Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No8
Newsletter Themes: Lionel Shriver on character, Disaster education, and Parents take a stand in Portobello
This week’s newsletter carries two great articles looking at the values and concerns we pass on to our kids. It also has a report from the ‘Concerned Adults Talking Openly About Gender Ideology’ event in Portobello, Edinburgh, last week. Press coverage of parents protesting about their children’s education seems to increase week on week. Our inbox is filling up with messages from parents who want to know what they can do to challenge what children are being taught, particularly about sex and gender but also on issues of race and the environment. The SUE editorial board is developing a platform of demands that we hope can help parents and teachers structure and focus their demands. One key local demand might be for parent councils at primary schools to have a discussion with staff about our shared understanding of the term ‘age appropriate’. One important national demand could be a call for the Scottish government to stop funding for gender ideology activists to visit schools, and to start a national review of the current RSHP advice and reading lists. We are keen to know what demands you want included in our campaign work, so please get in touch.
This week you could help SUE by looking at the public consultation on the Hayward Review, (The Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment: Phase Three Parent/Carer Survey), which is open only until 7 April. This review will change assessment for senior pupils. Like so much of today’s guidance, there is a working assumption that education should socialise our children to embrace a ‘social justice’ agenda, which the policy-makers call ‘learning in context’.
Finally, please get a free ticket for Stuart’s conversation with Lionel Shriver on Thursday 30 March at 7 p.m. and invite three friends to join you online. We’re extremely lucky to get Lionel to join us and we want a big audience for the event.
Shriver talking about character and adult responsibility
Stuart Waiton is an academic and Chairperson of SUE
As we look forward to the next Scottish Union for Education online event with the acclaimed American author Lionel Shriver, it is worth examining the idea of character, a subject Shriver has recently discussed (‘Children can’t be experts on themselves’). Thinking about the idea of character immediately brings to my mind Martin Luther King Jr and his famous speech where he said, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Straight away, the interesting aspect of this quote is that those who proclaim their ‘anti-racism’ today are often people who condemn King’s colourblind approach and instead endorse a form of colour consciousness that in recent years has led to the promotion of the idea of white privilege in schools.
Martin Luther King wanted black people to be treated as equals with their fellow Americans. In a sense his ‘dream’ was that of the American dream, or at least its ideal. For most modern ‘anti-racist’, I suspect this idea of becoming American, or even the idea that there can be this dream of equality and integration, would be treated with far more cynicism and possibly with outright hostility. King, it seems, was not interested in celebrating his blackness. The opposite was the case. He believed that a good and just society would be based on an ethical framework of values – a framework of values not organised around the question ‘Are you black or white?’ but instead around ‘Do you have character? or ‘Do you have virtue, or the values of honesty, integrity, compassion, and a sense of personal responsibility?’
People should be treated according to how well they embody these values, values that are often difficult to acquire or to live up to but values that hopefully, and through much effort, we develop as we mature. This is the argument that Lionel Shriver starts to unpick, and she does this for a reason, because she believes that this is what we are losing in the way we approach children today. As she notes, rather than talk about character, educators are inclined to talk about ‘identity’, a ‘hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born – thereby removing all choice about who we are’.
With more than half a nod to the transgender craze in schools, Shriver has intelligently observed that what we have today is the abandonment of the idea of character and maturity, and indeed an abandonment of adulthood and leadership, in a world where children are educated to think that what they are is something they can and to some extent must discover inside their ‘true selves’. Today, she notes, it is children who are expected to tell us who they are, to find and instruct us about the ‘self’ they want us to recognise and respect – a pre-packaged self that comes with its own special pronouns and labels. In this respect, the idea of ‘affirming’ someone’s self, rather than being understood to be progressive, is a reflection of the loss of adulthood and judgement – it is a form of abandonment.
‘I further submit’, Shriver argues, that ‘throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices – refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” – is child abuse’. Shriver’s argument addresses a far bigger problem than the trans ideology: the issue of adult leadership, or loss of it.
A key part of the intended work of the Scottish Union for Education is to examine this issue of educational and adult leadership, part of which, I suspect, in the school context, needs to be developed in terms of the seriousness with which our institutions engage with the very purpose of education itself. A school system built on a passion for knowledge and a strong belief in the need to teach the ‘best that has been thought and said’, and to pass this on to the next generation, would be one that took ideas and principles more seriously. It would be a form of schooling where a sense of intellectual and hence adult authority was so strongly embedded that the idea of children discovering their true selves would be an anathema.
