ARE SCHOOLS INDOCTRINATING OUR KIDS?

[Music] thank you okay everybody well welcome to the first in the strand of Education debates today at the Battle of ideas my name is Gareth sturdy I am one of the organizers of the Academy of ideas education forum and as I say there's Australian strand of debates uh in this room today um all about education and none of the issues perhaps more hot button Hot Topic than the subject that we're looking at this morning are schools indoctrinating um our kids so this strand is um partnered by the organization don't divide us which campaigns for Freedom tolerance and a colorblind approach to anti-racism in education and indeed the director of don't divide us is with us uh Alka Siegel Cuthbert we'll hear from her shortly um but if you don't know about don't divide a cert do do check them out it's a really really good organization so indoctrination then can I just do a sort of straw poll in the room could you put up your hand if you think schools are indoctrinating our children that's why I asked the question because that will obviously uh determine the kind of debate we have here could you just put up your hand if um you think that it's important that things like race climate gender sex and relationships those kind of things those kind of issues should be in the curriculum do you think schools should be uh delivering material like that okay primary schools secondary schools doesn't matter okay that's fine thank you very much okay well um you know the panel are no doubt gonna raise uh this morning uh various aspects some of the issues that you know I've I've just listed um so I'm not going to kind of give us a kind of list of examples here of of the kind of things that perhaps some people consider our indoctrination I will just say that in the last few days as a simply an example in the last few days the National educa Education Union um looks like it's going to adopt proposals that suggests that debate about the trans issue in schools would itself be transphobic to encourage a kind of debate about uh different viewpoints on that issue will be transphobic so I mean that's just by way of saying that this issue of whether it's indoctrination or isn't is very very live at the moment but today in the debate I'd like us to try and get into perhaps you know where this has come from and what we do about it um more than just engaging uh in a in a kind of culture War about some of these issues um well to discuss that I'm I'm thrilled that we've got this this panel um this morning I'm going to introduce them in the order in which I'm going to invite them to speak and uh at the end of the table on my right the first to speak will be Emma Webb uh Emma is director of the Common Sense Society UK branch which has a stand downstairs I believe so if you want to know more about that um then do check out that stand downstairs uh m is also the host of Newspeak which is the new culture forums weekly current affairs show and the new culture Forum has done a very interesting film on the idea of indoctrination in schools that's uh just come out so I recommend that you can find that on YouTube and it's also co-founder of save our statues and she writes the titles including the time The Spectator and regularly appears in on the broadcast media uh and then the next to speak will be Dr Sean Lang who's on my left he is senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University um he's the author of the first world war for dummies which I will be checking out um after this debate that sounds like just the book for me and uh but also what what history do we need uh an interesting question and uh Sean is also a fellow of the historical Association so we're very pleased to have Sean with us today and then the third speaker will be uh Dr Deborah Hayton to my immediate right uh Deborah is a teacher of physics in Bristol uh she's also a trade unionist and a columnist for The Spectator and unheard and uh writes a lot about education matters so it's great to have Deborah here thank you very much for coming and finally our last speaker will be Dr Alka Siegel Cuthbert whom I mentioned the director of don't divide us um a teacher a member of The ofsted Advisory panel on English and also prolific author in education um including the title what should schools teach disciplines subjects and the pursuit of Truth which was published by The Institute of education so they're our speakers for this morning I think it's a fantastic panel can we just welcome our speakers thank you very much so each speaker will speak for about five minutes and then after that we are going to go straight out to questions from you because I think um this debate will uh really be made by hearing from what you think um not just what the panel is thinking so if you're ready Emma we'll start with Emma off you go thank you good morning everyone so I'm saying to Gareth yesterday the in the process of preparing for this discussion I did a sort of Deep dive down the rabbit hole of examples of things and discovered that it really is just an endless pit of horrifying examples of what's going on in our schools and Gareth mentioned Calvin Robinson's documentary that was produced by the new culture Forum um on this very subject and I would urge everyone to go and give that a watch when I was watching it I was reminded of something that kemi badenox said in Parliament not too long ago she said that this is a quote what we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact so what I'm going to do um briefly is run through some of these contested ideas um because obviously the Crux of my view is yes schools are indoctrinating our kids um but it's also to do with the horrible implications that this has for teachers who dissent against what's going on so the best way I can do this is is by basically painting a series of vignettes on two subjects race and gender so I don't think for this audience there's any need for me to explain what CRT is so I'm just going to take you through some examples of how that is manifesting itself in the curriculum so the first newspaper story on this one um Nursery teachers given non-statutary guidance telling them that telling them to teach White