Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No21
Newsletter Themes: artistic freedom, the cultural Taliban, and the new bigotry
Next Thursday we have choreographer Rosie Kay as the guest at our next online SUE meeting. As Kate Deeming explains below, Rosie is one of those brave individuals who has fought back against trans intolerance and attacks by transactivists on artistic freedom. Tickets are available here and are free to SUE paid subscribers.
Also in this issue of the newsletter, we are republishing an important article by Frank Furedi on what he calls the cultural Taliban, made up of those who seek to cancel some of the greatest thinkers in human history. Furedi identifies a rapidly developing trend within schools, universities, and society at large to undermine or cancel anything associated with civilisation and the norms, traditions and conventions associated with it. What we are witnessing, Furedi believes, is an assault on knowledge itself.
Finally, Stuart Waiton asks readers to consider if it’s time to take a stand against schools and universities demanding that staff use other people’s wrong-sex or ‘neo’ pronouns. SUE is keen to collect information on employers and institutions that are coercing staff to use pronoun badges or perform other rituals related to trans ideology.
Last week we had a fantastic lively meeting in Glasgow with almost 100 attendees. Over the summer we will be developing a programme of roadshows, including events in Edinburgh, Ayr, Fife and the Borders. Please get in touch if you can host or help us to organise events (big or small) in your area.
Rosie Kay – purity spirals and dance
Kate E. Deeming is a solo mother to a P5 child, a dance artist, a child advocate, and a community organiser. She has developed dance programmes with children in educational and community settings globally for three decades. Originally from Philadelphia, USA, she has been based in Glasgow for 23 years.
The story of Rosie Kay is an important one for our time. An eminent British choreographer, producer and dancer, Rosie Kay was highly regarded artistically and academically until one day she found that she held the ‘wrong’ thoughts. And for this she lost everything. In Václav Havel’s book The Power of the Powerless, the author, poet, playwright, former dissident and first president of the Czech Republic makes a case for the danger of ‘normalisation’ – a state in which action becomes impossible as people are rendered ‘unlikeable’. Normal is, in this context, a state-sanctioned abnormality, and nowhere is this more evident in the current state of the arts.
We can draw many parallels between totalitarian states of our past and the current politics and indeed ‘purity spirals’ (and funding strands) of arts and artists today, where one must stay within the perceived frame of ‘normal’ as set by a small vocal and powerful minority or face devastating consequences.
Rosie Kay did everything right. A rising star at London Contemporary Dance School, she went on to become a choreographer of distinction, visionary and aspirational, with a host of high-end dance productions to her name – something few dance artists will ever achieve. The scale of her ambition ranged from her show 5 Soldiers (spanning the years 2010–2017) – a portrait of army life for which, in preparation, she joined the UK 4th Battalion, The Rifles, to watch and participate in full battle exercises, and visited the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre for our Armed Forces – to her role as choreographer for the handover for the 2018 Commonwealth Games, involving Birmingham Royal Ballet’s principal dancer Céline Gittens alongside more than 500 volunteer dancers and televised live to more than one billion people.
For 20 years her work received vast critical praise from legacy media, with five-star reviews and accolades, and was also drawing in a wider ‘non-arts’ audience. Her commissions are forensic both in form, from a choreographic perspective, and content, drawing from a vast body of research and knowledge. In 2013 she was the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the University of Oxford.
In short, she was what dancers and choreographers aspire to be. She was doing it, producing good work and thriving. But in today’s state of dance, and the arts in general, that is not enough. It will never be enough. Rosie made the mistake of revealing in a private conversation that she believed biological sex to be a real and immutable fact, and for this she was subject to a witch hunt by the very dancers she employed. For this, she lost the dance company she had founded and whose success was based on her labours.
Reading this, you might think this description of the treatment of Rosie Kay to be impossible and outrageous. You might believe her case to be an outlier in an otherwise stable and open-minded industry, but for this you would be wrong. The arts are broken; independent thought is no longer permitted when it comes to the subject of biological sex or indeed any host of social justice parameters.
I have worked professionally in the arts sector for 30 years. When I came to Scotland in 2000 to pursue my Masters in Drama from the Royal Conservatoire, I found Scotland – and more specifically Glasgow – to be a thrilling place with a ‘f*** it’ attitude where ‘s*** happened’. It was exciting, and (more importantly) in its mad pursuit of personal and collective creativity, it was fun. However, somewhere along the way the arts decided it needed to atone for its own and the world’s perceived sins, and everything funded started to have a moral slant. Although I can appreciate the noble aspirations of some of the promoters of this goal, what it has done is create a framework and foot soldiers for absolutist art. We are fast becoming an arm of Mao’s Scotland.
