Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No110

Themes: Are young men ‘toxic’? And what’s wrong with ‘global education’?

Mar 27, 2025

Jamie (Owen Cooper) and Eddie (Stephen Graham) in Adolescence

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This month we have seen another controversy about single-sex spaces, or rather, the lack of them. This time it is the news that new guidance from the Care Inspectorate says that children who identify as transgender ‘should not be made to use the toilets or bedroom of their sex assigned at birth’. In other words, girls in care could end up sharing bedrooms with boys.

This is not the first time concerns have been raised about the Care Inspectorate and its guidance. Indeed, the brilliant social work consultant Maggie Mellon has written about this for SUE, explaining how children in care were being encouraged to ‘transition’ by the very people who should be looking after them. And, as we know, it is children with social and emotional difficulties who are the most likely to be influenced by transgender ideology.

You can find details of the Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance that Maggie works with – and learn all about their work to challenge the disgraceful practices promoted by the Care Inspectorate. It would also be worth contacting your MSP about this subject, to keep the pressure on.

On a similar note, the Scottish government have been warned that they could face legal cases if they don’t change their position that transgender-identifying men are women and should be legally allowed to use spaces reserved for women – spaces from which they can currently be excluded under the Equality Act 2010. This comes after the Equalities Minister, Kaukab Stewart, bizarrely admitted that she did not know ‘for a fact’ whether Scotland’s NHS is following the law. Similarly, Police Scotland has been urged to provide clarity about whether rapists can self-identify as women, after the force was said to have misled MSPs on this issue.

Regarding a different but perhaps equally bizarre matter, this month has also seen the attempt to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon announcing that there is a danger that the Bard could be seen as a symbol of ‘British cultural superiority’. This move has been roundly ridiculed by commentators, including the headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh, who argues that this approach harms both white people and ethnic minorities and harms race relations in Britain.

This is an issue we will explore in the future, and if there are any English literature academics, teachers, or indeed simply lovers of Shakespeare and literature who would like to write something for us on this issue, do get in touch (info@sue.scot).

To give my tuppence worth, it does seem somewhat of a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ type of situation when it is not only the terrible aspects of the past that our decolonising activists want to attack, but that even when there is something fantastic and loved around the world, like Shakespeare, this also magically turns into a problem of ‘cultural superiority’. Sometimes you feel you really can’t do right for doing wrong.

However, I think the biggest talking point from last week is actually the discussion about ‘toxic masculinity’ that has been prompted by the Netflix drama Adolescence.

In case you missed it, the fictional programme, tells the tale of a 13-year-old boy who is accused of murder. As Netflix explains, its aim is to ask ‘What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?’

There are almost too many issues that this programme has raised raises, but it is worth trying to unpick a few of the controversies that are being highlighted, at least to start a discussion.

The first thing that is worth noting about the discussion is how one-sided it is in its focus on what is called toxic masculinity. Indeed, it is noticeable how, within days of the launch of the programme, almost everybody – in parliament, in newspaper columns (of all political persuasions), on chat shows, in both the UK and the US – were talking about toxic masculinity and the modern folk devil that is Andrew Tate.

A colleague noted that the horror expressed towards Tate, the online sexist gobsh*te, reminds him a little of the panics about video nasties in the 1980s, and with the weight of political and media attention focusing on ‘toxic masculinity’, it does feel that we are at risk of turning an important discussion into a one-dimensional panic.

The Adolescence programme raises the issue of incels. Incels are young men who have an identity of being involuntary celibate, and whose resentment about their inability to get a girlfriend can drive a hatred towards women and girls. This is a strange new type of victim group, more self-pitying ‘misogynists’ than the neanderthal man of old who is often in the heads of those talking about toxic masculinity. In many respects, these young men are the opposite to this old image.

Some sceptics have already pointed out that the reactions to Adolescence seem to fit into the existing narrative that demands further censoring of the Internet. I think this is true and a worry. However, the question of teenagers accessing adult material is a real problem.

But the potential for panicking about this, and seeing demonic young men where all we are seeing is everyday adolescence, is also a problem, with one headline asking, ‘Is YOUR son a ticking timebomb? From not letting you see his phone to being rude to his mother, expert reveals signs to watch for’.

Well, the sign I ‘watch for’ from this headline is the word ‘expert’ when referring to everyday life. There is no such thing. Which is arguably another part of the problem: when parents are encouraged to think that they need ‘experts’ to direct how they care for their children, this is something that is likely to undermine their authority.

Part of this trajectory is one where authoritative parenting, according to the ‘experts’ with their ‘research’, is seen as problematic – perhaps even abusive – and so we find the criminalisation of parents who smack their children. But this, I would argue, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to challenging almost any form of assertive parenting in a world of ‘children’s rights’.

