Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No90
Themes: opposing the ban on conversion therapy; subject knowledge and the curriculum; and a new book from the anti-prejudice industry
Gerund 2008 (detail), Patrick Hughes
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Last week the Scottish Union for Education joined more than 140 prominent professionals and politicians to sign a letter to Keir Starmer demanding that he stop the proposed ‘trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices’. The letter, written by James Esses, Co-Founder of Thoughtful Therapists and Co-ordinator of the Declaration for Biological Reality, expressed grave concerns about the unintended consequences of the UK government’s proposal.
As we have said in previous newsletters, attempts to ban so-called conversion therapy/practices in both England and Scotland are a serious issue for anyone working with children and young people. Addressing the prime minister, the letter says: ‘You have previously defined conversion therapy as anything that seeks to “change or suppress someone’s gender identity”. This ambiguous phrasing risks criminalising basic therapeutic techniques, such as pausing for thought and reflection, exploring causation and contributory factors, challenging unhelpful thought patterns, and exploring a range of options.’ It goes on to say that if the bill becomes law, many psychotherapists will need to stop working with children with gender dysphoria altogether, for fear of being criminalised.
As Dr Jenny Cunningham has explained in previous newsletters, the bill is being driven by LGBTQ+ and transgender rights organisations that want to establish gender identity, and transgender identity in particular, as a legal category on a par with biological sex and sexual orientation. They hope to do this by illegitimately conflating the two distinct categories of sexual orientation and gender identity. The UK government is currently supporting this initiative even though there is a lack of evidence that conversion practices are common or widespread in this country, and despite the fact that the terrible practices previously directed against homosexuals are already unlawful. Advocates of a Scottish bill are having great difficulty defining those practices that fall through the legislative gaps.
This week’s newsletter follows up on the discussion we had last week on the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). In 2021, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) published a report called Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Into the Future, in which the organisation made a number of recommendations to the Scottish government. The first recommendation was to reassess CfE’s aspirational vision against emerging trends in education: ‘Scotland should consider updates to some of its vision’s core elements and their implications for practice, in particular, the role of knowledge in CfE.’ Apparently, the government is currently engaging in that reflection. It’s not clear who are the so-called ‘stakeholders’ involved in that process, but Stuart Baird, a parent and a secondary school teacher in Scotland, has some advice on how they should approach the question.
Following Stuart’s piece is book review by Rachael Hobbs, looking at a new book on ‘bias’ which is targeted at schools and education professionals. Rachael has read the book and summarised the arguments, so that you don’t have to. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she discovered that the woman telling us how to avoid bias is not immune from the tendency herself!
Penny Lewis, Editor
Subjects matter
Stuart Baird is a parent and a secondary school teacher in Scotland.
Without the fanfare that accompanied the uncovering of Tutankhamun’s tomb or the discovery of the burial site of Richard III, the leading figures in Scottish education may be on the verge of their own rediscovery; we hope they are about to rediscover knowledge itself.
The ‘curriculum improvement cycle’ run by Education Scotland will, as reported in TES Scotland, work on reviewing all curriculum areas to put the ‘technical framework’ of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) ‘under the spotlight’. Among its goals are ‘clarifying the position of knowledge within curriculum areas’.
The CfE left knowledge behind when it opted to focus instead on generic skills and discovery learning. The position of knowledge will be clear only if we have a proper discussion about the purpose of education itself. For now, that purpose is lost, shrouded behind layers of social goals and common anxieties about the future. Removing that shroud could free schools, allow them to refocus on the educated individual, an aim that should be at the centre of any curriculum improvement. Perhaps then schools will be places that allow teachers to connect the past and the present and give children a sense of the future.
The way we talk about the past to pupils is through the subjects. Generations who have struggled to advance our understanding and ways of knowing the world have experimented, written and taught to build a body of knowledge for each discipline. Subjects draw from academic disciplines, although they are repackaged for schools to make them accessible to young people through the work of teachers.