Last year I attended Scottish Ballet’s (exceptionally well-funded) three-day conference on ‘Children’s Dance and Mental Health’. Having only just come out of lockdowns, I was glad to see Scottish Ballet rise to the challenge of addressing the absolute devastation plagued upon our children over three years, which was being widely reported on for its consequences on children’s mental and physical health. What I did not expect was to see a host of social justice sessions and not one mention of lockdown or poverty. I did not expect to hear about Scottish Ballet’s flagship outreach programme ‘Safe to be Me’, which had toured to 60 primary and secondary schools in one year and propagandised gender theory. What was distinctly lacking from the programme, and indeed school programming, was a focus on ... dance. This is now de rigueur in the dance sector.
Scroll through funding opportunities on the Creative Scotland website and you will not find a funding strand that is free of social justice markers. Here is one from this month: “We are also committed to working with and supporting artists from under-represented groups. We now have a two-stage application process: an initial selection is made then this is narrowed down in a second-stage selection process. If you are a person from an under-represented group or have a disability and/or is neurodiverse you can self-select to be put forward automatically to the second round, if you choose to do so. We also want to highlight that if you are an artist who has work that focuses on environmental awareness, that you can also choose to put yourself automatically through to the second stage of the selection process.”
This week-long dance residency pays £750 for a week of work. This is no small fee. A 2015 survey found that more than half of professional dancers earn less than £5000 per year. And although the survey is old, I can assure you there has not been any massive boon in the cultural world that has shifted that figure in any significant way. (I work consistently and make between £9000 and £11,000 per year). Dancers need paid work. What’s one to do when the baseline for normal is not dance but relationship to social justice?
How does this play out in the larger world if artists and organisations are to thrive? They must adapt and adopt the social justice mantle. Imaginate is one such organisation. As the national organisation in Scotland that purports to promote, develop and celebrate theatre and dance for children and young people, it has recently made some strong financial and strategic partnerships with the UN and the UN development goals. What this means is that the only two productions from Scotland in their recent festival (available for download at https://www.imaginate.org.uk/festival) were themed around climate change and child activism. As noted in my earlier piece on ‘disaster education’, this style of work is seeded by the research of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. It is founded on the beliefs that all life is based on a system of power structures, and that therefore all teaching must first identify and dismantle those power structures to function. It does not in any way address what is developmentally appropriate as championed by Jean Piaget, the eminent child psychologist who was the former go-to in programmes for children. In fact, it goes against child development.
Therefore, the theatrical output of Imaginate, of our National Theatre of Scotland, and beyond, and funded by the Scottish government and beyond, is pure propaganda. It does not take any child development into account; rather, it makes children vessels for the message. It will (and is) adding to the devastation we are forcing onto children’s lives. There is no question or journey in these stories presented to kids, but rather a map of what to think and how to behave.
How does any artist survive in such a climate? Rosie Kay was devastated but she had a body of work to call on and the watershed of the J. K. Rowling witch hunt had passed, so she regrouped and reformed a new company, which was no mean feat. Without this visibility to continue in the arts – and indeed many other fields – one must adopt the normal doctrine or lose work, career, reputation and ... income.
There are no performing artists that I am aware of who have stood above the parapet in this fight (shout outs to Magi Gibson, Jenny Lindsay and Elaine Miller, who have fiercely and nobly fought in the fields of writing and the comedy). I can only assume that the artists who hold up these social justice mantles are adopting these policies readily, believing themselves to be doing a good thing. I can only assume the dancers who hounded Rosie Kay believed themselves to be doing a good thing. In arts sector meetings where I might question the of use preferred pronouns, I am looked at with disbelief and reminded about ‘kindness’. Where does it end? Mao’s Red Guard also believed themselves to be holding up ‘the best cultural ideals’ when using compelled language) as we use wrong-sex or ‘neo’ pronouns. But then, as everyone was trained to look for an offence in everything (‘the hammer sees everything as a nail’), everyone was a potential victim. No one survives a purity spiral.
