Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No88

Newsletter Themes: kids treated as race-terrorists, the story of ‘racist’ councillor Audrey Dempsey, and the collapse of language education in Scotland

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This week we heard reports of a nine-year-old child in England sent to a Prevent re-education camp for being a potential extremist!

We hope to chase this story up for more detail but while we do that, this is what we know.

A parent claims that her son was in a classroom where there was a lesson about heroes. Images of Taylor Swift, Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler were shown to the children with the question, which one is your hero. The son picked Adolf.

Because of this, the teacher reported the child, and the child was then reported to Prevent, the anti-terrorism programme. One assumes the purpose is so that he can be re-educated about racism, or fascism, or perhaps extremism in general. The mind boggles.

Despite having complete faith in the source who reported this mother’s story to us, I still found it hard to believe. Perhaps the mother in question is making it up, which seems crazy, but almost more believable than the fact that schools might do this.

However, if you ask Google if Prevent works with primary school children, it turns out they do - ‘to prevent [children] from being drawn into extremism and terrorism’. Indeed, schools have a legal duty to stop people from being drawn into terrorism.

There are, clearly, a number of questions that I think we need to ask. Firstly, why would a teacher think this terror label could or should be applied to a nine-year-old, especially a nine-year-old who has, as far as we know, done nothing more than picked Adolf as his hero. Does he even know who he is?

Secondly, what do they mean by terrorism, or extremism, today? After all the Labour government now argues that misogyny should be treated as seriously as terrorism by Prevent.

Surveying this story, it would appear that our concern about indoctrination taking place in schools is more on point than even we thought.

There is something tragically brainless about all this, and one wonders if it relates to the recent election of a Labour government. If so, what else is now being treated as ‘extremism’ resulting in children being targeted this way? I’m not even sure if the Stasi went this far.

It is also brainless because, as we saw last week, there appears to be a tendency in schools to encourage teachers to follow ‘the guidance’ or ‘correct procedure’ rather than to use their common sense or professional judgement. The logical outcome of this robotic, bureaucratic trend is that teachers will potentially now trigger a Prevent intervention rather than deal directly with children in their care.

There was always something strange about Prevent, especially with its focus on the idea of deradicalisation. This notion, in part, helped to present the idea of terrorists as victims, as child-like figures who were ‘radicalised’. Previously, we would treat terrorists or extremists as adults who had a mind of their own and were responsible for their actions. But this idea about deradicalisation is different and degrades the very idea of personal responsibility.

However, as a colleague pointed out to me, this idea of deradicalising adults was made more difficult when individuals who had been supposedly deradicalised went on to murder people, as was the case with Usman Khan, the London Bridge killer.

Consequently, as I noted in my own workplace, the spotlight turned to universities, where there were uncomfortable discussions about the new need to engage with Prevent. This new focus on universities and university students was presumably initiated in the hope that getting to people of concern a little earlier which would give Prevent a better chance of deradicalising them. More recently, the Conservative government changed the definition of extremism so that it now focused on ideology rather than actions.

It would now appear that the deradicalising effort is shifting into schools and, astonishingly, it looks as though schools are now to act as institutions who not only educate children in class to accept the values of the state, but who target children for intervention by the forces of anti-terrorism. The nine-year-old in question, for example, is to receive a six-weeks re-education programme!

It is worth asking, why has almost nothing been said about this? Why is it now seen as a good, rational or reasonable response to send primary school children to Prevent?

We’ll keep digging to see what this Adolf story is really all about, but either way, the very fact that Prevent is set up to target nine-year-olds or even younger children is both bizarre and Orwellian in the extreme.

Tragically, it provides us with yet another example of how childhood and adulthood is being utterly confused, where adult teachers have lost their sense of perspective (and authority) and where the authorities themselves have lost their understanding of how adult ideas and beliefs develop.

Politics is an adult thing. Schools should be places of education, not indoctrinate.

