Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No86
Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No86
Newsletter Theme: are teachers and schools replacing parents and families?
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This week’s Substack looks at a recent report that explores the changing role of schools, one that reflects a confusion of roles, where teachers increasingly come to replace parents while turning education and school life into a form of ‘values’ instruction.
We have spent some time highlighting the role that activism plays in schools, especially around the issue of transgender ideology. For SUE, a key problem with activism in schools is that it turns a topic of debate into a moralised collection of information, often developed through a new ‘correct’ form of values that represent ideological belief systems.
Some people believe that transgender children are simply ‘real’, a modern expression of liberation at a time when personal identities are being freed to express their ‘true selves’.
Others challenge this idea and see it as simply untrue, unreal, and rather an expression of transgender ideology that has been promoted and imposed upon children.
However, we can see this pattern of activism and ideology elsewhere.
In a report just out, the Family Education Trust has shown that three in ten schools in England are covering ‘toxic masculinity’. This, they argue, means that ‘contested beliefs surrounding masculinity have crept into the school curriculum in the same manner as gender ideology’. Part of the problem that they see with this is that built into some of this ‘education’ is the notion that ‘men possess traits that are inherently negative for society’.
Like transgender ideology, this idea of toxic masculinity is highly contested. The idea stems from a strand of feminist thought, and whether you agree or disagree with this perspective, it is contentious, and if taught as fact represents the same problem that many feminists identify with trans or ‘gender’ ideology.
It would appear to be entirely legitimate to debate these issues with older schoolchildren, but when all children are being introduced to such ideas through the lens of one ‘correct’ perspective, or when this perspective becomes part of the school ethos, we again find that education is being replaced by indoctrination, resulting in the ‘expert’ training of children to adopt certain values. This is not what schools are for, and it is not education.
Interestingly, one of the arguments about the growing number of young men wanting to transition and ‘become’ women is that men and maleness are increasingly being framed as problematic (‘toxic’). As a result, some non-traditional (for want of a better term) young men have attempted to escape this degraded identity by transitioning. This is discussed in the film The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood, where we hear the tragic stories of men (some of whom have been castrated) who have come to recognise the devastating harm that they have done to themselves.
Societies change all the time, and new dimensions to life for men and women also change. In a social media age, there may well be new expressions of misogynistic ideas and behaviour emerging, and it would seem worth discussing them. Personally, I think it would be fantastic to have higher-level students listening to outside speakers or organising a debate on the topic of toxic masculinity, where arguments are made from very different perspective.
But that does not appear to be what is happening.
If, or rather when, ideologies and contested ideas are turned into ‘education’ in a one-sided way, we need to challenge this and point out that this is not what schools are for.
Teachers or parents: who is responsible for teaching the next generation?
Rachael Hobbs is a mother, a teaching assistant, and SUE’s book and journal review editor.
Joanna Williams is a writer and academic who has worked for a number of political think tanks including Policy Exchange and Civitas. She is the author of Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (2016) and Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t be Bought (2012). She is currently a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest and writes for various publications including the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Times.
Joanna Williams, in her new publication Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for teaching the next generation?, suggests that a serious role reversal has taken place between the two, regarding who is charged with having the expertise and authority on child rearing and development.
Teaching, which has made the woolly ‘wellbeing’ mantra a central goal of schooling, alongside an increasingly political curriculum, has led schools to pursue a mission far beyond their academic remit, eclipsing the role of parents and diminishing real education at the same time.
Parents, caught between this and a saturated industry of commercial or state-sponsored parenting ‘experts’ bombarding them with advice, are losing confidence and legitimacy in bringing up their children. Media stories offer a constant tale of apparent parental failures in child rearing, from not making children ‘school ready’ (if we are to believe the hype) by not toilet training them, to not teaching good behaviour or even imparting the ‘correct’ beliefs.
This adds up to disempowered parents and blurred roles between themselves and schools. Williams links this discord between parents and teachers to a wider breakdown of adult authority in society, impacting the socialisation of future generations.
A new, hidden curriculum
Williams highlights three ways in which education has become political and transformed the role of teachers.
Sex, relationships and health ‘education’ lessons which increasingly serve a political programme by introducing contested ideas and age-inappropriate content to children, and which undo even basic relationship norms, including that of the family unit.
The revision of traditional subjects (geography and history) to centre on ‘inclusion’ and ‘social justice’.
The way in which political messages now infiltrate daily school life beyond lessons, for example via invited speakers from activist circles, which in turn infuse school policies.