And where is dance in all this? Are we supposed to be likeable? Is our art supposed to propagate a frame and not a question? I don’t know. What I do know is that the current funded arts sector is a very powerful tool in state-sanctioned propaganda, which is something most people don’t realise, and that our children are collateral damage in the pursuit of ‘social justice’. As Václav Havel pointed out, we are living in abnormal times. Can we find a way to just dance for the sake of it again?
Cancelling human knowledge
Frank Furedi is a sociologist and writer who has written 26 books, including Paranoid Parenting (2001) and How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century (2018). This article appeared on his Substack Roots & Wings on 5 June 2023.
One of the earliest and certainly the most prescient warning about the threat posed by the phenomenon that we now call Cancel Culture was published in 1949. George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 contains an important passage where its main character, Winston Smith, is told by a colleague in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth:
‘By 2050 – earlier probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak [that is, standard English] will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.’
Today, the reputation of the four great cultural figures cited by Orwell – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Byron – are being reframed as white supremacists by advocates of Cancel Culture. Numerous so-called scholars represent Chaucer, the ‘father of English poetry’ as ‘a rapist, racist and antisemite’. That is why, two years ago, the University of Leicester announced that it would remove Chaucer from the English curriculum. Along with other problematic poets, he will be replaced with courses on ‘race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity’.
If they can ditch Chaucer, is it any surprise that they are coming for Shakespeare? Some academics have concluded that his plays need to be decolonised. They believe his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, displays ‘problematic, gendered and racialised dynamics’. Sections of the decolonisation crusade characterise Shakespeare’s texts as a resource for promoting white supremacy.
John Milton – one the earliest and bravest advocate of free speech – has been rediscovered as an apologist for slavery [1]. And despite his reputation for being an opponent of slavery, the poet Lord Byron is challenged because he ‘insistently privileges the purity and beauty of white bodies’ [2].
How soon before the powerful writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Byron will exist only in Newspeak versions depends on us and our willingness to understand and respond to the war being waged against the legacy of human knowledge and beauty.
The assault on knowledge is waged on many fronts. There are numerous cultural institutions and non-governmental organisations that are committed to the goal of displacing the pursuit of knowledge in educational institutions with a political agenda. In the United Kingdom, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is at the forefront of imposing the doctrine of decolonisation on all intellectual disciplines. The decolonisation movement has many objectives, but in the Academy, its main objective is to discredit the intellectual foundation of Western cultural institutions.
The QAA has decided to embrace the tactic of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and subject British Universities to a regime of woke indoctrination. The latest target of the QAA is the discipline of mathematics. It demands that the math curriculum be decolonised and insists that the subject be taught as a vehicle for promoting the ideology of diversity.
The principal aim of politicising the mathematics curriculum is to ensure that students feel a sense of guilt and profound shame about the historical legacy of their subject. There is something genuinely grotesque about how the QAA has gone about inventing scraps of evidence about the supposed complicity of maths with heinous crimes. The QAA guidance instructs university teachers to be aware that ‘some early ideas in statistics were motivated by their proposers’ support for eugenics. It claims that some astronomical data were collected on plantations by enslaved people. It also suggests that professors should know that in the past, some mathematicians possessed racist or fascist views or had connections to groups such as the Nazis.
The QAA’s attempt to recast the history of mathematics as steeped in racism is no doubt inspired by the North American decolonisation movement, where this subject is frequently denounced as very white and very oppressive. Thankfully the QAA does not quite go as far as Canada’s Simon Fraser University, which hosted a seminar last October on ‘Racist Math’. The organisers of this conference promised that the event would unpack ‘oppressive structures and bias in math and science’!
Led by the QAA, the indoctrination of students is fast becoming the norm in British institutions. Even the most unlikely subjects – such as geology, archaeology and the classics – are under pressure to decolonise and apologise for their existence. Subjects such as economics, engineering, business and management, biosciences, languages, law and politics, and international relations have all been instructed to tow the QAA’s party line.
In true Taliban fashion, the QAA and sections of the Higher Education Establishment want to undermine British society’s cultural and intellectual legacy. Decolonisation is another word for detaching British society from its intellectual and cultural heritage.
A leaked copy of the ‘draft inclusive curriculum development’ to ‘decolonise’ the engineering curriculum at Sheffield University warned that Isaac Newton may have benefitted from ‘colonial era activity’. It is evident that higher education is in big trouble when the engineering faculty promises to decolonise its curriculum to tackle ‘long-standing conscious and unconscious biases’ among students and challenge ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘white saviour’ approaches to science and maths and promote ‘inclusive design’.