Privilege this was guidance put together by the uh by unions and Charities through something called the early years foundation and teachers were being trained to teach anti-racism To Toddlers and that telling them that children's racial Prejudice is at risk of this is a quote being maintained or reinforced unless teachers had specialist training to develop an understanding about white privilege systemic racism and how racism affects children and families in early years setting settings and if we wanted to be cynical we would say that this sounds like it's a bit of a gravy train because obviously someone wants to provide that training another story children um who were around age seven um being told that they're not racially innocent MPS said that Brighton and Hove city council who were behind this were doing something akin to Soviet style indoctrination I agree with that this program was called racial literacy 101 and the sessions trained teachers to condemn again a quote the widespread view that young children are racially innocent and it showed a diagram of um acts that they said were constituted covert white supremacy and this included things like the denial of white privilege and eurocentric curriculums and the consultant apparently told the teachers and this is a quote again that science upholds the status quo so um without going into too much detail you can see what the implications would be there for free speech if you're not allowed to even question the concept of white privilege which is a contested political idea um there's also in addition to that the push to decolonize curriculums which um Falls quite neatly into issues surrounding the teaching of History to our children and the the attempts to edit the reading lists by exam boards as one headline putter to take the curriculum from dead white men so all of this is just straight out of the critical race Theory Playbook and there's an extra layer of Cruelty to all of this as well because it doesn't necessarily chime with students experiences even if it might chime um with excuses we know from various studies including by the government that white working class boys are the most disadvantaged group in education the statistics on this uh you know enough to make you cry only 16 of free School meals eligible white British students started higher education at the age of 19 in 2018 which is the lowest compared to any other ethnic group except Irish and roma Traveler and only 53 of these students met the expected standard of uh development at the end of the early years Foundation stage yet one of these courses were teaching um students training teachers that pupils shouldn't be taught to quote that race doesn't mean anything everyone can work hard to be successful so this is bad for black students because it's teaching them basically that they're victims and trapping them in a victim mindset which is something that can be badanok has talked about at length and also is bad for white students because it doesn't reflect their experiences so quickly to run through some of the gender stories Gareth already mentioned that that Telegraph story this week that transgender school's guidance says that discussing women's rights could be offensive a draft policy by the National Education Union proposed changing the definition of transphobia so that it would include propagating Concepts and misinformation harmful to trans people which arrays and ignore trans history such as trans ideology and contagion And discussing with trans a trans person how best to balance trans and sex-based women's right sex-based women's rights or refusing to acknowledge their identity that their identities are real or valid primary school children being bullied for misgendering other students Lucy Phillips from the safeguarding from safeguarding school Scotland said that they had stories of primary school children being vilified being ostracized in the playground um had been reprimanded sent to the Head teacher for sometimes accidentally misgendering and reams of other stories including from places like Eaton of young boys being told to put pillows underneath their t-shirts to simulate being pregnant and being told in workshops to to come out as straight um and told about toxic masculinity and porn and other things that were completely aging appropriate so I just want to finish very very briefly with with a couple of examples um of how this is actually affecting teachers as well as the students so Joshua Sutcliffe who was a Christian maths teacher clearly a very sweet man who cared about his students suspended for um accidentally saying well done girls to a class that had a trans child in it he was investigated and the punishment is the process in these cases a reverend who was fired for giving a sermon basically telling students that they didn't have to accept the things that they were being taught by activists who were coming into the school and teaching um this ideology and closer to home recently an Evangelical Christian teacher who was actually jailed when he returned to school after misgendering a student so just to finish up my point is that activists are using children as instruments for their ideological purposes and good teachers are the collateral damage of this okay thank you very much Emma I mean that gives us a a really good introduction into the kind of issues that people are referring to when they say indoctrination I suppose uh a question for us is um how much of this politicized teaching is a caricature how much of it is widespread is this going on in in all schools or is it a few that get highlighted and then the the situation looks a whole lot worse than it actually is but anyway um let us move on to our second speaker then which is Sean off you go okay um indoctrination is a powerful word and it's an emotive word and I think my worry with it is that it gives the impression that there's a sort of direction that there's somewhere where it comes from and that there's a sort of plan behind it and I'm not sure that's the problem I think the problem is something a bit different although I'm simply talking in terms of what I see and particularly in my sphere which is history the teaching of History which as