Our discussion with Lionel will be enlightening in and of itself, exploring literature and the work of modern novelists. But we also hope it will act as a springboard for this wider discussion about schooling, adulthood, and the need for leaders who can help develop the character rather than the ‘identity’ of our children.
Book your free ticket here.
Puppies are being buried alive
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.
I want to talk to you about puppies being buried alive. Before we get to that, I am going to assume that if you are reading this you are interested in what is best for children. While I know there are ‘bad players’ out there, most of us who are invested in children’s lives – be it in education or healthcare – are in it for a ‘good game’, whether as a teacher, parent or policy-maker. What is a good game? And what is best for children? This is where it starts to get tricky.
In the podcast ‘Sold A Story’, journalist Emily Hanford exposes how over 30 years educators embraced and implemented reading strategies in schools that didn’t work. Because of the way that teachers were taught to think about these strategies, they ignored what was before their eyes and made excuses as to why children were not reading – telling parents that their kids ‘just weren’t getting it’ or ‘just needed to work harder’.
George W. Bush intervened, in September 2000, with valid and well-argued concerns around the lack of scientific grounding in the current reading programme and pledged significant investment, but he was systematically undermined on the back of party politics. While adults played moral and political games for over 30 years, hundreds of thousands of children were let down, thousands upon thousands of children did not learn to read. It happens. Experts make mistakes. Solutions and circumstances become politicised. Teachers, especially young teachers, may not have the depth and breadth of life experience to know what is being shown to them is not the only way and may, in fact, be very wrong.
On the other hand, experts sometimes come to conclusions long after common sense has prevailed. I am reminded of a ‘breakthrough study’ that emerged in the late eighties: ‘Sugar Makes Kids Hyper’! Millions of moms and dads across the land shook their heads in disbelief (‘Ya think?’).
Sometimes it’s the experts who need to catch up with the knowledge on the ground. Some might say this is the definition of empirical science. I call it common sense.
While family observation is not a perfect thing, it is families that must live with the implications of school policy while policy-makers or teachers don’t. The latter two groups can implement the most well-meaning part of educational policy or deliver a lesson and walk away. They don’t, because it’s the parents who must pick up the pieces when kids don’t get the reading skills they need to succeed. And so we arrive at puppies being buried alive.
The last thing you expect to hear from your child’s lips on his emergence through the school gate is ‘A special guest came to school today’ and then to hear your child recount a horrific account of puppies being buried alive. You wouldn’t expect your child to recount this story as if he was reading from a grocery list and with no sense of horror or total desensitisation. Such is the state of ‘disaster education’, which is being embedded in our school under the mantle of social justice. I call this schooling disaster education, because it seems to be framed around the idea that the world is in a state of disaster. I believe this approach can only lead to desensitisation of the child and to the development of a kind of generalised PTSD. Much of this has been studied academically in terms of media programming for children – which is why we have age stratification for entertainment at the cinema etc. – and yet this knowledge seems to be by the wayside in the educational context.
The incident described is from my personal experience. The visitor was from the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I have to assume (because we were given no warning) was the person who shared explicit and graphic content of the puppies during my son’s school assembly. I have made various complaints to the school related to this ‘disaster model’. From ‘Covid education’, wherein children were fed a daily dose of fear in the name of safety, to end-of-the-world scenarios with COP26, to end-of-the-world scenarios with the Ukraine conflict, and on it goes. In the first 2 months of lockdown, I heard of local primary schoolchildren having suicide ideation or self-harming, and I even heard that some secondary kids had to be detained under the Mental Health Act.
When my son started primary school, I was enthusiastic for social justice to be included in the curriculum. I am an activist; I want to live in a fair and just world, and of course I want my son’s school environment to reflect that. What I didn’t expect in the course of his schooling is that these lessons would continue to grow in voracity and include content that was explicit, violent and catastrophic.
Again and again, he was told that the world was an inherently broken place, even that the children themselves were broken. And the delivery of these disaster lessons was integrated to make the children feel as though they were responsible. I didn’t expect to see previously free-spirited children become worried and anxious and look like small adults with their signs and posters and campaigns ... all too soon. I didn’t expect to walk through my son’s school and see posters covering the walls with death counts of the Pakistan floods ... made by children. I expected childhood to be preserved and celebrated.
In parallel to the copious amounts of investment for these activist-driven curriculums, investment in child-centred opportunities has virtually disappeared. In my community of Pollokshields, three community centres have closed, leaving us with a single community room (one room for 10,000+ people), which is closed more often than not (listen to the Radio 4 programme I made on this subject, My Name is Kate).