Williams highlights that from 2019 to 2021, sex education shifted (quietly) to ‘sexuality education’ thanks to the influences of Stonewall, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and WHO, the World Health Organisation. This resulted in widening lesson parameters to something altogether more controversial. Personal, Social, Health, and Economic (PSHE) ‘education’ in England, and Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenting (RSHP) ‘education’ in Scotland, now incorporate same-sex teaching and highly controversial ‘gender identity’ lessons. This came alongside an ongoing message guised as ‘breaking stereotypes’, which encourages children to question heteronormativity and the idea of the traditional family as ‘normal’.
Williams reminds us that despite Sunak’s Conservative government proposal to ban teaching of ‘gender identity’ earlier this year, it is unknown whether Labour will reverse this or if they will roll back activist ideology in lessons and the insidious hold LGBTQ+ lobbies have over ‘inclusion’ materials in lessons.
For Williams, the very fact that teachers are often discouraged from informing parents if their child discloses a new ‘gender identity’ encourages teachers to take on the role of parent.
With this and many other changes in schools, the understanding of parents is being downgraded and often degraded, so that they come to be represented as out of touch, freedom-stifling figures. Natural efforts of parents wishing to protect children from harmful ideologies is consequently presented as a safeguarding matter.
For parents, this generates a level of anxiety and helps to transfer authority from parents to teachers and to the ‘experts’ and activist groups who increasingly operate within schools and help to develop their ‘ethos’.
In England, parents are not allowed to remove their children from the ‘relationships’ component of PSHE classes. This means that it is often difficult to protect your child from sexualised material or lessons that encourage transgender ideology, as they are often built into these relationship lessons. In Scotland parents can withdraw their children, but again it is difficult to know what exactly is being taught in what class, while the wider ethos of the school often embodies ‘aware’ attitudes that embody the same ‘values’ and ideas.
Additionally, of course, the very idea that schools, teachers and experts are supposed to teach children how to have relationships is a very modern idea and one that constantly risks becoming ideological and based on the idea of ‘correct’ relationships as defined by these ‘experts’.
Not only this, but children are taught arbitrary subject matter: ‘consent, sexual exploitation, online abuse, grooming, coercion, harassment, rape, domestic abuse, forced marriage, honour-based violence and FGM’ (p. 6). Williams contends that ‘such broad content […] left classes open to the different political enthusiasms of individual schools and teachers’ (p. 10).
Williams points out, very succinctly, that Relationships and Sex Education is not a traditional school subject and, as such, it has no disciplinary basis, or body of knowledge and that there is no such thing as a relationships ‘expert’. It is therefore simply ‘a means of imparting a pre-determined set of moral values and political assumptions to school pupils who comprise a captive audience in the classroom’ (p. 8).
She deems these lessons harmful to individual pupils via the messages being taught. They also undermine parental authority by ‘promoting the idea that the state, via teachers, is responsible for imparting attitudes and values about the most intimate aspects of life.’ (p. 8).
In terms of the revision of traditional subjects, here we find that History, Geography and mandatory Citizenship lessons in secondary schools embody a new type of moral crusade in schools. The ideology of decolonisation, for example, is increasingly embedded in these subjects, and indeed this idea that we need to decolonise the curriculum is becoming part of the new ethos of schools. This is being helped by teachers’ unions, who are pushing for ‘every subject and every stage of the school curriculum [and] every aspect of school life’ to be ‘decolonised’ (p. 12).
Here we find that the one-sided image of the UK as nothing more than a country based on racism and colonialism becomes part and parcel of both the education and the ethos of schools, driven by an extreme ideology espoused by unions, who argue that even the ‘design of classrooms’ and the very ‘structure of daily routines’ in schools have what they describe as ‘colonial roots’ (p. 12).
These subjects now reflect a modern focus on climate change activism and a highly controversial ‘social justice’ version of the past. History lessons have been subject to revision from divisive ideologies such as critical race theory, encouraging an identitarian, ‘white oppressor’ versus ‘non-white victim’ approach to the topic. Parents are often unaware of these politicised developments, while children rarely encounter alternative and critical alternatives to this ideologically driven curriculum (p. 24).
Williams believes that subjects have taken on a moral tone to fit current political concerns, describing them as nothing more than political projects presented as school topics (p. 8).
There is a distinct move away from teaching national stories to that of promoting the idea of global history, with a one-eyed focus on all the past wrongs of Western powers. In this way, the history curriculum has become a vessel for promoting political views that steer pupils away from parental or community values, something that helps to undermine the sense of being a national citizen through the promotion of globalism (p. 11).