Stuart Waiton

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SUE has produced a leaflet for parents explaining what so called anti-racist education is all about. Feel free to download it, discuss and distribute it to anyone you think may be interested.

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When anti-racism results in excusing racial violence

Stuart Waiton is chair of SUE

Audrey Dempsey is an ex-labour councillor who was forced to resign after being labelled a racist by councillors in Glasgow. The racist label was thrown at Audrey after she raised concerns about a group of non-white children who attacked her daughter.

Audrey’s daughter attends a school in the east end of Glasgow and had already told her mother about a ‘game’ played by some of the immigrant kids, where they targeted an individual, attacked them, and videoed the assault. It then happened to her own daughter.

Soon afterwards, Audrey heard about this happening to other children and when the police visited the home of one of the perpetrators, the police officer told Audrey that they were treated in a similarly disdainful manner by the parents. Teachers have anonymously told her similar stories, some of whom have been physically attacked by these children.

One of the odd remarks, but perhaps not all that odd given the focus of schools today, was that the children who were throwing insults talked about making Audrey’s daughter their ‘slave’; this is something that appears to crop up again and again.

Audrey, who has received an MBE for the anti-poverty charity work she does in her area, raised the issue with the council, but was warned by her party that it wasn’t politically correct to raise concerns about black children being racist. When she went to the school, she found that the teachers were like a ‘rabbit in the headlights’. Those who spoke to her were frightened about losing their jobs if anyone found out that they had spoken to Audrey.

Audrey challenged the Labour group for not wanting to ask the question about racist violence. Why, she asks, is the issue of equality not taken seriously for all children? Children themselves don’t want other children to get away with doing this – it benefits nobody, she explains. ‘We need the kids to know what equality means. It’s not Syrian, or Scottish; we’re all human’.

The children who attacked her daughter were at school the next day. Nothing appears to have happened about what they did or indeed continue to do. What did happen was that someone from the Labour group, Audrey believes, encouraged the SNP and the Green councillors to start a race panic.

Helped by the Scottish press, this is exactly what happened and soon she found herself being depicted as a far-right racist and Islamophobe.

The National, in a comedic exercise of investigative journalism, explained that they ‘can reveal she has liked a number of tweets about ‘anti-white racism’, and that she liked a tweet which said that ‘white lives don’t matter to the political class, media or justice system’. To back up the absurd shock horror story of Audrey the racist, the paper quoted a Green councillor who claimed that, ‘Councillor Dempsey's ignorant yet dangerous comments are something we used to hear from the BNP’.

One can only assume that the journalist at The National had no sense of irony when writing this.

Audrey describes the experience of being tarred as a racist as like being hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat. She even had to console her daughter, the victim of the attack, as she now blamed herself for what was happening to her mother. It also now looks as though Audrey’s attempt to move her anti-poverty charity to a bigger building has been scuppered because of the campaign against her.

Is Audrey a dangerous far-right, BNP-style racist? Well, you can watch the interview of her here and make up your own mind.

Whatever you think about Audrey’s views, one thing seems quite clear: she is happy to have a debate with anyone about these issues. In fact, she has constantly pushed for this to happen. But nobody appears to want to even discuss this. Perhaps this is because ‘anti-racism’ is now an official policy across Scotland’s institutions. Tragically however, this so-called anti-racism is grounded in the belief that all white people have ‘white privilege’ and that black people are forever victims.

Given this divisive and degraded form of racialism being taught to children, it is perhaps no surprise that some non-white kids will act upon it. And when they do, it is no surprise that our educators, politicians and media scream ‘NOTHING TO SEE HERE’ before targeting the mother of a child who has been attacked and denouncing her as racist.

As the police officer said to Audrey, ‘Mrs Dempsey, please don’t give up on this, dig your heels in and stand your ground because this has to stop, someone has to put a stop to this’.

SUE is working with Audrey to try to do just that.