While children are taught about the UN’s ‘Rights of the Child’, including the ‘right to play’, our local small play park has been broken for years, despite many parents campaigning at local and national government level to get it fixed. Despite a large investment in a beautiful new sports pitch attached to the local school, it is locked to the local community except in cases where we can raise extortionate fees for its hire; we have no other playing field. So parents of means drive great distances (and at great expense) for sports and arts activities while poor kids are left behind with nothing.
I have made a formal complaint regarding all of this to Glasgow Education. I have been told that the aim of the curriculum is to make our children into ‘global citizens’. I have been told that all safeguarding protocols are followed. I am challenging all of this. I do not need my son to be made into an activist, although he may choose to be one when he is older and has the social and intellectual capacity to do so.
In the meantime, most parents are unaware of the major ideological shift in our children’s education. This current model of education being embedded across every state school is a radical shift from those of the past. I call it ‘activist education’ (or disaster education), and it’s rooted in postmodern theory, in particular the work of Paolo Freire. Freire’s theory is that systems of oppression exist in every aspect of life and therefore must be exposed. Freire’s approach is criticised by James Lindsay of New Discourses. He illustrates his argument with the following scenario:
‘Your seven year old is given a basic maths formula as follows: Jimmy and Sally are going with their parents to a roller coaster park. They have driven 50 miles; the park is 100 miles from their home. How much further do they have to go? Seems basic enough. No. In the Paolo Freire model the educator (the word teacher is expunged) might be instructed to ask the following sorts of questions:
‘Who here has been to an amusement park and why/why not? Children might answer – No – too expensive (get into conversation around class) or No – don’t have a car (get into a conversation around class or climate change related to fuel and global resources). Or Yes – Who did you go with? Only your Mum (get into conversation around family structure, queer theory, this might lead to discussions around race leading to Critical Race Theory).’
Lindsay’s story goes on...
‘As you can see, the lesson has gotten the kids all jigged up and thinking about race, class, the environment, gender etc. ... but has failed to get the kids talking about ... maths. This is the new educational system at its most bare. This model moves away from the former educational system of Jean Piaget which relied on copious amounts of research and evidence related to child development. ... Piaget noted that “abstract and decontextualised reasoning” is not appropriate till a child is “at the earliest” 11 years old, and more realistically well into their teens.’
Freire’s theory lacks any sense of responsibility, for example, to ensure that a child is not exposed to explicit content or that some subjects are not appropriate from a child development perspective. From my research, there is no long-term evidence of its academic or even social or psychological efficacy. One might even wonder if our current youth mental health crisis is the fallout from Friere-inspired approaches.
It also devotes vast amounts of time to everything but the subject area.
Speaking to parents, we are worried. Many, like myself, have seen a sharp downturn in educational standards; our children are being failed in the basic tenets of education. While children have expensive days out to receive ‘anti-Racism’ training, they do not have basic writing or reading skills. Many are surprised when I voice my concern; they say ‘I thought I was the only one’, but they are not. The more I speak to parents, the more I see this is an endemic problem – and it’s getting worse.
Most parents are tolerant and want our children to have a well-rounded education; however, we are concerned that our children will not be given the *basic* skills to survive and thrive in the world because they have been loaded with too much, too soon. Our instinct is that ‘something is wrong’. And yet policy-makers pat us on the hand: ‘There, there dear, we know, it’s just your child is not right’. And so, I reiterate, is this it? Is that true? Or, as with the thousands of children who were failed by a disastrous reading programme, will we look back 30 years from now and say, ‘We should have listened to the mothers, the fathers, the common folk – we failed children.’ I ask you, is this disaster model of education the right thing? Is it necessary? Is this what we want? I know I certainly don’t.
‘… Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.’
Maggie Smith, ‘Good Bones’ from Waxwing. Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith. Visit the Poetry Foundation website for the full poem.
Parents need free speech: a report from the ‘Concerned Adults Talking Openly About Gender Ideology’ event in Portobello
This report was written by a meeting attendee
A meeting for local people in Portobello Library, Edinburgh, ended up in the headlines last week after transactivists mounted a campaign to stop it. A group calling itself ‘Concerned Adults Talking Openly About Gender Ideology’ was formed after trying to discuss the impact of gender ideology on children on ‘Porty People’, a Facebook group for local people. So, the group was formed and decided to hold a meeting. Invitations were issued to the proponents of gender ideology. However, the suggestion of a meeting to hear speakers on both sides of the debate was met with horror by advocates of transitioning children to live as members of the opposite sex. Any criticism is ‘transphobic’ and must not be spoken or heard. ‘Nothing to worry about. Shut up.’ was the tone of the response.
