Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No53
Newsletter Theme: the first anniversary of the Scottish Union for Education
As standards in education continue to decline, we hear about five-year-old children being branded as racists by their schoolteachers and also hear news of schools asking primary-age children to decide on gender-neutral toilets in their schools. It shouldn’t be difficult for our educationalists to understand that their job is quite simply to educate our children but this feels like almost the last of their priorities at the moment.
Below, Stuart Waiton, the chairperson of SUE, gives an overview of the work we have carried out over the past year and puts out a call for anyone who supports us to become a Founding Member to help fund our work.
This year, our work includes an education conference – Education not Indoctrination – taking place on Saturday 9 March 2024 at the Tron Church, 25 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW - Buy tickets here.
Ticket numbers are limited, so early registration is advised.
A year of the Scottish Union for Education
Stuart Waiton is Chairperson of SUE.
The Scottish Union for Education (SUE) was set up in February 2023 with the objective of challenging indoctrination in schools.
In the space of a year, we have met some great people, many of whom now write for us regularly, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed articles. For me at least, the enthusiasm, intelligence and passion to get involved shown by people across Scotland and further afield has been one of the most exhilarating aspects of SUE’s work. (You can read a selection of SUE articles in our Christmas Special, Twelve views on Scottish education)
We have held online events with notable individuals such as the novelist Lionel Shriver, comedian Graham Linehan, and politician Jim Sillars, and organised public meetings across Scotland. With more than 50 newsletters under our belt, we also now have a huge library of articles and ideas that we can draw on, and with this, we hope, to help both parents and teachers to think about, and to challenge, some of the indoctrination that is taking place in schools. Alex Cameron produces our newsletter, a supporter in Edinburgh subedits it, and Penny Lewis is the editor; all three have been pivotal in creating this fantastic resource.
We have more than a thousand subscribers to our newsletter now, which is good, but I think we need ten times that number. We also have an increasing number of Founding Members, whom we would like to thank for helping us to fund three people to professionalise, produce and promote SUE across Scotland and beyond. If you receive the newsletter and would like to help us further by becoming a Founding Member, to celebrate our first year and to help us with our work in 2024, you can do so here.
Indoctrination is a strong word and to some extent feels out of place when we think about schools. Schools, after all, present themselves as being particularly caring and inclusive today. Unfortunately, this caring–inclusive language is often bound up with modern ways of thinking that can produce something very different.
The great work that had been started by individuals such as Richard Lucas, Catriona Taylor, Facebook campaigner Glasgow Cabbie, and many others, highlighted the concerns that ever-greater numbers of people have about the sexuality education taking place in schools. It turns out that being ‘inclusive’ can mean promoting children’s rights, including the apparent ‘right’ to a sexualised education.
One aspect of SUE’s work has been finding out if concerns about sex education were legitimate, and with the help of parents and grandparents who have written and given talks for us on this subject, I think we can say without question that this is indeed a deep-seated and serious problem. As one Glasgow parent explained, ‘When a headteacher of a primary school tells you, “You’ll be pleased to know we’ve taken the clitoris off the curriculum”, you know something is going seriously wrong’.
Talking to Sarah Fraser, a mother based in the Highlands, we have also found out how difficult it can be to challenge schools about the RSHP curriculum, but challenge it she has, along with many other parents. If we have discovered anything over the past year, it is how important parents are for the future of education, and equally, how dismissive the authorities are towards them.
The ‘inclusive’ agenda in schools has also, significantly, meant the promotion of transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools, sometimes even in nurseries. One of SUE’s board members, retired paediatrician Jenny Cunningham, explored this issue for us and wrote a very useful pamphlet, Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: What’s wrong with government guidance? to help explain how this ideology is being promoted in Scottish schools and what is wrong and dangerous about it. We sent Jenny’s pamphlet to every headteacher in Scotland and have subsequently had some help and input on this issue from individuals such as Sam Cowie, who has been able to explain how the LGBT+ lobby has infiltrated schools, and how the trans issue actually undermines gay rights rather than being part of this progressive movement.
We’ve also spoken to Murray Allan, the former schoolboy who was, somewhat ironically, excluded from his class for not being ‘inclusive’. Of course, here we find one of the recurring features of the transgender ideology in schools, which is the lack of inclusivity of different opinions – even when those opinions are simply related to the biological fact that there are only two sexes. Murray was eventually thrown out of his school for videoing the exchange he had with his teacher, but he is another individual, like Graham Linehan, who has been incredibly brave and shown the need to stand up and be counted on this issue.
Here at SUE, we want people to speak their minds and challenge educational authorities, but we have also set ourselves up as a union so that we can act with you and also on your behalf. We need strong individuals to win this fight, but just as importantly, we need strong institutions with the financial independence and the will to take on those in authority. This is what we see as our task.
To help with this, we have held public meetings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee, and again a big thank you goes to all those who helped organise, pay for, and speak at these events. We’re also holding a day conference in Glasgow on Saturday 9 March to explore in more detail what is going on within education and, more importantly, what we can all do to make a difference. We’ll also be showing The Lost Boys at the conference and talking to one of the producers of this superb and tragic film about young men – detransitioners – who have experienced at first hand many of the catastrophic consequences of the ‘caring’ transgender ideology that has overrun so many of our institutions.