Subjects are continually revised, updated, and applied in the present, allowing us to rationally engage with the world. Subject knowledge and skills give teachers the authority to say, ‘This is how we see the world, and these are the tools we have used.’
Through the subjects, students are formally introduced to the broader world beyond their immediate surroundings. As they engage with this content, they develop the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the world and make their own informed judgements about it.
The subjects, and the ways in which they are communicated, require formal introduction. Some subjects, for example in the natural sciences, involve hierarchical learning – beginning with foundational ideas and advancing to more complex ones. In other areas, such as politics and the humanities, knowledge builds through exposure to different contradictory theories and perspectives, such as Marxism or class, and feminism or women’s rights.
The need for a formal introduction to the subjects highlights their difference from the knowledge that pupils pick up or discover informally through their day-to-day experiences. Within the school timetable, the precious time available should be spent on things that cannot be done anywhere but in schools.
Subjects don’t just provide new windows onto the world; they also introduce students to our values and identity. The struggle to achieve such values as democracy, tolerance and freedom can be explored holistically and help us understand our society. The stories of discovery and exploration provide a human context of knowledge. Subjects are the living artefacts of our collective efforts.
Engaging with subjects will also foster pupils’ positive personal character traits such as self-discipline and curiosity – much like those of the men and women who forged the knowledge and apply it today. With the understanding that knowledge brings, and the values gained from school experiences, students become responsible for their own thinking and begin to act independently. This transition marks the beginning of their integration into the world beyond school, as they acquire the tools to challenge the present and shape the future.
And then there are qualifications. These provide young people with opportunities to demonstrate success, and they also have a social value for employers and universities, but they are not the goal of education. Daisy Christodoulou describes exams as indirect measures of a subject’s domain. She warns, however, that these measures can be easily distorted if we overemphasize them. She cautions against backward planning based solely on past papers or exam specifications, arguing that such an approach limits deep engagement with the body of knowledge that underpins a subject [1].
Since subjects represent a shared cultural heritage, it is a matter of justice that everyone has access to them – not just a privileged few. This is particularly crucial for students who may not have the resources within their family to support their learning. As Leesa Wheelahan notes, ‘The working class needs access to powerful knowledge if it is to participate in society’s conversations’ [2].
This approach to education is rooted in the tradition of liberal education, which has a long history stretching back to ancient Greece, where the concept of paideia (‘pie-de-ah’) referred to an environment where a select group could pursue knowledge and truth, cultivate civic values, and think critically. This tradition continued through the medieval university, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, as rationalism, scientific inquiry and secularism took hold. By the twentieth century, education expanded to become more inclusive, with the democratisation of education becoming one of the century’s great achievements and a legacy of the post–Second World War era.
A focus on knowledge creates powerful teachers – subject specialists who can shape curriculum development, share their expertise with colleagues, and resist pressures from political and activist agendas. In the Scottish Union for Education’s first newsletter, Lindsay Paterson wrote that, for liberal education, ‘there is a common thread in the sense that learning for its own sake is liberating because learning for any kind of extrinsic purpose constrains our freedom’.
Yet, as mentioned, education faces many extrinsic pressures, from demands to provide pupils ready for the world of work to the creation of responsible citizens. Of course, an education that successfully supports knowledgeable, socialised and critical young people will also meet various external goals. These goals, however, are not the purpose of education.
As Alka Sehgal Cuthbert and Alex Standish state, ‘Treating the curriculum as a tool to solve social, environmental, health, and economic problems undermines the idea of education as a public good in its own right and weakens the case for teacher autonomy.’ [3].
Without a clear focus on subject knowledge and education for its own sake, teachers lose their authority in the present and pupils their inheritance from the past and their ownership of the future. It is time to rediscover education.
References
1. Christodoulou D. Making Good Progress? The Future of Assessment for Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Wheelahan L. Why Knowledge Matters in Curriculum: A Social Realist Argument. London: Routledge.