Emma was saying is one of the areas where you might very well see the sort of of issue that we're talking about to some extent of course schools are always indoctrinating simply you use the term if it's something you disapprove of there's an overt um an agenda if you like so obviously religious schools have it the British values issue in both primaries and secondaries is another example with certainly some people have called indoctrination although I wouldn't um but first of all where might it come from because what we have a very decentralized system and indeed it's become more so with the growth of academies um you know who actually determines the curriculum and and you do that because of this you can indeed get the sort of opening for activists that Emma was just describing but it's not the DFE because um the national curriculum doesn't apply to Independent Schools it doesn't apply to academies um exam Boards of course have have a a greater hold on it um and but a lot of it particularly below the level of gcses is this in the hands of individual schools and therefore individual teachers superficially if you look at the curriculum of your own local school you'd like to say in my area of History it will look rather different from what you might remember from your own school days so for example you will find the teaching of African history uh in their medieval Marley for example is one that I've seen on a number of school curricula or Benin or Mughal India or the Maya and this will apply both at primary schools and key stage three the lower the years of secondary schools is this a good thing is this a bad thing I think it's a good thing um I've got no problem never have had any problem with extending people's knowledge I don't think there's any such thing as knowledge that you somehow shouldn't have the trouble is that there's a price simply because curriculum time is finite so if you add more things in then something has to give and I don't think that has ever been identified if you're going to pay that price and that it has to be paid then you need to start thinking about the criteria for choice and that is a debate I'm not seeing indeed one of the things I do in the historical Association is sit on its Council and I raised this very issue um not a few months ago because if you look on the historical association website but first thing you'll see is diversity and diversity is a major aim it's been added to the association's sort of core aims um there's they do a regular and annual survey of secondary school teachers and in the last couple of years diversity has been the number one issue that they've asked about and it's sort of tabulated and schools where it's not happening are on Coast to make it happen and so on so that's actually really cool so I said well I think we need to discuss what diversity means um and what the criteria are there are certain areas which are obvious talks about women about black and Asian LGBT but where's it going to end you can always add things in and what is the cost and that's the point because there are certain there's a certain purpose behind the teaching of any subject in terms of shaping um you know the society that we live in in the case of History it says traditionally for a long time it was about a sort of political education that's why history took off as a school subject it was seen as a background to understanding the Constitutional political system that we have and you did recent politics has suggested that that sort of knowledge is uh should be a priority because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding including among politicians about the sort of political system we actually have it's not a presidential system it's not a federal system and so on yet that is I would what I would call the Democratic deficit of this lack of criteria which means that when you do look at what is taught in history a sort of political Humanities subject what you find are is the sort of emphasis on diversity but not on what I would call a core of political historical knowledge and this gets sort of caricatured as sort of dull old-fashioned and as you say you know old dead white men but actually I'm sorry to say this dead white men or what I do and and white men are what have created the even political system that operates in this country and if there's no debate and what I wanted to see was a debate and you can probably guess what going to say absolutely not didn't want to debate it into being decided so what I'm calling for is a facing of the agency problem that there is a deficit there's a price that we have paid uh in the interest of diversity I think that price is in democracy it is in Democratic understanding and if we don't have a debate somewhere then I think we're going to drift into a situation of ignorance uh lack of understanding and that obviously is what I'd like to see starting here thank you very much Sean perfect timing by the way five minutes um thank you that's that's you know you raise a number of interesting questions there uh indoctrination from one person isn't for another um hasn't you know hasn't always uh been like this to a certain extent and also this idea of choice and Democratic accountability in this um very very interesting questions I hope we get into some of those issues uh when we discuss further but for now Debbie uh thank you Gareth well of course schools for induction kids it's like one of those irregular verbs isn't it I am I am offering guidance and advice to young people you are persuading children to change their minds and he's brainwashing them with his fanciful nonsense uh we could debate why schools even exist indeed if it's not to change children to mold them and in the words of one former chair of the commons education select committee perhaps to mold them into productive economic units and after teaching for 26 years I can quite believe that that's the government's plan and I suspect many of us here are more concerned about the social and cultural dimensions and I've got a specific view on some of the pressures first by uh first by young people I transitioned myself 10 years ago but have long since uh stop believing that I have a chance sex and I worry