Part of the discussion about Adolescence relates to the issue of ‘role models’, something that over the last few decades has often led, strangely, to talk about football players. Of course, this displacement discussion fails to ask the question about why traditional authority figures have left the building. Why, after all, would we expect Wayne Rooney to be a role model for anything other than kicking a ball?

But then we can see why when we have politicians with little or no politics, or preachers who at times no longer appear able to preach, or even to believe in God. We also have teachers who are discouraged from thinking of themselves as people who teach, who discipline, and who act as authority figures in schools. Being an authoritative teacher is as likely to get you disciplined as it is to help you get a promotion as our schools become ever more ‘child centred’.

Or we get the new role model of Sir Gareth Southgate, knighted perhaps more for his politically correct campaigning than his ability to win football tournaments. This Bambi-like figure feels that the problem with men is that they don’t open up, and we will no doubt see a push in schools to help boys ‘express themselves’.

Perhaps this is more of the problem than the solution. Not to say that boys shouldn’t talk, but the solution to almost everything today appears to be therapeutic, something that further turns young people in on themselves to find solutions. The question of adolescence has always related to how adults pull teenagers out of themselves, out of their bedrooms and their own heads, and into the adult world. The therapeutic approach appears to attempt to bypass this much-needed adult leadership and leaves kids with little more than their ‘selves’ and with ever more introspection.

But if adults are to pull children into the world, it begs an even bigger question: into what world? What heroes are there for young men in Britain today when even the greats, like Shakespeare, are sullied and degraded by the very people who are meant to be promoting his work?

The question I think Adolescence really raises is this one of authority, of leadership, and of belief, something that is lacking in almost all areas of life. Tragically, all the talk of ‘toxic masculinity’ in this context risks confusing things and making them worse, creating what the American feminist Christina Hoff Sommers describes as the War Against Boys.

As she notes, feminist attempts to limit masculinity, to instead get boys playing with dolls and thus deconstruct masculinity, actually degrade young boys and young men and saps them of the very thing that they need, and that we need to encourage: strength.

Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair

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Book review

Alex Standish, The False Promise of Global Education: Why Education Needs Boundaries (Continuum, 2012)

Reviewed by educator Rachael Hobbs.

Alex Standish is Associate Professor of Geography Education at University College London Institute of Education, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

His research is based on knowledge in the curriculum, curriculum design, and how social progress is related to education. He has led teacher-training programmes for geography PGCE students, and as tutor, oversees postgraduate research. He is an adviser to the Department for Education, the Mayor’s Office, Cambridge Examinations, and several schools with regards to the curriculum.

He organises Fawcett Lectures and the Fawcett Fellowship scheme for experienced geography teachers. He completed his PhD at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2006, and his career includes teaching at Western Connecticut State University in the USA, as well as primary schools in Oxford and Sussex, and an international secondary school in Wandsworth.

There has been a significant shift by policy makers over the last several decades, to make education ‘global’.

Standish, in his book The False Promise of Global Education: Why Education Needs Boundaries, outlines that what began as efforts to make teaching reflective of a more interconnected world has transformed into a troubling ideological mission, with unfettered influence by vested interests.

His review is a critical indictment of education, particularly in the US and UK. Along with what constitutes a democratic crisis over who has jurisdiction in determining educational provision, Standish shows how important boundaries are being broken when it comes to the key hallmarks which make education successful.

Standish tracks key developments of ‘global education’ to post-1945 influences. These include what was a declining trust in national identity, and the increasingly transnational nature of politics, as well as civil rights breakthroughs in sixties and seventies America which accelerated discourse around identity and rights beyond that of national belonging.

Global education, however, for Standish became distinctly more political post the 1990s through an over-focus by leaders on ‘diversity’ – one that might even be described as an obsession. We can see this, for example, through New Labour’s 2005 publication Developing a Global Dimension in the School Curriculum, which placed ‘diversity’ at its heart.

Standish believes that this has been overextended into every aspect of education and is a hollow value which inhibits the pursuit of meaning for pupils: ‘While it is one thing to live in a tolerant, culturally diverse society, turning diversity into a value is a way of avoiding discussion about what our society believes in and which values it upholds’ (p. 136).

At this point, global education starts to undermine the traditional knowledge-based curriculum.

The lost boundary around knowledge

One of Standish’s main criticisms of ‘global education’ is that advocates hold an underlying ambivalence towards knowledge-based pedagogy, under the influence of modern ‘progressivism’ or ‘social constructivism’, which often reduces it within a relativist approach to facts, or as social construct.