If you would like to help, contact us at psg@sue.scot and if you would like to help Audrey and the charity with their Christmas appeal to help all the children in Glasgow who need their support, visit the Facebook page for Glasgow’s No1 Baby and Family Support Service.

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Classical languages are dead and buried—have modern languages joined the trend?

Rex Last was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Dundee from 1981 to 1991, having worked for nearly two decades at the German Department of the University of Hull. After becoming the sole carer for his wife, Oksana, who died recently with dementia, he wrote a book deploring the plight of the carer: The Informal Dementia Carer – Who Cares? He has also written several novels. 

Imagine you are an ostler in the late nineteenth century, busily tending one evening to the horses and carriages arriving at a roadside inn, when the piebald mare you are leading into a stall for the night suddenly utters that strange equine alarm, half squeal, half whinny, and threatens to tear the arms from your shoulders as it rears up fearfully at the brusque arrival of a strange, loud four-wheeled contrivance gushing vile black smoke from its hind quarters. Your first acquaintance with a horseless carriage is not a happy one, nor is it for the horse, but it is a portent of things to come, the ultimate transformation of the inn into a motel and, on the human scale, the disappearance of a whole tranche of skilled employment designed for horses and the carriages and wagons they pull. The moral of that little tale is that many skills have a passing relevance, particularly in the last century or so of increasingly rapid change. Now a new generation or two of chauffeurs for the rich and drivers of white vans and truckers sweeps the age of the horse aside, until they in turn yield to the dawning age of the AC, the autonomous car, which will soon render their skills valueless in turn. And so it goes on. 

To change direction for a moment: there is an even worse skill shock hovering in the wings. Think of the age of the computer, the internet, and the specialist programmers and designers who toil away in their garrets servicing this huge, global cyber-beast. You may believe that learning computer programming, from C++ to JavaScript and many more such time-consuming studies, is the way of the future. But no: those skills will become—correction, are already becoming—increasingly redundant as artificial intelligence has now matured to the point that it can perform many of the highly-skilled tasks formerly the exclusive province of the programmer and designer. A few lines of descriptive text, the press of an Enter key and suddenly computer code, images and even video are spirited out of thin air. And a whole new raft of expertise is swept aside. So ‘deskilling’ isn’t really a matter of dropping a skill set which is no longer relevant but using your knowledge to acquire a new one. 

The point of all this is a forcible wake-up call for all those who demand that in an ever-changing age everything must be ‘relevant’ and ‘up to date’, and that culture-based stuff and especially dead languages and literatures are quite literally a thing of the past and should be quietly left to a few demented scholars in Oxbridge colleges. The moral of the tale is that it is knowledge that endures, skills come and go. Or, to put it more kindly, if you are taught something truly transferable founded on an established knowledge base, you are much more likely to prosper in a market place where the pattern of employment shifts ever more rapidly. 

Teach facts or instil knowledge?

The real question is: What is the purpose of school education? It certainly is not, after the Covid upheavals, to smother pupils in mental health support. There is even more reason now to focus on the ‘day job’, which surely consists in large measure of passing down the knowledge of former and present times to enable the pupil to leave as a more-or-less rounded human being. If they are not exposed in school to the fact that life can be very challenging and difficult, how on earth are they to cope when they walk out the school gates for the last time? One of my sons, when aged nine, was once asked by a visitor what he wanted to be when he grew up and he answered: ‘A man’. About right, I guess. 

This is probably where I part company with some of you reading this, but here goes anyway. If you take issue with me, wait until the end of this piece; you might be in for a surprise. I believe that the more challenging a subject is, the greater the benefits studying it bestows. Taught properly, it can have a hugely beneficial impact on the learner and their development as a knowledgeable human being. Now we come to the tricky bit. You may baulk at the concept of love of learning for its own sake and also at the acquisition of hard-won knowledge in subjects studied for their own sake, but it’s all too often condemned nowadays as ‘too challenging’ for the delicate sensitivities of the young who have endured Covid and its aftermath. Don’t get me started chasing that red herring up a blind alley without a paddle. 

