Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No40 – Part 1

Newsletter Themes: this week’s Substack will be in two parts; you will receive the second part on Monday. Part I: the violence of decolonisation, how to defend family autonomy, and conversion therapy.

As the war continues in the Middle East, tensions appear to be mounting in Western nations, with divisions developing around those who sympathise with Israel and those who sympathise with Palestinians. It should be possible to stand on either side of this division while at the same time recognising that what Hamas did to Israeli civilians and foreign nationals on 7 October was barbaric.

This may appear to have nothing to do with education, but in fact we find ‘radicals’ and academics justifying these murders by arguing – in the immediate aftermath of the attack – that this is what ‘decolonisation meant’. But it is not simply the fact that some academics support Hamas and their desire to kill Jews. It is the fact that schools and universities (as well as libraries and museums) are all promoting the need to ‘decolonise’. In schools and universities this comes in the form of policies that tell lecturers to ‘decolonise the curriculum’.

With many of our educators who promote the need to decolonise we find the one-dimensional and dehumanising idea that there are the privileged – whites (and Jews) – and the oppressed – black people (and Muslims) – and as a result, those, like the Israelis, who are defined as being privileged essentially deserve everything they get.

SUE will look at the issue of decolonisation in more detail in the coming weeks, but as you may already know, the demand to decolonise your curriculum is not because academics across Scotland have a colonial mindset. This idea of decolonisation basically means ‘check your privilege, WHITEY’, the presumption being that we teach certain issues and authors because they are Western and white, rather than because they’re good.

Tragically, this approach appears to be motivated, at least in part, by a form of hatred and self-loathing, an approach that denigrates ‘whiteness’ and anything associated with the West or Western civilisation.

A number of people who promote this idea in universities have recently come out to explain that this decolonisation is not just about changing the reading list of your curriculum, it also means supporting the murder of Jews by Hamas. For example, Mahvish Ahmad, assistant professor in human rights and politics at the London School of Economics, said of the Hamas massacre that decolonisation ‘is not a metaphor’, while in the US, history professor Russell Rickford called the Hamas attacks ‘energising’ and ‘exhilarating’.

Beyond academia we found the ‘progressive’ Green MSP Maggie Chapman responding to the Hamas massacre by posting: ‘The oppressed are fighting back for their rights... Don’t let the Western media fool you into thinking it’s terrorism, this is decolonisation’.

We at SUE do not believe that all those promoting the need to decolonise the curriculum in schools and universities are celebrating the murder of innocent Israelis. We do, however, think that there is something degraded and illiberal about the ‘decolonisation’ idea today. In this respect, it is shocking, but not surprising, to find certain academics and politicians celebrating the racist violence of Hamas.

As a result, we have written to the Scottish Funding Council and to some of the individuals on their ‘Tackling Racism’ board to clarify if they believe that what Hamas did is ‘what decolonisation looks like’.

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Let kids be kids! What’s wrong with the government’s sex and gender education?

Speakers include:

Dr Jenny Cunningham author of Transgender Ideology in Scottish Schools: What’s wrong with government guidance?

Murray Allan expelled from a Scottish school for saying there are two genders

Maggie Mellon social worker and expert in child protection

Dr Stuart Waiton chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education

If you are free on Monday 6 November and live in the Edinburgh area, please come and join us at our meeting at 6.30 p.m. at Lauriston Hall, EH3 9DJ.

You can order tickets on Eventbrite here.

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Whose kids are they anyway?

Stuart Waiton is chairperson of SUE. This is the speech he gave at the Battle of Ideas conference last weekend.

There is a lovely little book, written by Dick Pountain and David Robins, called Cool Rules. In it, they argue that Cool has become the new normal.

Part of being Cool is that we become relaxed or even oppositional to conventions, and in the context of parenting we become easy-osey and drifted towards a bit of an anything-goes type of approach.

At some level I was that parent. Not in a number of respects but certainly in terms of my children’s use of mobile phones – and my toes now curl when my daughter describes stuff she was watching on YouTube when she was still a child, for example ‘Two women one cup’!! You really don’t want to know.

As a community worker I was surprised to find a coworker, a grandfather, who seemed totally relaxed about his 10-year-old grandson listening to Eminem singing about ‘f****** bitches’.

Similarly, I have a friend who used every swear word under the sun, almost purposefully, around his kids when they were little more than toddlers – and the kids would use that language back at him. I knew my friend’s parents well, and for me this was a clear case of him rebelling against the respectable working-class upbringing he had had.

To relate this back to the Cool Rules thesis, what we can see in our culture today is a move towards what I would describe as lifestyle freedom. Interestingly, when thinking about the family, part of this development of lifestyle freedom means that we reject other people’s rules. And we tend towards a My Lifestyle My Rules type of approach to life and towards parenting.

You might think that this would result in a growth in the idea of family autonomy, but actually we find that the very opposite has happened. Which is worth thinking about.

Part of the problem with the easy-osey approach to parenting, and more broadly to life, is that we risk losing lines in the sand. Lines like the distinction between childhood and adulthood. We can see this loss, often most clearly, when we look at authorities and organisations responsible for education.

For example, when you read UN or WHO educational documents, they often discuss things in terms of the child’s human rights. What’s significant about this, I think, is that once you talk about human rights in terms of children, you risk losing the distinction between children and adults: if we are all human, with human rights, where is the sense of childhood?

And so we end up with documents from WHO that explain that ‘sexuality starts at birth’ and that tells us that nursery-aged children need to be educated about ‘early childhood masturbation’. In Scotland, we find educational videos from LGBT Youth Scotland explaining how children from the age of three need to be free to express their ‘gender identity’. For this educator, it is the RIGHT of the child to be FREE and to express their TRUE SELVES.