This is particularly so under ‘global education’, because the parameters of disciplinary knowledge have been widened so much under global ‘inclusivity’ to incorporate any other worldview – so no truth can be pinned down, and no body of knowledge merited above another. As Standish explains, ‘When knowledge becomes global, it is opened up to alternative meanings and consequently it loses its special status’ (p. 172).

Standish acknowledges that theoretical knowledge can be social and therefore culturally ‘biased’, but only if it cannot be transferred to another context: ‘As one abstracts from a given social context and is able to make connections with different contexts, knowledge becomes objective – it transcends the historical and cultural conditions of its generation’ (p. 172).

The takeover of education by the third sector

As global education weakens the boundaries of established, knowledge-based learning, this, along with the overemphasis on ‘diversity’, has led, for Standish, to a vacuum of political leadership over the years, through avoidance of asserting with any confidence what education is for.

This has left it prey to a host of non-governmental bodies only too happy to determine that for us. And it is why we see the opportunistic takeover of education (often funded without much thought by governments) by those keen to promote their own version of ‘global education’, which often takes the form of the ‘social justice’ ideologies by single-interest groups. As Standish says, ‘Making education global has been a way of enabling others to take over the curriculum and fill the moral void with their own agendas’ (p. 181).

This amounts to a democratic crisis in education: ‘Non-profit organizations and business leaders now play a key role in determining what gets taught in schools and how. Together with policy makers, they write key policy documents, curriculum resources, guidelines for teaching subjects, provide school training for teachers and advisors, contribute to the content of textbooks and examination syllabi, and in some instances shape teacher preparation’ (p. 66).

Standish cites Professor of Education Elizabeth Heilman, who highlights how important democratic boundaries have diminished as education is determined by unaccountable powers: ‘Cosmopolitan global citizenship seeks to shift authority from the local and the national community, to a world community, that is a loose network of international organizations and subnational political actors not bound within a clear democratic constitutional framework’ (p. 66).

Standish argues that we have failed to question whether this takeover by the corporate and third sector has any legitimacy or educational expertise: ‘Not only do the values of these organizations often clash with those of communities, but their agenda for schools are not educational.’ (p. 66).

The boundary between adult and child

When knowledge as a distinct entity is surpassed via modern themes of ‘inclusion’ of any ‘truth’ outside of strict subject discipline, education devalues teaching: ‘Because they refrain from identifying a body of knowledge worthy of passing on to children, advocates of global education are ambivalent about the role of the teacher’ (p. 171).

This has led to the capture of education by pedagogies such as ‘child-centred learning’ in place of adult-centred teaching. Within this, education is viewed as ‘a natural process of unfolding the child’s inner abilities through discovery learning’ (p. 171). Standish explains that ‘rather than imposing adult knowledge on children, progressive educators aim for children to find their own path to knowledge, skills, and values (although they often surreptitiously control teaching materials in order to communicate desired values and skills)’ (p. 171).

‘Therapeutic education’, an offshoot of child-centred learning, promotes lessons across UK schools about ‘how the brain works’ or ‘wellbeing’, where children are versed in such non-academic inanities as what feelings mean. Children are ‘taught’ about how they learn, thus promoting only an insular and bizarre focus on understanding themselves.

Standish cites Ecclestone and Hayes, who write extensively on ‘therapeutic education’: ‘Developments in the UK have gone further still, with learning being replaced with “feeling good about yourself”.’ ‘From education to learning, from learning, to learning to learn, and from learning to learn, to learning to feel and respond “appropriately”.’ As they conclude so aptly, ‘the collapse of belief in human potential is palpable’ (p. 171).

The child-centred curriculum reflects, for Standish, a capitulation by adults of their duty to teach children, who cannot ‘learn’ by themselves. Furthermore, through the political nature of themes entering the curriculum (human rights and environmentalism, for example) and via an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach (which he highlights crosses another line – the boundary between disciplines), Standish argues that global education is asking children to take on adult and world problems. For example, ‘sustainability’ is now a central ethos behind most subjects in England (p. 147).

Global education has become a social values project: ‘Lessons across subjects may often present hypothetical problems from the outside world into schools, not to study them, but to use them as a means to transmit values and skills to children’ (p. 166), ‘Whether it is the skills gap, environmental crisis, racial intolerance, inequality, the declining meaning of citizenship, or human rights; global education is seeking to solve problems from the adult public sphere by displacing them into the classroom’ (p. 166). Standish urges that this is not fair on teachers or on children (p. 166).

Standish provides extensive examples of how subjects now take on ‘problem-solving’ in the name of student ‘participation’ in global issues. This politicises education, making it not so much about acquiring knowledge but addressing political issues facing society (p. 141).

