Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No31
Newsletter Themes: sexualised schools, trans activist lobbying and narcissism
This week Amanda Armstrong, a parent from Livingston, wrote to us about her one-woman campaign to get her child’s school to think more seriously before it exposes children to sexual material. Amanda is so frustrated by the failure of politicians and teachers to respond to her concerns that she is thinking of home educating or finding an alternative, private school. Most parents won’t go to these lengths, but many share her frustration and lack a means to express that sentiment. Next week we will hold our first parents’ online forum, so if you want to get active, please get in touch at PSG@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
In this week’s issue we pursue the theme of therapeutic education outlined in last week’s Substack. Simon Knight, a youth worker, reports from the Edinburgh Festival, and Kate Deeming has written a review of a video lecture by Christopher Lasch, one of the most useful public intellectuals of the past century. Next week we are looking at race and education, so let us know if you have examples of good or bad practice in your local school.
How is showing children sexual images going to protect them?
Stuart Waiton is Chairperson of SUE
At SUE we regularly get stories sent to us by parents and teachers concerned about the sexualised nature of the RSHP (relationships, sexual health and parenthood) curriculum. As we have noted before, concerns have been raised about nursery schools buying in copies of Julian is a Mermaid – a book that promotes the idea that some children are ‘transgender’. We have also had a recent concern raised about universities promoting ‘gender fluid’ changing rooms, while using posters to denounce anyone who might believe in the need for single-sex spaces.
This week we heard from Amanda Armstrong in Livingston, who has been trying to limit the sexualised materials her primary school–aged child is potentially going to be taught. Interestingly, when Amanda showed her child’s teacher and headteacher some of the RSHP materials, they agreed that it was age-inappropriate (see the articles by Catriona Taylor and Colin Smith about sexualised primary education).
However, the headteacher also felt that it was necessary to expose children to this sexualised material because this was something, he believed, they would be seeing online anyway, and so schools using this material would help protect children from it. The tautological nature of this argument is interesting, and indeed it is one of the ways that the government tries to justify sexualised primary education. It doesn’t appear to concern these people that not all children are being exposed to porn or sex online. And even if there is some truth to this, wouldn’t this be an argument for educating parents about how to limit the adult material being watched by some children?
Some of the horror stories I hear from my kids about what they watched when they were young makes me realise that I was far too blasé, and rather than simply accepting the online world as an inevitability for young children it would seem far more useful for us to start a national debate about how to protect children and childhood rather than to simply roll over and let adult material wash over our kids.
As it happens, I suspect that part of the reason that this weird material is being introduced in schools is because liberal teachers are uncomfortable with drawing lines in the sand and recognising that the right-on ‘anything goes’ attitude (that most of us have about sex nowadays) is not appropriate for kids. Indeed, being ‘moral’ has become something of a secular sin today, and as a result the idea of adulthood and childhood is being lost in an ideological sea being pushed by our ‘progressive’ educationalists.
Amanda also raised concerns about her school’s use of third-party sex educators. This is where schools (perhaps understandably given the creepy and weird nature of the material) feel more comfortable handing over the responsibility of ‘sex talk’ to charities. Of course, these charities are essentially funded by the state and are, in reality, sex activist groups who believe they are liberating our children by exposing them at an ever earlier age to sexualised material.
Amanda has talked to her MP and MSP and either been dismissed or given the runaround about her concerns. Brilliantly, she has been leaving leaflets in shops and has created her own parents’ group with others who have serious concerns. In the end, however, she is left with the choice of educating her child at home or taking on the financial burden of sending her child to a private school.
But it is an outrage that parents like Amanda are being forced into this position.
In the light of letters from others like Amanda, SUE has decided to set up a nationwide Parents and Supporters Group that will be meeting online to share stories and to work out what we can all do, collectively, to challenge what is happening in our schools. The first online meeting is this coming Wednesday 6 September. If you would like to come along, please get in touch at PSG@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
What parents can teach the world
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.
The culture war around transgender ideology – you know, the one we’re told doesn’t exist – threw up another victim at this year’s Edinburgh International Arts Festival. The Royal Lyceum’s David Greig liked a couple of tweets and has spent the past two weeks contemplating clearing his desk. David Greig is the Artistic Director at Scotland’s leading classical and contemporary theatre company. He has written more than 30 plays and a musical version of Local Hero with Mark Knopfler. No slouch then, but even premier-league thespians, tasked with producing drama from the current zeitgeist, aren’t untouchable these days.