In effect, the plan to decolonise the engineering curriculum aims to morally de-authorise the reputation of one of the most important founders of modern science. The English mathematician, physicist, astronomer and author Isaac Newton is not just simply another scientist. He was and remains widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and scientist of all time. Arguably, he was the most important figure in the scientific revolution.
Like mathematics and engineering, science has become the target of the decolonisation crusade. According to one of its advocates, science served as the British Empire’s ‘practical’ and ‘ideological’ tool. Apparently, ‘since its birth around the same time as Europeans began conquering other parts of the world, modern Western science was inextricably entangled with colonialism, especially British imperialism. And the legacy of that colonialism still pervades science today’.
If they come for Newton, it is only a matter of time before individuals like Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday or Einstein become the target of the know-nothing philistine diversity-inspired cultural revolution. So, it is unsurprising that Sheffield’s draft curriculum indicates that world-renowned scientists like Paul Dirac, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Leibniz could also ‘be considered as benefiting from colonial era activity’.
The decolonisation project of British universities has no interest in academic learning. Its objective is to discredit and take down the leading historical figures in the sciences and humanities. When I say take down, I mean literally take down. In an attempt to emulate the Rhodes Must Fall campaign targeting the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, students at Cape Town University adopted the phrase ‘science must fall’! It appears that discrediting science is a small price to pay for decolonising some of the most precious achievements of humanity.
Promoters of cancel culture are also coming for the classics. They attack the classics for being too white. In turn, academic institutions have accommodated these criticisms and are more than ready to turn the humanities into a propaganda weapon promoting woke ideals.
Two years ago, it was announced that Cambridge archaeology museum would display signs highlighting the ‘whiteness’ of ancient Greek sculpture plaster casts. Cambridge’s Classics Faculty decided to highlight ‘the role of classical sculpture in the history of racism’. Instead of extolling the unique aesthetic sensibility gained through studying the classics, this institution has opted to recast Greek and Roman civilisation as the cradle of modern racism.
Recently, the animosity against classical music has acquired a thoroughly racialised dimension. In line with the current Black Lives Matter–influenced zeitgeist, the classical music establishment has rolled over and embraced the criticism claiming that its institution is irredeemably compromised by association with white supremacy. That is why the Sydney Opera House organised a conference on ‘How to be Anti-Racist in the Arts’. In the Anglo-American world, it has become obligatory for the classical music establishment to apologise for their art’s association with white privilege. At times the classical music press appears to portray a love of this art form as a marker of white supremacy. Writing in the New Yorker, the critic Alex Ross apologised cravenly for being a ‘white American’. He described his world as ‘blindingly white, both in its history and its present’. As far as Ross is concerned classical music is compromised by its supposed ‘history of systemic racism’.
In literature, the targeting and cancelling of the classics have assumed a ubiquitous form. There is now a concerted attempt to render some of the most important contributions to the literary canon invisible. Even Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey are not just the foundational works of Greek literature but also Western civilisation, is dismissed with contempt by cultural jihadists.
‘Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!’ boasted one Massachusetts high school teacher recently on social media. When an English teacher boasts that Homer’s Odyssey has been cancelled and expects her followers to give her signs of approval, it becomes evident that even the classroom has become the battleground on which the culture war is being fought.
The campaign designed to discredit and de-authorise the humanities should concern us all, for what is at stake is the status of a cultural legacy that has endured for thousands of years and inspired people throughout the ages. If we lose sight of the artistic, literary and intellectual contribution of Ancient Greece and Rome, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we risk falling under the spell of cultural illiteracy. We owe a great debt to the humanities, for they provided the foundation for developing human civilisation’s moral and scientific insights.
The assault on knowledge threatens to corrode and discredit the intellectual foundation of our civilisation. Orwell’s prediction that by 2050 Newspeak will triumph no longer seems farfetched. Every time an academic subject or a field of intellectual or artistic endeavour becomes decolonised, we risk losing sight of what we have lost. As I noted elsewhere, society is coming under the spell of historical amnesia. That is why we must raise the alarm and take action to protect our arts and sciences from the cultural vandals stalking our institutions.
References
1. Jablonski S. 1997. Ham’s vicious race: slavery and John Milton. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. 37(1):173–190.