dreadfully about what children are being told today and the impact it's having on them and their Mental Health but that's just one example in a much wider debate as as others have already intimated and if transgender Idol ideology are a disappeared tomorrow something else would likely take its place and we should therefore provide children and more importantly I think their teachers with the tools to recognize uh the indoctrination that often hides in plain sight and there are tools to do this or there were I teach physics as Gareth said but back in 2010 I was asked to teach some mere level critical thinking it was quite a shock for me and very different to teaching physics and in that first year at least I was happy if I was a full chapter in the textbook ahead of my class but nobody taught me to think critically at school but perhaps more significantly nobody taught me to think critically in my first 14 years of teaching without the skills I acquired from teaching that course I would have never held my own in the uh in the toxic and diverse and and divisive transgender debate which is going on online at the moment and in that debating others I may never have developed the ability to actually recognize indoctrination and I would certainly have been left without the language to call it out so what is critical thinking uh it's not critical theory amongst other things critical thinking equips teach students to critique arguments and assess The credibility of those making them always I taught children use five criteria if you're wanting to assess The credibility of a source uh first the reputation is as somebody got a reputation to lose their ability to see the situation are are they a good Witness uh vested interest important one do they have any expertise expertise and their neutrality in the issue or bias so reputation ability to see vested interests expertise neutrality Revan r-a-v-e-n that's what I taught and essentially it's helped my pupils answer the question who told you that and why did you believe them and it's a question I regularly ask others and to which I rarely get a coherent answer so I say I taught critical thinking I don't any longer the government canceled their level course in 2016. I wonder why maybe it was thought not necessary in order to form those productive economic units as I reflected on what what today's children are losing out on but the more I thought about it the more I realized it's not children we should be worrying about you know children go to school and children are in the care of adults the people we should be concerned about is their teachers teachers are getting no training on this at all and its teachers and adults who are responsible for what happens in schools not children and too many professionals have let too much goal and I'd say going back to my Raven groups with vested interests perhaps with little in the way of reputation or expertise have planted ideologies in our schools and often from a very blinkered and biased perspective in terms of Reverend their credibility is junk it really is but they'll never be stopped if they're never challenged and if teachers don't have the language to challenge them it will perpetuate so I'd say that it's the teachers who have let things go that must also be challenged in these ways and it it's not rocket science to challenge them actually it's quite fun all we've got to do is ask that question who told you this and why did you believe them thank you um that's great if we could just keep the Applause tilt till the end would be really great but they clearly like what you said Debbie um but I mean you raise a really uh important issue about the responsibility of the student themselves here and the responsibility of their teachers I mean I was I was thinking just on the on the way in this morning that the students that uh I think the students that through soup over vancov's sunflowers uh in the past few days I mean I I suspect they thought they were thinking critically about the whole economic system and the use of fossil fuels you may disagree but I'm pretty sure they thought they were thinking uh critically so it is a it's a it's a really interesting question um hopefully we'll get into that our last speaker then uh Alka thank you I want to change the question a bit as My Prerogative as a speaker um rather I'm going to ask our schools indoctrinating which I think everybody kind of agrees on I want to ask a question which I think is prior which is our schools educating because I think if the schools are educating then we can be fairly confident that they won't be indoctrinating right so clearly I think the answer to that question are they educating is no um and that might seem odd because when you think about it let's look at the Visa figures the British Association educational suppliers Association we have over 20 800 20 806 primary schools we have 4190 secondary schools we have 264 804 teachers in Primary School 247 300 247 378 teachers in secondary school and over nine million pupils attending school every day so that's a lot of people doing something every day that we take as education and we don't really think very much or very deeply about what actually is education what is education what is going on in the schools we've heard about the egregious cases and believe you me I could give you a lot more examples from don't dividers of the not just the shocking examples of sackings and job losses but the everyday cruelty that goes on every day arbitrary meeting out of theological injustices of what capacity is a social justice that are bound to leave any thinking adult or child befuddled in the news as to what is actually going on so we're not educating the statistics that I've given you show you a key problem which is that education isn't fundamental in empirical phenomena right so you can have all the statistics you like all the inquiries and official policies into let's look at how many kids are too hungry to learn too fat to learn too stupid to learn don't have good enough parents to learn whose teachers are all the kind of literally of secondary things that have nothing to do with the fact of what is the quality of thinking what is the knowledge that we