The group went ahead with plans for a meeting of those who did have concerns. Their first booking in a local independent community centre was cancelled after protests that the meeting would make children – and indeed the whole community – ‘unsafe’. The group then made a deputation to Edinburgh City Council to ask for support in holding their meeting in a council venue. A booking was made for the local library with the support of a local Labour councillor who was concerned to protect the rights of her constituents to discuss issues of concern.
All hell broke loose. A campaign was mounted to make the Council cancel the booking. Police said that there was no role for them in ensuring that the meeting was not disrupted. This is the same police force that denounces ‘transphobia’, has charged a woman for using ribbons, and has visited women at home to warn them not to repeat actions considered ‘non–crime hate incidents’ on the basis of complaints by trans rights activists who claim to be ‘terrorised’ by people advocating for women’s rights. The council responded by telling the organisers that they would have to pay for security for the event. The organisers issued a press release that was picked up and featured in the Times and discussed on Mumsnet. A Crowdfunder raised the money overnight.
A local Green councillor called on supporters of ‘trans rights’ to attend a demonstration outside the library. The call to action encouraged protestors to wear masks to hide their identity and to try to dress unobtrusively in order to gain entry to the meeting to disrupt it. One of the organisers, a single mother, was publicly named and accused of ‘hatred’ and ‘transphobia’ and of promoting ‘toxic’ views. All these accusations are untrue and put her at risk.
On the day, a hundred or so activists from across Edinburgh gathered outside the venue. Three got in and locked themselves in the room and the toilet opposite it and were subsequently carried out by the security team employed by the Council. Two cars were vandalised. The meeting went ahead successfully despite the intimidation, and we heard from the main speaker and a teacher, a librarian, and a psychologist.
Despite the harassment, the false claims, the accusations, and the intimidation of the organisers, the trans protest called #NoDebate was pronounced dead.
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/ James Kirkup on the document that reveals the remarkable tactics of trans lobbyists. 02/12/19
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/17/drag-queen-teaches-pupils-conversion-therapy-spectacular-safeguarding/ (paywall) Ewan Somerville on the Drag queen who posted about ‘orgies’ and was invited to school in ‘spectacular safeguarding fail’. 17/03/23
https://open.substack.com/pub/cieo/p/the-trouble-with-sex-education-1a5?r=fjkva&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email Joanna Williams on the trouble with sex education. 19/03/23
https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-the-sex-binary Colin Wright on Understanding the Sex Binary. Accurate, nonpoliticized descriptions of biology are essential to crafting policy to preserve the integrity of female-only spaces. 20/03/23
https://news.stv.tv/scotland/eis-union-warns-of-toxic-misinformation-over-trans-rights-and-lobbying-in-schools-amid-gender-bill Tara Fitzpatrick on the teaching union warns of ‘toxic’ misinformation over trans rights. The EIS have issued guidance to counter a rise in ‘lobbying materials, containing inaccurate information’. 15/03/23
https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/people/portobello-library-parents-told-to-pay-ps600-for-security-after-edinburgh-gender-talk-plans-spark-protest-4062535 Jolene Campbell, Portobello Library: Parents told to pay £600 for security after Edinburgh gender talk plans spark protest. Group told to pay for security guards amid fears about public safety at Portobello event as the council is facing calls to cancel. 13/03/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11885599/Sex-education-lesson-plans-teach-children-aged-13-sex-toys-porn-masturbation.html Elly Blake, Sex education lesson plans teaching children aged 13 about sex toys, porn and masturbation are removed from website of UK provider selling them. 21/03/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/universities-turning-students-snowflakes-says-29520459 John Glover, Universities are turning students into snowflakes, says ex-Glasgow careers chief Linda Murdoch claimed that advice around mental health and supporting students meant that they were being turned into snowflakes as normal emotions were being treated as a threat to their mental health. 22/03/23
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k13f Antisocial on Sex education and schools. Some school pupils are learning about pleasure, some parents think it’s too explicit. The debate online has been fuelled by the fact that schools aren’t sharing lesson plans.
http://futurecities.org.uk/2023/03/22/companies-proper-gander-into-design-education/ Alex Cameron on the worrying proposal to put ‘sustainability’ and the ‘circular economy’ at the centre of the Design & Technology GCSE curriculum in England. 22/03/23
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