The boundary between education and activism

Standish elaborates that global education has crossed over from education to activism because it aims to solve global issues (p. 140): ‘When problems faced by those in other countries are presented as global issues, the tendency is to move away from an attempt to understand the cultural and political context and toward the banal assertion that we are all responsible for the problems of the world’ (p. 141).

He points out that lessons in personal, political or emotive topics, whatever they are, are not educational: ‘Engagement is either a therapeutic or political objective (depending upon whether the outcome is personal change or some kind of political action), but it is not an educational one. This is why teaching for social justice uses the language of “raising awareness” but rarely talks about knowledge and understanding’ (p. 142).

He continues: ‘If the aim of a lesson is to instil an attitude of tolerance or empathy in children, or to change their consumption habits in order to reduce carbon emissions, then this is a therapeutic or political activity not an educational one’ (p. 161).

Standish argues that global education is also an assiduous attempt to change adult beliefs, through children. Because it demands change, and employs topics now common in schools, such as conflict, poverty, and human rights, ‘Its primary goal is to change the values, attitudes, and behaviour of children, who in turn are expected to influence the behaviour and attitudes of their parents’ (p. 162).

He cites sociologist and professor Frank Furedi, who described this as ‘socialisation in reverse’, because ‘where education once sought to integrate children into the norms and values of society, children are now used to educate their parents’ (p. 162).

How global education uproots children

One of the most serious effects of global education is how it fails to give children a sense of rootedness to their communities (p. 159): ‘Proponents of the global perspective view traditional subject-based knowledge and understanding of the past as less important than encouraging a “global view’’’ (p. 2).

He states that ‘The global context diminishes pupils’ understanding of homogenised local and national community’. And at a deeper level, collective values are ‘to be replaced with a global mindset framed around therapeutic “self-knowledge” rather than knowledge per se’ (p. 131).

Standish argues that the aim of global education to reflect other cultures does not even achieve that. The principle of ‘diversity’ avoids true learning about cultures beyond a superficial focus on ‘identity’ – to avoid assessing their merit: ‘The purpose of global education appears to be to remove education from communities of adults and their particular beliefs. This is evident by its rejection of subject knowledge by association with nation-states, and its promotion of diversity while actively discouraging engagement with different ideas and cultures’ (p. 177).

As Standish rightly points out, ‘The failure to engage with different perspectives, or to be critical of different versions of knowledge or cultural beliefs and practices, means avoiding questions of morality and truth’ (p. 177).

A final thought for readers to take away from Standish’s outstanding grasp of what is wrong with modern schooling, is that a global approach uproots pupils from grassroots values within local society. This denies children the process even of moral grounding, because global ‘diversity’, through its avoidance of making any considered judgements, asks that they permanently suspend them.

Standish does not believe that the original intentions of global education were malign but points towards a larger crisis: that top-down, hollow values such as diversity are really placeholders, to avoid acknowledging that without collective national identity, we no longer know what we stand for. Such uncertainty has only allowed interest groups to infiltrate schooling under the open-ended remit of ‘global education’, which through its boundaryless scope cannot tether itself to anything.

Global education philosophy denies children what they most need in all aspects of their development: the safety of concrete, cultural and moral roots.

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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-159138335?source=queue Joanna Williams, What is education for? It is easy, and necessary, to criticise much of what happens in schools and universities today. Far more difficult is the task of defining education in positive terms. 15/03/25

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/17/labour-is-wrecking-the-education-of-poor-kids/ Fraser Myers, ‘Labour is wrecking the education of poor kids’. Katharine Birbalsingh on the dangers of Bridget Phillipson’s school reforms. 17/03/25

https://archive.is/ob6hk Oliver Wright, GCSEs are too academic and holding pupils back, review finds. An expert commissioned by Bridget Phillipson will say Gove’s EBacc system neglects vocations and dents achievement. 18/03/25

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/24/exam-stress-is-not-a-mental-illness-2/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1cb9mvPj4DrSXajyQldfF-E5k8HQ1DZGidHr2j6zlCU-eCbDeZsM7UJDI_aem_vgQITtV0PTxq_7NsJKjlXA Frank Furedi, ‘Exam stress’ is not a mental illness. Making GCSEs easier will only breed fragility in kids. 24/03/25

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g0rxz2yj4o Branwen Jeffreys, Poorest children missing more school and further behind after Covid. 17/03/25

https://archive.is/l3Mr6 Louise Eccles, Britain’s first part-time school, where children go in just once a week. London Park School Hybrid is offering children affected by Covid lockdowns a way back into education. 23/03/25

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jsxmed/qdaf026/8042063 Joshua Lewis, et al, Examining gender-specific mental health risks after gender-affirming surgery: a national database study February 2025