are teaching how is that knowledge being taught are we are we encouraging children to engage with our cultural Legacy with an attitude of Suspicion inbuilt contempt division or are we encouraging them to go in with a more open mind to confront ideas that they don't find every day at home because what would be the point of that why pay a profession why pay for schools if you're only going to give children what they can already find in their everyday lives and that Mantra of representation we must see ourselves before we can learn is the most Philistine discount intellectual destructive idea and it's taken the hold everywhere in education and Beyond so no the statistics don't tell us anything if we don't value thinking if we don't value our past cultural and intellectual achievements and are prepared to give them their due of respect and critically engage with them but you can't critically engage with something if you don't engage with it first and that means understanding it and recognizing it seeing where it sits in its own place in its own time and then judging comparatively how it fares with today's knowledge or today's Moors but if you don't do that if you go in with a critical lens straight away you destroy education so we're not educating we have many subjects today on the curriculum many people in favor of modernizing 21st century skills will say oh it's so tedious we have such an academic curriculum all these traditional subjects that we've had for 80 or 100 years that's rubbish because if you look at those subjects the label might be the same but the intellectual and imaginative content has been hollowed out um with this level of prevalent cultural hostility which is unique to the anglo-american sphere I would say I don't think it's prevalent all over yet um I don't think we can educate it's as simple as that when we think of teachers as being a professional that has to be trained rather than educated and and here are kind of semi agree and disagree with Debbie I don't think you need critical thinking as an add-on I think if you have knowledge and engage with knowledge and think that is critique enough built into that I've got to stop now there you go okay well that's uh four fantastic contributions to some of these questions um but I want to hear what you think I mean I'm I I'm really struck by things that people have said but I've got disagreement points with everybody but let's uh the hands are going up already so let's get let's get out there yes thank you um I used to be a teacher I escaped um and I remember the before times and I have to think of myself in the before times and the now times the before times I just thought things were normal and then a few years ago the scales fell from my eyes and now I come to the Battle of ideas but before I remember being a teacher and just thinking that there was broadly sort of Good and Evil like a real Disney Vacation of looking at the world and I think a lot of teachers do and I I look back and I kind of don't want to scrutinize too much because I think God how much how much indoctrinating did I do thinking I was just talking about what was broadly good and not really seeing my own biases for what they were and I think one of the challenges that we have is that a lot of teachers you know young idealistic are coming out of University thinking if there is good and there is evil but there's a specific basket of good things and it's not the Tories if you're coming through this sort of education education training and so I'm wondering if we're going to re-educate or it doesn't sound good does it teachers young teachers people interested in the profession how far down do we have to go to to say it's not just good or evil there's gray areas there's you know complications I worry that teachers coming through see everything in Black and White and with the best of intentions our indoctrinating children without knowing they're doing it so what can we do about that yes I was just wondering uh whether where are the parents and all this because um I remember it's been a long time since we've had kids at school but I know that if we were being if my kids were being forced to listen to this rubbish I'd be in trouble and I also want to know uh where are the kids too because um if I remember my lot they were fairly bulge they were fairly bulchy Bunch if we've got three kids they're all fairly bulgy at school and and they're still boxing thank you um and they wouldn't take this stuff passively they're questioning people as we taught them to be I had a very quick question really are we so have we sort of invited the wolf to the door in as many regards that schools are now having to do so much more parenting almost and it sort of seems to be encouraged by the state to do so but it seems a lot of times parents are either willing or happy for it to happen and therefore they're leaving that Gap to be filled by schools that never used to be hard to be shooting me I've just got a question for um could you comment because you your commenting mostly focused on the work of activists uh and I'll share your views uh of the danger though but could you please comment on the role of the conservative party in promoting indoctrination because it seems that we've got a situation where the conservative party is saying you should not be indoctrinated within schools oh yeah it is itself promoting indulgination through promoting British values for example so let's say looking at that from the perspective of a left-wing teacher why should I not teach critical race Theory why should I not promote it if I'm also being told to promote British values um and we've also got things called some lot of concern for Christian parents in particular which is the new relationship sex and health education curriculum so I just wanted you to comment on those two as examples of what appears to be a conservative party telling teachers to indoctrine I'm now going to come back to the panel to respond and uh we'll keep those comments nice and brief we'll go back out and take another batch of questions um that last question was addressed to Emma and Alka so um Emma spoke first last time Al could you want to respond to that or any other points