3. Cuthbert AS, Standish A, editors. What Should Schools Teach? London: UCL Press.
Book review
Unravelling bias: How prejudice has shaped children for generations and why it’s time to break the cycle by Christia Spears Brown (Ben Bella Books, Inc. 2021)
Reviewed by Rachael Hobbs. Rachael is a parent and an educator.
Dr Christia Spears Brown is the Lester and Helen Milich Professor of Children at Risk, in the Department of Psychology at Kentucky University, and the founding director of its Center for Equality and Social Justice. Brown is a developmental psychologist and carries out research into ‘gender and ethnic stereotypes’ among children and teenagers.
Her two previous books are Discrimination in Childhood and Adolescence and Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes, and in her latest, Brown’s ambition has been to record discrimination and explore ‘how that process can be disrupted’ (p. 276).
Unravelling Bias is presented as an attempt to consider individual prejudices alongside wider policies that disadvantage marginalised groups. Unable, though, to unpick such a vast and often arbitrary topic like ‘bias’, Brown instead resorts to sweeping, unsubstantiated statements about bias and who is guilty of it.
She often refers to ‘bias’ as a standalone state of being (i.e. biased children/white people/policies), although it is, by definition, relational and related to something or someone. Unfortunately, this lack of definition leads to a blurring of the important distinction between that of established, overwhelming norms and prejudice.
Brown provides some interesting analysis of the US legal history of the recognition of discrimination against specific groups, such as black children, or girls, within education. Her purpose in doing so seems, however, to be to build a similar case for what she sees as the modern-day equivalent – the transgender movement, which she defends on the basis of the ‘right to authenticity’.
Biased babies
The book covers a lot about prejudice and babies. Based on a 20-year-old study purportedly showing that very young babies exhibit preferences towards adults of their own skin colour, Brown declares all babies to be innately biased (p. 10). She claims there is widespread racial bias during preschool age. This is based on her own research in 2010, which involved children from a range of ethnic backgrounds but was titled, ‘Variability in the inter-group attitude of White children: What we can learn from their ethnic identity labels’ (pp. 11, 242). Brown is not learning much from her own work.
She found that when asked to rate on a thermometer scale between 0 and 100 how warmly they rate someone from a particular ethnic group, the children rated their own group higher. This does not denote prejudice – let’s give preschoolers the benefit of the doubt – but rather ease with visually familiar groups, which balances out in diverse societies and, as she does admit, tends to disappear at the age of around 7 years.
‘Over the course of elementary school, children begin to endorse common racial stereotypes about what people in different groups are like, such as who is smart or who gets into trouble’ declares Brown (p. 11), without providing any supporting evidence.
It’s the same for ‘gender bias’; based on her single study from 15 years ago, ‘By the time children are 3 years old, they believe gender stereotypes about boys’ and girls’ abilities and interests and usually show a strong aversion to playing with one another at school.’ (pp. 11, 243).
Her claims about children’s ‘stereotypes’ are supposition, and she fails to consider a natural tendency of youngsters to play with those of the same sex. This is a topic that merits more understanding than Brown is willing to explore, as her reductive agenda is to conclude that we have innate bias, and it needs ‘correcting’.
Biased parents
Brown is hung up on data which show that parents may not be ‘teaching’ their kids about race (pp. 17–18). She fails to consider that this might be because modern social justice dogma has deterred people from being able to state anything about race with confidence. She ploughs ahead with unsubstantiated statements based on scant pupil surveys, testing how they referred to different groups: ‘The older kids refused to mention race; even when it was the most efficient way to describe someone. These types of findings show that White parents and their White children, the ones most likely to hold racial biases are collectively quiet about race which allows these implicit biases to stay intact.’ (p. 18).
‘The ones most likely to hold bias’ is a biased statement which she does not qualify. Brown then cites a single ‘research study’ parents were asked to participate in, based on different topics including race-related issues with their children. Brown is incredulous that only 10% reported having ‘meaningful’ conversations with their children and that two dropped out when they found it involved discussions of race (p. 18).