2. Canuel M. 2015. Race, writing, and Don Juan. Studies in Romanticism. 54(3):303–328.
The new bigotry
Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of SUE, reflects on the recent decision by Napier University to compel its staff to sign up to trans ideology.
Napier University have recently launched their ‘Etiquette for LGBT+ inclusive working’, but, as ever, the weasel word of inclusion is not all it appears to be.
Increasingly, taking the knee to trans ideology is becoming a must for workers today. Napier University apparently ‘recognises that there is a spectrum of gender diversity’, so their staff must now adopt this opinion and change their language accordingly. One assumes this means that the university thinks that there are 72, or some say 100, genders on this ever-growing identity spectrum. But does anyone at Napier know what these 72 or 100 genders are, or doesn’t it matter? (Note to Napier: there are two sexes and no genders. If I’m wrong, please prove this to me, or at least prove it to me beyond the ‘whatever gender someone says they are’ line of argument).
If universities are going to start policing our language and our thoughts, perhaps we should pay more attention to the words and their meanings. BIGOT: a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
‘Sack the bigot’, say the ‘progressive’ defenders of trans ideology. ‘F*** the TERFS’, scream transgender activists. ‘Thou shalt use correct pronouns’, say our ‘free-thinking’ universities. Welcome to the modern-day transgender bigots.
We know that ‘being inclusive’ today is code for excluding different opinions. Being inclusive really means being so ‘obstinately and unreasonably attached to a belief’ that you will scream at, discipline, sack or ostracise anyone who refuses to take the knee to your perspective.
It is wrapped up in the ‘be nice’ type language of ‘respect’, but make no mistake, ‘being inclusive’ is the form that bigotry takes today.
As governments, big business, education, the law and the police raise the transgender flag above their institutions, it becomes ever more clear that the great power that is in the hands of the modern elites is increasingly being used to not only silence those who disagree, but to force words into he/him/she/her/they/them/xe/xir/ze/zir mouths.
Perhaps it’s time for a revolt against the compelled use of preferred pronouns.
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/concerns-as-scottish-universities-adopting-extreme-anti-racism_5277275.html?utm_source=share-btn-copylink Lily Zhou, Concerns as Scottish Universities ‘Adopting an Extreme Form of Anti-Racism’. Senior lecturer warns academics could be labelled racist. 05/06/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/free-speech-fears-scottish-universities-30141860 Douglas Dickie, Guidance from the Scottish Funding Council suggests a belief in academic freedom is an example of ‘white indifference’ – and it seems many Scottish institutions agree. 02/06/23
Redrunnerlea, I Was a Tomboy in the 70’s... No one ever asked me if I felt like I was born in ‘the wrong body’. 06/06/23
https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/scottish-news/23573523.glasgow-schools-provide-increasing-support-transgender-pupils/ Sarah Hilley, Glasgow schools to provide increasing support to transgender pupils. 07/06/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12164005/Fury-Oxfams-Pride-cartoon-depicting-angry-Terf-character-critics-say-resembles-JK-Rowling.html Dan Sales and Natasha Anderson, Oxfam faces boycott calls over ‘Terf’ Pride cartoon ‘depicting JK Rowling’: Charity apologises saying it had ‘no intention to portray any particular person’ as it deletes clip and releases edited version. 08/06/23
https://unherd.com/2023/06/the-gender-wars-are-not-a-gift-to-the-right/ Kathleen Stock, The gender wars are not a gift to the Right. Concerned women are hardly extremists. 07/06/23
Stephanie Edmonds and Natalya Murakhver, Should Minors Be Allowed to Consent to Medical Procedures? 08/06/23
Abigail Shrier, Little Miss Trouble, Why I’m Not Waiting for the Gender ‘Pendulum’ to Swing Back. 03/06/23
https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_934784_smxx.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0Ch_LPNIQTgRp01IlKb3FCAEii4wbxc9fBgjZpdktqMQ6MK9nVHP5PJ9Y_aem_th_AZJfvZwhOflP_dCTwv3T6uzE7y8SYic13iDccSloQGUhE2PoflSCdVzHXZ4ntjg2tyk The National Anti-Racism Framework for Initial Teacher Education
https://archive.is/2023.06.10-201412/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/10/gender-ideology-foster-mother-nearly-lost-children-class/ Benedict Smith, Foster mother ‘nearly lost children after questioning school’s gender ideology class’. Teacher allegedly reports to social services woman who raised concerns about pupils being given lessons on non-binary gender. 10/06/23
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