Greig committed the cardinal sin of liking tweets that questioned some of the intolerant madness that passes for progressive ‘trans inclusion’. In one tweet, the paradox of police actions over two separate incidents was highlighted. It read: “If you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned.” No doubt Greig, like many people, was reacting against the ‘lesbian nan’ arrest and the unavoidable evidence that the police are clearly on one side in the culture war. It’s increasingly hard to swallow the idea that trans activist and other lobby groups are marginalised victims when the police and every state institution, big business and tech firm affirms them.
Emboldened by the void where questioning, discussion and debate should exist, ‘progressives’ demand blood sacrifices when the latest hapless fool transgresses their scripture. And, suitably cowed, the accused hopefully offer themselves up, praying that penance will bring forgiveness. But frequently this only leads to further demands from the insatiable beast. Mary Whitehouse would be astounded at their gall. Greig followed the usual routine: accepting his guilt (he did ‘like’ the tweets in question), denying full culpability (he didn’t remember actually clicking these particular ‘likes’), referring back to his past record of being an inclusive nice guy (“I support the human rights of trans people both in principle and in practice. I value my trans and non-binary colleagues. I value my queer, gay and lesbian colleagues. I have programmed and supported the LBGTQ work and will continue to do so.”), and committing himself, and the entire theatre company, to ubiquitous awareness raising training (as if anyone today could be any more ‘aware’!). It remains to be seen if this case will buck the trend, but another talented career may be about to end.
In the wake of another flashpoint at the world’s premiere festival for virtue signalling and intolerance, the comedian and Father Ted writer Graham Linehan’s cancellation by the Leith Arches venue, a Herald poll showed 92% of the 5330 respondents supporting the latest modern-day sinner. Ninety-two percent, folks! The world is upside down today. Democracy, that greatest of human inventions, the one where we know that the majority of people are capable of running the world, is in retreat. If we are to believe our cultural elite, those in the arts at all levels, much of the print and screen media, the (supposedly impartial) BBC, politicians, and others in the commentariat, there is nothing to see here. Cancellation has no reality to it – move on please. However, 5330 Herald readers disagree, and at least 4903 of them are against it!
The same is true for what’s happening in education. Although the notion is scoffed at by professionals, a not-so-clandestine capture of schools has taken place. Nationally prescribed relationships, sexual health and parenthood (RSHP) lessons and activist teachers are pushing personal, sexualising, non-educational agendas on impressionable pupils – our children! But, unlike in other areas of society, the theatre sector in particular, today parents of schoolchildren are beginning to respond differently. Instead of hiding contritely, they roll up their sleeves and come out swinging. Ordinary people participating in politics – whatever next?
When being gaslighted by those in positions of power, parents gather and share evidence of the reality of what is happening. On a weekly basis, the Scottish Union for Education receives documented cases of parents asking questions, digging deeper, and then standing up and asking ‘What?!’ and saying ‘No!’. Often, elected councillors on education committees are unaware and then outraged when they find out what is occurring on their watch. RSHP classes are emptying as parents become aware and more children are withdrawn from what is, in effect, state-sponsored sexualisation in school. Books with unacceptable content, often graphic and completely age-inappropriate, surreptitiously added to libraries by activist teachers, are being called out and having to be removed. Flags and other one-sided political paraphernalia are being taken down in classrooms. Headteachers are having to hold parents’ evenings and are being challenged on proposed lesson content.
One might think that in developing the ‘best international drama’ at the Royal Lyceum, contemporary issues might just feature. If these issues can’t now be openly addressed, our cultural sector is failing and should receive no public money. Do radical playwrights really have to resort to allegory to conceal explorations on matters of gender and sex? What would Arthur Miller say to activist staff, high priests of the cult, at the Royal Lyceum? How would Oscar Wilde or Joe Orton fair today at the hands of our illiberal new puritans? The culture war has many battlefronts. When democracy is under threat from an unelected clerisy in any area of life, more democracy is the answer. We need more ordinary people to have the confidence to stand up and say, ‘No!’ Parents of schoolchildren are now showing the way, having faced down ruthlessly illiberal educational professionals. May the 2023/24 academic year be a time when tides are turned further, with more of us remembering that in today’s intolerant times, the meek shall inherit nothing.