She does not explore reasonable possibilities as to why, for example, parents have a right not to participate in things that transpire to be political projects, or that results might reflect sensitivity or parental instinct that children do not need politicisation.
Social engineering?
Brown is simply describing life when she states how kids are ‘exposed’ to all sorts of influences, but she is bothered by this: ‘It is no stretch to say that everything children are exposed to has the potential to shape their biases – and that in the absence of any conversations, nuance, or challenge that exposure those outside forces become much more influential’ (p. 18).
Put another way, children may need guarding from the perils of different opinions. This creeps into having a problem with free will or free society, via her view that there is a current ‘absence’, of regulation perhaps, on views they develop.
In her analysis of gender inequality, #MeToo disclosures, and contested recent ideology around ‘toxic masculinity’, Brown states, with no supporting evidence, that ‘The groundwork is laid by preschool for every single gender-based inequality we see in adulthood’. These kinds of comments comply with the wider call from identity politics discourse, that more should be done to ensure children possess the ‘right’ opinions from an early age.
Minority-group legal histories and the social sciences
Brown equates past systematic injustices against black people in the USA, gay people, and women, to the current transgender movement, and tries to mould them into the same narrative. Few would dispute the discriminatory histories of these groups, or object to actions to challenge such discrimination. These issues are, however, different to transgender matters, which for many involve a conflict of rights between two of the groups Brown claims to represent (women and gay people), but she is insistent on framing opposition as ‘bias’.
Brown does provide useful insights into how NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) attorneys in 1954 managed, against a history of failed lawsuits, to win their case (Brown vs Board of Education) to end racial segregation in schools.
This was achieved through a key social science statement submitted and signed by respected social scientists, around the theme of discrimination via harm. This demonstrated how segregation might be responsible for sending the message that a black child was inferior and, in turn, attributed to cases of delinquency or disengagement from education.
The growing importance of social sciences and concepts around psychological harm were important to the case. While this was a positive in terms of overturning discrimination, Brown seems to be highlighting it not just to reveal the importance of recognising ‘detriment’ in the law, but to reason that such a mechanism be employed to change modern laws for transgender rights lobbies. (This is something that is now happening, where often questionable ‘data’, obtained from scant transactivist surveys, represent only one side in the ‘harm’ debate and questions are often heavily loaded.)
Through her account also of eventual recognition of discrimination or harassment of girls in school in the USA, she concludes: ‘It took both cultural and political changes to lead to an increase in the laws and policies that limit gender discrimination in schools’ (p. 63).
In reference to past segregated education, she emphasises how judges during the 1940s and ’50s struggled over whether they should make decisions that went against accepted norms. Brown stresses the views of Robert Redfield, a key attorney and anthropologist testifying in cases by the NAACP, who said: ‘Law is itself education, they help men to make up their minds in accordance with a major trend or ideal of their society’ (p. 37). As she then states, ‘He was arguing that laws sometimes need to change first and people’s attitudes and beliefs will follow’ (p. 37).
You sense that Brown is, similarly, advocating for law to ‘educate’ people in the ‘right’ views even now. So much for neutrality, and again, the law becomes a social-engineering mechanism. This is important because the point she makes in her accounts of racial justice and gender laws is that success is achieved by overriding public will. It is not true either in terms of history – laws changed in the end thanks to increasing public feeling that opposed discrimination.
The ‘authentic self’
When we reach Brown’s section on LGBTQ+ matters, the narrative of discrimination and public ignorance has already been set. You sense arrival at Brown’s core passion within the catch-all of addressing ‘bias’. She subsumes the topic under ‘authenticity’, presumably to avoid any awkwardness arising from inconvenient ideas related to biological reality, sex-based boundaries, and males in female spaces. This takes us into a one-sided discussion, and she does not open up debate to consider the arguments of gender-critical politics. Towards the end, Brown calls for readers to become activists and challenge policies that she deems biased. Centrally, this stems around trying to change ‘biased policies’ including sex-based regulations and even the use of common language such as mother or father when referring to parents.
