasi parents, part-time therapists, or political activists; they want and need teachers who can teach their subjects, who have a sense of authority based on their expertise, and who have the freedom to do this in their own way, directed by a very clear, weighty and detailed curriculum based on the human knowledge that has been accumulated over the past 2000 and more years.

As it stands, it is clear that educational standards in Scotland are collapsing, and at the same time, education is becoming a form of indoctrination.

Parents, together with teachers who understand what is going wrong in Scottish education, are key to transforming schools, and it’s not that difficult a problem to solve: Just teach your subject and let parents get on with loving and caring for their children.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight

https://substack.com/home/post/p-145816943?source=queue Jean Twenge, How has mental health changed across demographic groups since 2010? . If social media is uniquely beneficial to adolescents in marginalized communities, we might expect to see their rates of anxiety and depression increase less than those of other groups. But we don’t. 20/06/24

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/theres-something-very-wrong-with-childrens-history-books/ Mary Wakefield, There’s something very wrong with children’s history books. 15/06/24

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/education-has-all-but-disappeared-from-the-election-debate/ Peter Lampl, Education has all but disappeared from the election debate. 05/06/24

https://archive.is/Xxf4f Madeline Grant, Our culture is in the hands of people who hate it. It’s easier to ‘queer’ the Bronte sisters than actually engage with their ideas and their hinterland. 22/06/24

https://substack.com/home/post/p-145836211?source=queue Barbara Kay, In Canada, Gender Politics Could Topple Trudeau. Unpacking the consequences of Trudeau’s gender policies on his political standing and Canada’s future. 22/06/24

https://archive.is/8V3Tq James McEnaney, New qualification on the horizon for Scottish schools. 23/06/24

https://substack.com/home/post/p-145942843?source=queue Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Europe’s Rightwing Youthshift. Are the kids here to save us? 24/06/24

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