Williams outlines how, in 2021, research by the Universities of Oxford and Reading found that 87 per cent of UK secondary schools had made substantial changes to history teaching – not to emphasise a national story but to address issues of ‘diversity’ (p. 10).
Michael Gove, under the Conservative government in 2010, vowed to reverse the ‘trashing of the national past’ in lessons but was met with attack by teaching unions and historians (p. 12). Williams argues that what we now have is politicised education deterring pupils from knowledge-based pedagogy that connects them to their national histories.
A rounded and critical understanding of the past is necessary, but this should include an understanding of the fascinating and complex history of Britain that has helped developed the ideas of democracy and freedom that are central to a modern nation state.
Remarkably, the political values and ideologies being coached to pupils are, according to Williams, not even considered as a clear example of the crisis of impartiality but are rather understood as an acceptable opportunity for schools and teacher to engender ‘correct’ attitudes and to change the culture of society through children, via the use of our education system.
She describes how, following the Brexit vote in 2016, teaching associations wrote to the government calling for renewed commitment to the teaching of PSHE, Citizenship and Religion (p. 10). The focus was global citizenship. For Williams, this was tantamount to using education to replace national allegiance with a global one, challenging citizens who voted for Brexit and distancing the children from their parents’ ideals (pp. 10–11).
Here, once again, we see a one-sided and politicised dimension to education, where global ideals are taught as a necessary good, compared to any national sentiment and beliefs, which are consequently negative and bad.
School fixation over ‘mental health’
Importantly, Williams also looks at the way in which teaching has now also taken on a vast pastoral role, via incorporation of ‘wellbeing’, teaching children ‘emotional regulation’, and heralding ‘therapeutic education’ as a perpetual theme within wider school policy.
This is an important and new dimension of schooling, because it is so rarely questioned.
Williams argues that what we are witnessing through the ever-increasing focus on managing mental health is ‘a shift in the role of teachers from experts in academic subjects to experts in childhood.’ (p. 4).
This shift from engaging with children as thinking beings to one where they are increasingly understood with reference to their feelings reflects not a rise in the ‘caring’ nature of schools and teachers but a crisis in schooling. As Williams puts it: ‘Unable (or unwilling) to assume authority in the classroom on the basis of superior subject knowledge, teachers claim authority in relation to child development’ (p. 4).
This is something the American educationalist Edgar F. Friedenberg noted as far back as 1959 in his book The Vanishing Adolescent. For Friedenberg, the tragedy emerging in education was built on a profession that had lost a dynamic and positive belief in the beauty, creativity and potential of developing knowledge, and as a result, teachers had lost their (knowledge-based) authority. Consequently, he argued, teachers were no longer educators but had become manipulators of children’s emotional selves.
This begs the question, is education today becoming ‘therapeutic’ and ever more preoccupied with the idea of wellbeing because it has lost expertise in formal curriculum disciplines?
The Department for Education expects schools to have a ‘whole school’ approach to wellbeing. Williams highlights a long list of principles recommended for schools, including ‘curriculum teaching […] to promote resilience and support social and emotional learning’ (p. 17).
As evidence for the trend towards the confusion of roles between parents and teachers, we also find that, via government directives, schools are now advising on things that once belonged to the parental domain: examples include healthy eating, how to brush teeth, and what age children should be allowed to walk to and from school on their own.
Wellbeing lessons can range from yoga, deep breathing exercises, and learning how the brain works to an endless foray into the world of feelings, something that risks encouraging children to become ever more introspective. As a result, the socialising dynamic of education that needs to draw children out of themselves and into the world is turned on its head, and teenagers in particular are actively encouraged to look inwards rather than out into the world to understand themselves and their ‘identity’.
At its most extreme, what we are witnessing here is the institutionalisation of narcissism by the very institutions, schools, whose core purpose, through education, is to act as the bridge into the historical weight of generationally produced knowledge and understanding.
As the centrality of knowledge wilts, the role of educators as managers of emotions expands, and the role of teacher increasingly impinges on the space of parents.
As a result, schools pay lip service to the idea of parental rights and authority while assuming that a child’s ‘mental health’ falls under the more reliable remit of teachers (p. 17). For example, ‘circle time’ for younger children asks for disclosures of feelings, and discussion over private aspects of life at home, and it is the family that is often assumed to be the source of emotional problems.
It is not unusual to now find ‘old school’ parents and grandparents who are highly conscious of what their children and grandchildren are writing in their ‘diaries’ – diaries that teachers use as a basis for discussions in classroom.