And this is really why I started with a discussion about Cool Rules. Because what appears to have happened over the past 50 years is that the very ideas of freedom, rights and autonomy have changed towards this new type of lifestyle freedom which is all about rejecting rules and conventions and asserting the right to BE ME. A process that some have described as a shift from Self to Selfie.

The sexualisation of childhood is happening. And it creates problems but also opportunities.

The problem is that in this world of lifestyle freedom, parents tend to be pretty isolated from one another. Even those who are opposed to what is happening in schools tend to oppose these developments purely in relation to their own children, which is understandable but also limited. This opposition can in part come from this more introspective sense of My Kids My Rules – which I would suggest is different from having a wider sense of the autonomy of the family.

However, the reaction against this sexualisation also offers a potential. Because in the process of reacting, often instinctively, against the creepy and weird sexuality education, parents are to some extent being forced to draw lines in the sand. Lines that are not simply of relevance to their own children but to the collective or cultural idea of childhood.

Many campaigners opposing these changes in education try to do so by using the law, or by lobbying politicians – and there is a role for that. But for me, this limits and can prevent the solution from emerging, because it is only when parents become collective that they will be able to move from their lifestyle freedom, and their assertion of My Child My Rules, towards what we really need, which is the communal drawing of a line in the sand that asserts that there is a thing called childhood, and that equally asserts that we need to promote and protect family autonomy for all.

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Conversion therapy

Simon Knight has a PhD in Education from the University of Strathclyde. He has been working with children and young people in a variety of social care, youth work and school contexts for 35 years. He has two school-aged children.

When looking at the trend to undermine the autonomy and authority of parents, the recent attempts to develop a law against conversion therapy is one of the most dangerous to date.

Nobody believes in literally forcing someone to change their sexuality or ‘gender’ today, so the term conversion therapy is essentially a con. What those who promote this idea are really talking about is conversations between parents, pastors or therapists, where they question the sexual orientation or ‘gender’ identity of a child or young person (or indeed an adult).

For parents, a conversion therapy bill would mean that a parent who questions, or even simply does not affirm their child’s identity, would be made a criminal. Abuse is already illegal; the new law would likely mean that a parent is criminalised when no abuse takes place. Exploratory therapy, where a child’s gender identity is not confirmed, would also be criminal.

Ironically, at a time when transgenderism is being promoted in schools, we find that many of the children being pushed towards changing their sex are, in fact, gay. A conversion therapy law would mean that the pressure from social media and from educators to change your ‘gender’ (read sex) is upheld and celebrated; in other words, a conversion therapy law would institutionalise the transgender conversion of gay young people!

Being watchful, trying to empathise while not simply promoting transgender ideology, would be a crime! Therapists are not and should not be required to adopt the perspective of their patients. When facing a child who is confused about their ‘gender’, under this new law, that is exactly what they would have to do.

Teachers would similarly face further pressure to accept without question any child who proclaims that his or her sex has now supposedly changed. They would be forced to accept the delusion that the child had been ‘born in the wrong body’.

As Malcolm Clark notes, ‘In the old days, before we were all expected to believe that men could have vaginas, “conversion therapy” meant pseudo-psychiatric techniques that were used to bully and demean homosexuals into being heterosexual. In the UK this largely died out in the 1970s. As a result, fighting conversion therapy in modern Britain was something of a non-cause’.

As it stands, both the British and Scottish governments have put this potential law on hold. The attempt by the transgender lobby to portray the UK as a country that is full of abusive conversion therapy zealots is now being questioned, as it should be, because there is no evidence of this.

Let’s hope that sanity will be restored among our politicians and that the freedom of parents to express their opinions, even opinions that we don’t agree with, is retained. Family autonomy is a basic freedom that all liberal and truly progressive societies must defend.

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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://www.teachwire.net/news/initial-teacher-training-what-weve-lost-and-why-it-matters/ Shirley Lawes, Initial Teacher Training – What we’ve lost, and why it matters. (retrieved 23/10/23)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12623643/Being-trans-non-binary-new-sub-culture-risk-raising-nation-chemically-castrated-children-Doctor-spent-12-years-working-vulnerable-teens-Tavistock-warns-gender-ideology.html Chris Matthews, Being trans or non-binary is a new sub-culture... but we risk raising a nation of chemically castrated children': Doctor who spent 12 years working with vulnerable patients at the Tavistock warns over gender ideology. 21/10/23

Dissolving biological bonds

Marion Felder, Dissolving biological bonds. Freedom or irresponsibility? 15/10/23

https://substack.com/inbox/post/137435513 Dave Clements, Is every child a SEND child now? What can be meant by 'special needs' if they're increasingly common? 23/10/23

https://aeon.co/essays/we-ve-forgotten-how-to-give-children-the-space-to-have-secrets Tiffany Jenkins, My Secret Life, Parents expect to know everything about their children’s lives. They need to remember that secrets are part of growing up.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/52937905 BBC, White privilege: What is it and how can it be used to help others? Republished 28/10/23

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/27/why-is-the-bbc-telling-kids-they-have-white-privilege/?utm_source=Today+on+spiked&utm_campaign=aa69d8ca91-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_10_27_05_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-aa69d8ca91-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Why is the BBC telling kids they have ‘white privilege’? CBBC's Newsround has become the propaganda arm of BLM. 27/10/23

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-67199816 Christina McSorley, Parents have right to see sex education content, says minister. 25/10/23

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