that we've just heard I'll um respond to that that last Point um I think I think what I'm talking about is the prior conditions that allow indoctrination to exist in the classroom those prior conditions have been created by both parties every on the Coalition as well and it's been going on since the 70s we've had wave after wave of different forms of instrument mentalization now of course education will always have right any social institution will have secondary aims as well to train a Workforce to create a literate population Etc but there comes a point when if that instrumentalization reaches a certain level of influence and an intrinsic understand the evaluation and understanding of the intrinsic value of the thing is lost then the thing itself is destroyed and I think we're at that point or getting very close to that point I mean on values itself I think you know there is a very good question put to myself and people who hold my position which is you claiming to be very neutral how can you be value neutral and the answer is I'm not I am not value neutral I'm upholding truth and impartiality there's nothing neutral about that right but the point is it's not party political those those those are the values that are close that are kind of if you like intrinsic to epistemology to scholarship and then further down the line to education in a slightly different form it's true with children at schools we're not talking about academic higher academic freedom in the sense it exists in universities but that connection The Logical connection has to be maintained and if it is not maintained if it is not affirmed then we don't educate then we indoctrinate Okay so we've got is it the tour is is it the parents uh is it socialization um should I share my own political views with the pupils or not uh lots of things on the table Emma how do you want to respond to that question in particular you know what about the role of the conservative government in all of this I think um Elka said it perfectly and I couldn't agree more actually um I think that fundamentally it's not possible to be value neutral like I say I I agree with what um Alka has said and I think sometimes the issue is within schools that it seems that there isn't a recognition actually that those schools are being partisan there is this belief that you you are being value neutral in teaching these things that are highly contested ideas and highly contested political ideas the um just a quick point on British values so um the definition of British values was um I believe it was brought in under David Cameron in 2015 he gave a speech on that subject and actually the reason why that was introduced into schools was actually um to try and push back in some ways against indoctrination because it was in response to the crisis that we were facing with respect to islamist radicalization um and and other forms of radicalism and so actually it was it was an attempt to try and combat that I don't necessarily think that defining British values is the best way to go about it because it's very much like as as um as Alco was saying it's similar to the critical thinking argument that it's a shame that we actually felt that we had to do that in the first place so no I don't think it's possible to be value neutral but I think that the values that schools ought to take and this is the same with all sorts of Institutions that have become politicized and have strayed from their purpose is that you should you should you shouldn't be value neutral but you should hold those values that are instrumental to you fulfilling the role that you are supposed to be fulfilling and in the case of Education you have to be impartial you have to recognize where you're being biased and you have to promote honesty and truth and and a certain set of values and actually um going back to critical thinking and also to the point that was made about the role of parents um character is extremely important and if a child has a strong character which is usually something that they can get from home sometimes that's not possible because you God can't choose who your parents are and to some extent that is always going to be a lottery you can't do anything about that and I think in schools what we've seen is and particularly pushed by activist groups is this attempt to sever parental responsibility to try and get around parents in some way to try and almost in a maoist way to to bring children into this ideological movement and I think that that's very dangerous so it's rather than focusing on things like British values and critical thinking I think schools should be focusing on trying to create the character not just in their students but also in their in their staff that is uh that makes it more possible to facilitate learning honesty and the pursuit of Truth okay thank you um Sean I mean feel free to respond to anything that we we've we've heard but I mean you know that idea of uh history being impartial can you ever teach history in a completely impartial objective way is that possible and and hasn't there always been some element of indoctrination going on in teaching well wasn't it ever thus yes it was um but in terms of my own subject you can teach it in a balanced way whether that's impartial or not is I suppose to be debated but certainly you can so recognize that there are different and indeed it should be because it's the whole point of history there are different interpretations different ways of looking at it but in terms of some of the questions that we had the how do you get teachers to recognize that there are gray areas rather than straightforward good evil good bad and so on um in my experience is a as a teacher um I think that you look upwards and that would come from either the head and particularly actually it's things like exam boards that people will follow the least little range of nuance chains of emphasis that comes down from the examples because it's got that sort of power behind it and there's a certain amount of fear I think that drives it that and ofsted I suppose and and those are the bodies where I think is important to really sort of re-educate to use the term that you use um because they have such they have