There are many other groups in Scotland who are taking the fight to the Scottish government. From feminist groups to Christian and lesbian and gay organisations, there is, to coin the term, a rainbow of people and groups who are already challenging indoctrination in schools. SUE is proud to have worked with all of them.
SUE has also been making the news over the past year, not least of all over our work that has demonstrated the significant decline in educational standards. Often bound up with issues of indoctrination and the politicisation of education, there appears to be a link between declining standards and the accelerated use of schools and universities for objectives that have nothing to do with education.
Brilliantly, Kate Deeming, who now coordinates our Parents and Supporters Group, coined the phrase ‘disaster education’ when looking at the issues and agenda being promoted in primary schools. Kate explained that one of the tragic dimensions of ‘progressive’ education is the obsessive focus on everything that is wrong with the world. There may indeed be major problems that we need to address, but historically, it was understood that this was something that adults rather than young children should be addressing.
The idea that we should let kids be kids has never been more important. There is a difference between being a child and being an adult. Children, especially young children, often need to be protected from the adult world. Being a mature adult means knowing what is age-appropriate, and not expecting adult agendas and controversies to be imposed on young children. At the very least, we should recognise that children need both time and space – as well as a good education – to help them to mature, to develop character, and also to articulate a clearer sense of themselves. Today, we find that this distinction is breaking down, whether that be through the sexualised nature of primary education, the disaster education taking place, or indeed, when children from the age of four are expected – and at times encouraged – to ‘discover’ their ‘identity’. With all these examples, it feels like schools are moving away from their understanding of what childhood is and what education is for – where talk of ‘awareness’ and ‘liberation’ feels like adult ideologies being foisted upon children in Scotland.
Of course, when it comes to the matter of education, we should not leave children to their own devices, or think that education should be ‘child-centred’, or that children and teachers alike are all ‘active learners’. Schools need to be places where adults – teachers – have expertise and authority, and where children, rather than being encouraged to look ever inwards to find their ‘true selves’, are drawn out of themselves and into the world of knowledge, truth and beauty.
School subjects are vitally important for passing on the best that has been thought and said throughout history. And despite what passes for enlightened education today, our history is not simply one of slavery and oppression, but includes episodes of great thinking, writing and action that have helped us develop a profound sense of freedom and democracy.
Unfortunately, a sense of human civilisation and accomplishments is often drowned out by those who see the world through a rather warped and depressing perspective – a perspective that now includes the adoption of ideas from critical race theory, which encourages the idea that all children with white skin have the shame of ‘white privilege’ to contend with.
Education should be about enlightening children, giving them the knowledge and the tools to understand the world and, indeed, the building blocks of adulthood, self-discipline and maturity that allow them to change it for the better. Changing the world is the responsibility of adults, not children. Unfortunately, at the moment, our politicians and educationalists appear to think the world should be made by ‘changing the culture’ through our children. But this is not education, it is indoctrination. It is not only regressive, and confuses the meaning of adulthood and childhood, but it also undermines the very meaning and the very quality of education in our schools.
In this coming year, we hope to build on the work we have done. In particular, we hope to explore the various ways that parents are being undermined by the Scottish government, and to develop our own understanding about the meaning and purpose of education. To that end, we will be organising online events, with guest speakers, for all those who are paid subscribers to SUE. If you are reading this and don’t have a paid subscription, please consider signing up here.
Finally, I would like to thank all of you who have subscribed and become Founding Members of SUE. The Scottish Union for Education is made up of volunteers, but with your financial support we will be able to take our work to a higher level and make it nigh on impossible for those in authority to ignore the voice of Scottish parents, teachers, grandparents, academics and communities who understand the importance and potential that can come from an enlightened education.
All the best
Stuart Waiton
News roundup
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/holocaust-student-education-jewish-anti-semitism/673488/ Dara Horn, Is holocaust education making anti-semitism worse? Using dead Jews as symbols isn’t helping living ones. 03/04/23
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vscx Beyond Belief, What Should We Teach in RE? Teacher and Tik-Toker @mrsreandpsheteacher shares her passion for religious education, but says there are problems. What needs to change and why is it important? 29/01/24
Sarah Phillimore, Children’s capacity to consent to transition. An important battleground gender identity ideology is that involving children. To what extent can they consent to social or medical transition? And what rights, if any, do parents have to object? 29/01/24
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/29/university-donors-oxford-pitt-rivers-go-woke-go-broke/ Lawrence Goldman, Universities are in for a painful lesson: go woke, go broke. Why would anyone donate when academics pour scorn on their benefactors? 29/01/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24090033.bid-raise-scotlands-school-start-age-gains-cross-party-support/?ref=ebbn&nid=1388&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=010224 James McEnaney, Bid to raise Scotland's school start age gains cross-party support. 01/02/24
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/29/why-is-a-full-grown-man-competing-against-teenage-girls-in-swimming/ Lauren Smith, Why is a full-grown man competing against teenage girls in swimming? A 50-year-old professor has been allowed to identify himself into a swimming league for schoolgirls. 29/01/24
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/15/transgenderism-has-become-a-youth-subculture/ Jo Bartosch, ‘Transgenderism has become a youth subculture’. Dr Az Hakeem on why ‘gender-affirming care’ is harming confused young people. 15/12/23
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