Unable to contain her own biases any longer, Brown’s concluding section is a tribute to her subjectivity. Apparently, ‘Elected judges can sentence black youth more severely’ (p. 224), so she calls for readers to ‘vote for politicians who are not biased’ (one of her most disingenuous statements). Another suggestion is we find ‘inclusive’ media and ‘make it popular and profitable’ (p. 220).
For ‘trans students’ she urges, ‘Check into what qualifies students for teams. Make sure that students can determine their gender identity and that that is respected in their sports teams, bathrooms and locker rooms’ (p. 221). Nothing of the impact on girls, their spaces and safety. Brown’s silence on transgender issues, specifically the clash with the rights of girls and women, speaks volumes – really it is the bias of omission.
Brown is channelling rigid ‘social justice’ ideology which cannot permit free thought and seeks to prescribe the ‘correct’ opinions onto society. On closer analysis (and by this I am merely complying with her demand we seek out bias in everything), what she is doing is reducing unexamined opposition to her own political positions as prejudice to set her own on a par with neutrality (and to not have to debate them), which unravels only her credibility.
You sense Brown’s frustration that democracy is stalling the march of her chosen political lobbies – if only there was a way of controlling us. This aligns with wider ‘social justice’ themes attempting to destabilise our most fundamental of social and collective values within the incorrect theme of bias.
What grates most of all is Brown’s underlying tone that the personal views (‘biases’) of the public have not been thought through. This only reflects a derogation towards ordinary people and lack of respect in branding valid counter-debates to identity politics as prejudice, rather than face those arguments head on.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/21/the-snps-24-genders/?utm_source=Today+on+spiked&utm_campaign=3ee9783e1c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_10_21_06_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-3ee9783e1c-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D Lauren Smith, The SNP’s 24 genders. Agender, demigender, autigender? The Scottish Nationalists are lost to trans ideology. 21/10/24
Dave Clements, We don’t know what normal is anymore. My contribution to ‘Neurodiversity to gender dysphoria: a problem of over-diagnosis?’ 21/10/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/parents-should-be-worried-about-labours-trans-plans/ Debbie Hayton, Parents should be worried about Labour’s trans plans. 21/10/24
Dave Clements, Some barriers shouldn’t be broken down. From neurodiversity to gender ideology – there’s something queer going on. 23/10/24
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24675038.glasgow-rape-crisis-splits-rape-crisis-scotland-trans-policy/?ref=ebbn&nid=1388&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=241024 Andrew Learmonth, Glasgow Rape Crisis Splits from Rape Crisis Scotland over trans policy. 24/10/24
https://archive.is/c4wSj Inaya Folarin Iman, Britain’s black history has never just been a story of oppression. It is vital to acknowledge and study the darker chapters of Britain’s racial history. But we must also be careful not to simplify. 25/10/24
https://www.thetimes.com/article/7c8d0a95-f554-4bb6-a0d4-89eba9f56814?shareToken=4a527d197aeff287cc69e09353bf93f3 Nicolette Jones, The best Halloween stories for children – that won’t give them nightmares. Here’s our expert guide to the best spooky stories for children of all ages – and sensibilities. 27/10/24
https://archive.is/mRrwk Daniel Sanderson, Bad teachers ‘being allowed to fail pupils’ as fewer than one per year sacked for incompetence. Powerful teaching unions accused of making it ‘nigh on impossible’ to dismiss underperforming staff. 27/10/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150882481?source=queue Joanna Williams, Good riddance to the Women’s Equality Party! This elite outfit was more interested in defending men-in-dresses than women’s rights. 29/10/24
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Cristia Brown - needs to acknowledge this basic fact of where we are at as humans (will we ever change?), all humans possess caveman brains which are being used to process 21st century problems. Bias is a survival instinct.
Adding brown to the list of DEI grifters I will never read!