The drift from language

I tend to concur with the cockup theory of things. A small impetus, not one intended to have any negative impact, sends events shifting inevitably in a particular direction, the snowball effect accelerating until one fine day we wake up and find that an irrevocable change has taken place. 

A newspaper report six months ago indicated that ‘the teaching of modern languages in Scotland is in terminal decline’. Over the previous five or so years numbers of school pupils studying such subjects fell by a quarter, with some of the blame placed on the change from standard grade squeezing the available slots in the curriculum and the decreasing number of students. The impact on university departments followed inevitably. Apart from blind fate, what main contributory factors have led to this collapse? I would wish to highlight two in particular: (1) everyone speaks English and if they don’t, there’s an AI chatbot to do the translating for you; (2) it’s a ‘hard’ subject and children are delicate flowers, even more so as a result of Covid and the lockdown. 

I have already addressed the first assertion. My greatest concern is the ‘hard subject’ line of attack. More than most subjects, learning a foreign language involves building incrementally on past knowledge and gradually working your way towards a reasonable competence level. On top of that is a little-mentioned factor which makes language learning even more demanding. There are two kinds of hardness in the subject: passively recognising and understanding spoken or written language; and, far more challenging, the ability to recall instantly and with a degree of grammatical correctness the vocabulary of a foreign language and being capable of stringing your spoken or written words into a coherent flow. 

Neither of those objections should disqualify a subject for learning. Quite the contrary, in fact. If pupils leave school fed on slops and are not challenged to learn and enjoy the experience of mastering challenging material, we as teachers have failed in our principal task. 

Surprise, surprise

Now for my promised surprise observation. In educational circles, the demolition of the principal role of the teacher is to be deplored, although some folk will reply that artificial intelligence will do away with the need for all this knowledge stuff. But hang on a moment: does this dereliction of duty actually reflect what is happening with AI? Based on the power of neural networks, the capability to sift through vast quantities of stored information, AI chatbots actually avoid becoming ‘skilful’. They focus instead on informational connections and the building up a non-human version of what we should as humans cherish most in education: knowledge. Plus ça change.

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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-149986684?source=queue Benjamin Ryan, At Least 14,000 U.S. Minors Have Received Gender-Transition Treatment or Surgeries In 5 Years, With Docs Billing $120 Million The findings of a comprehensive analysis of insurance-claims data by the advocacy nonprofit Do No Harm. 09/10/24

https://www.compactmag.com/email/8f851c3a-81bc-449a-8f89-bf95660b7e82/?ref=compact-newsletter William Thibeau, How the US Military Ditched Merit. 09/10/24

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149964277?source=queue Frank Furedi, Snow White And The Sin Of Whiteness. On the quest to turn whiteness into the West's original sin. 12/10/24

Four Lessons for Raising Resilient Children in the Digital Age

Seth Kaplan + Caroline Bryk, Four Lessons for Raising Resilient Children in the Digital Age. What secular families can learn from faith-based communities. 14/10/24

Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone – and let parents do the parenting

Joanna Williams, Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone – and let parents do the parenting. Over 50 years, schools have taken responsibility for children’s emotional health, moral values and political views — putting them at odds with their families. 12/10/24

https://archive.is/DlrBQ Charlotte Lytton, Why literature students have stopped reading long books. Today’s fast-paced social media world means young people are turning their attention to shorter novels over lengthy tomes such as Ulysses. 09/10/24

https://archive.is/Kjejg Charles Hymas, Ethnic minorities want their children to be proud of British history. Every group questioned felt Britain had been a force for good in the world throughout history, according to a new survey. 14/10/24

https://archive.is/GsLh2 Toby Young, Yvette Cooper wants to lock up your sons. 12/10/24

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