(In Scotland, with the attempt to give every child a Named Person, this anxiety about professional intrusion into the home made ever more sense as concerns about children who were ‘at risk of harm’ was expanded into an all-encompassing examination and scrutiny of all children’s ‘wellbeing’. This focus on wellbeing that covers every aspect and dimension of a child’s life remains the focus for education in Scotland.)
This leads Williams to what she sees as the broader role that academics, policy makers and journalists have played over decades in questioning the ability of family to socialise their children. Williams argues: ‘They have successfully established a narrative that presents leaving socialisation to the family as a threat to the life chances of individual children and a risk to society more broadly. In response social workers, health professionals and cultural commentators have sought to present raising children not as an instinctive or natural part of family life but as a distinct task requiring the mastery of specific skills.’ (p. 28).
Family is presented as less significant, as a more limited or even problematic institution of society, and for Williams, the assumption now is that ‘schools have to correct the impoverished moral influence of the home [something that] undermines the authority of parents who must themselves defer to the presumed expertise of the teacher, not just in subject knowledge but in child development.’ (p. 50).
Education without education
Williams notes that schools of course have an important role to play in the socialisation of children. She cites the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt, who described school as ‘The institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition to the world possible’ and how ‘school represents the world, although it is not yet actually the world.’ (p. 41).
Socialisation takes place, William asserts, through home, community and schools, but crucially, ‘it does not draw attention to itself’ (p. 42). In other words, it does not need to be stated; it is implicit, via imparting of knowledge and establishment of expected behaviours and social norms which teach the child.
One of the most important values, Williams outlines, is pursuit of and respect for knowledge as an end in itself, which also unites children and grounds their sense of place in the world. What we see now is a distinct departure from this, where teachers are increasingly instructing children only on values. For Williams, without the transmission of knowledge, the role of schools in socialising children has no worth (p. 41). Moreover, the expanding role of teachers as producers of values, as activists and therapists, distorts and undermines the informal socialisation that is the role of the family.
Williams cites academic and writer Frank Furedi, who posits that via the modern ‘child-centred’ approach to learning, ‘A new group of experts claimed that their science entitled them to be the authoritative voices on issues that were hitherto perceived as strictly pertaining to the domain of personal and family life.’ (pp. 46–47).
Positioning teachers as experts in childhood undermines parents but also the teacher’s own authority (p. 47). We now dispense education with the opportunity to mold pupils into its chosen brand of future citizen, giving teachers, according to Williams, too much power and allowing politics into schools.
In the words of Arendt: ‘An education without learning is empty and therefore degenerates with great ease into moral emotional rhetoric.’ (p. 49).
For Williams, the only way we can save parents and teachers from the crisis over their roles is to bring these debates into the open and be braver in speaking out when lines are crossed.
Boundaries must be brought back to distinguish the remit of the family with that of schools. This, in turn, may restore confidence to parents and return the outstanding deficit of knowledge-based learning – is there really any other kind? – back into education.
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.civitas.org.uk/publications/teachers-or-parents-who-is-responsible-for-raising-the-next-generation/ Joanna Williams, Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation? Sept 2024
https://archive.is/sERx6 Andrew Learmouth, Scottish Labour MP's concerns over conversion therapy ban. 26/09/24
https://unherd.com/newsroom/police-scotlands-trans-u-turn-should-not-be-trusted/ Joan Smith, Police Scotland’s trans U-turn should not be trusted. 25/09/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-labour-sidelining-keir-starmers-oracy-drive/ Steerpike, Is Labour sidelining Keir Starmer’s oracy drive? 24/09/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-scotland-still-tying-itself-in-knots-over-gender/ Catriona Stewart, Why is Scotland still tying itself in knots over gender? 28/09/24
Kids First, The Tail-Eating Snake of School Mental Health. Just how much are mental health prevention efforts in K12 contributing to the rise in mental health problems in kids? 17/09/24
https://www.scotpag.com/post/isn-t-honesty-always-the-best-policy?utm_campaign=464b137b-d64c-4847-ac63-777b9a9d4853&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail_lp&cid=8ba70ec0-5e5a-451a-a2b5-fa029719421b ScotPAG, Isn't honesty always the best policy? ScotPAG challenges Jenni Minto and her claims about gender ideology not being promoted in schools. 28/09/24
https://www.thetimes.com/article/a4205fb8-4077-4ad3-9a5f-54574b1c9268?shareToken=c253a83a3e0e179c385c61c5decbe116 Helen Puttick, Top Sandyford doctor raised the alarm about gender clinic in 2021. A whistleblowing report leaked to The Sunday Times shows that David Gerber was worried staff lacked caution when sending young people for reassignment treatment. 28/09/24
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