Review
The Culture of Narcissism lecture by Christopher Lasch on YouTube
Kate Deeming is the Parents and Supporters Group Organiser for SUE. She is a solo mother to a P6 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.
Christopher Lasch wrote the book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminshing Expectations in 1979. In this lecture he goes through the main themes of his book, which although 45 years old are remarkably apt for our time.
If the meteoric rise of TikTok and SnapChat hasn’t clued you in yet, society has an unhealthy ‘trend’ to self-absorption. In this 51-minute video, historian, moralist and social critic Christopher Lasch explores this trend, defining it as the ‘pathology of our age’, shaping families, healthcare, governance and business. Through this, he makes a case that this trend will only lead to further nihilism within the self and the larger culture as the normative schedule of psychosocial development is corrupted. This is a dense video, but it’s definitely worth your time if you want to further grasp the upside-down world we now find ourselves in.
How Lasch weaves social, historical and psychological trends is masterful. His reference to a societal ‘hypochondria’ wherein sickness is anticipated and constant fear of malaise is maintained speaks to the innate nihilism (becoming) embedded in our world. Wherein constant analysis, an abdication of wellness and health, derives not from living but rather tests and validation from external sources, with this pattern of ‘wellbeing validation’ involving experts who can only focus on singular areas of our lives, thus creating a narcissistic feedback loop. Wherein family life, in particular the life and role of the mother (although he says the same could be applied to fatherhood), becomes mediated through self-help books and parenting manuals and speaks very little to the traditional and inherent historical continuity of family. This failure to ‘live’ leads to further atomisation of society and self and a strange world where no one is responsible. In the sea of this dysfunction, things like work assume an abstract quality, and success is defined not by the physical and measurable aspects of employment but on abstract lines of the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. We can see this directly in the proliferation of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes in the corporate world.
All this is fed by our consumption of technology and images, our share loop wherein the idea of existence is embedded in these rituals of constant surveillance. We live in a time in which the possibility of the current moment being scrutinised and judged cannot be underestimated. In the end he sees the societal dysfunction of narcissism: an ethic rooted in self-preservation and psychic survival, a deviation from past ideas of economic warfare, the roles of crime, and social disorder but rather coming from the experience of subjective and personal experience of a disenchantment – ‘a faith without a faith’.
News roundup
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/glasgow-primary-becomes-first-scots-30767672?utm_source=linkCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar Rebecca McCurdy, Glasgow primary becomes first Scots school to deliver LGBT inclusive education. Scotland is first country in the world to introduce inclusive education across the curriculum. 23/08/23
https://freespeechunion.org/black-lives-matter-a-guide-to-teaching-sixth-formers-about-racism-and-inequality/ Black Lives Matter: A Guide to Teaching Sixth Formers about Racism and Inequality.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/23739201.puberty-blockers-scots-children-must-banned/ Azeem Ibrahim, Puberty blockers for Scots children must be banned. 23/08/23
WORIADS Europe, EU gender nonsense. How it slips into your national laws through the back door & what you can do about it. 30/07/23
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/27/the-radical-humanism-of-web-du-bois/ Brendan O’Neill, The radical humanism of WEB Du Bois. Sixty years on from his death, his writing offers a way out of the identitarian trap. 27/08/23
https://www.foxnews.com/media/german-daycares-promote-sexual-exploration-rooms-children-engage-sexual-games Nikolas Lanum, German daycares promote ‘sexual exploration rooms’ where children can engage in sexual games. One daycare said it offered kids the ‘freedom to try out childish sexuality’ in the rooms. 23/08/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/scots-teachers-refuse-teach-sexuality-30803362 Jessica North, Scots teachers refuse to teach ‘sexuality petals’ and full frontal nude images to primary aged kids. 29/08/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23748141.fundamental-mind-shifts-diversity-scottish-schools/ James McEnaney, ‘Fundamental mind shifts’ and diversity in Scottish schools. 26/08/23
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That piece by Dr Knight is truly excellent. Worth the subscription price alone.