a greater power from government over what actually happens in in the classroom I think parents are absolutely key I think that's absolutely right the great hope I think is that and I would agree entirely with what you said about children that there's a resistance among young people very often particularly if they feel that they are being sold a line very obviously by a school and I've seen that many many times uh both actually while they're at school and later and they're sort of looking back at that there's a sort of recognition that that's what they've expected to say and so they might sort of say it but actually they sort of um Kick Back a bit later so I think that is an area of Hope but very specifically on British values um the controversial bit about British values is calling in the British and that was all is one of the issues because what what is to say that they are specifically British um but when you look at what they are they're things like you know what was listed as sort of free speech and voting and a fair justice system and so on and so forth with none of which I would guess anyone would disagree but what worries me about it is having it as a sort of separate strand in the curriculum rather fan making it core to the actual life of school and the sort of philosophy of the school itself that's where you should have the British values and if you had that you wouldn't need um a sort of separate area of the curriculum you wouldn't have to really react in a in a sort of way against islamist terrorism or whatever and now it seems to me that if the British values were actually instilled in the working documents and life of a school we wouldn't even need to have this debate thank you Sean so um Debbie parents you're you're a teacher you're uh working in the classroom how much of this uh do you think is the area for the parents to deal with and it's not really something that you as a teacher should be engaged in um but then again how much do you think of your job is is teaching academic subjects and how much is sort of socialization being in school you know working out how to be in society you might want to respond to other points I just wonder what you thought of that well I think when when I became a teacher I naively thought my job was to teach physics but it's much it is much it is much more than that I'd like to pick up on what what my colleague the former teacher said about this uh this good evil dichotomy and uh that is what's going on there is there is a good and there is a bad uh I think I think it comes sometimes from Human Nature you know we are you know we are social beings we aren't tribal in our Niche and we look for safety within a group or many of us do and uh Shane is often used as a way of protecting us and stepping out from the group is a very brave thing to do I'd like to just pick up on what was said about what you know what the kids think here and the kids as well you know they're human beings and they're they they're very they're similar to adults in the way that stepping out of the group is quite a big thing for children uh as for parenting though yes we do more parenting than we used to 26 years ago when I started I think this is this is the part of the problem in society that as a parent I've got three children of my own and my investment in those three people is lifelong and I'm going to be a lot more careful about what I teach them whereas when it comes to when I'm teaching in schools then a I'm teaching those children for a year so I don't have the long-term investment secondly I've got a contract of employment here which uh which uh which protects my livelihood and if there's a policy to be followed then it's it's hard to step outside from that policy if you think you might your contract of employment might be uh might be at risk so I think what happens with the schools doing more of uh more of parenting which is what we're doing it is uh it's almost again it's that safety culture that people want to stay safe and by staying safe it means following the policy which parents I don't think will do in the same way okay thank you it's it's interesting to me how much we can trust the kids very good at spotting when someone's trying to sell them some ideology but on the other hand I think one of the trends we're seeing is that a lot of uh these opinions are coming from children it's kind of adults that are seeking to accommodate those opinions rather than saying like we might have done in a different age no that's nonsense you know forget all about it anyway let's go out again uh I would like to suggest that we should be focusing on critical education theorists and not just critical race theorists um I want to bring up a book by a guy called Isaac gottsman published in 2016 called the critical term education from Marxist critique to post-structuralist feminism to critical theories of race where it is detailed how the Marxist radicals of the 60s moved into the academy and started publishing how they have radicalized the field of education and this is something to celebrate the field of Education by the way being where educators are educated critical education theorists in the academy are running unethical experiments on young people and Society they know that's what they're doing and they're using academic freedom and name-calling as a shield to hide behind so they can keep us arguing while they keep doing it so my question should we be tolerant a radical political activists Scholars trying to seize control of the field of the field of Education to reorient the direction of society um hello even now I'm really nervous about saying what I feel and think um one of the reasons I'm here today is because I'm super worried about what's going on at the moment in my school in particular and uh certain London boroughs uh the fact that activism is overtly promoted that we're talking about children having critical thinking faculties or being agents with their own Destinies Etc but what happens when people are targeting the youngest this is the reason I'm here today because normally I'd just sit down listen go yeah that was great this is not great these are people coming into our schools and talking about the very youngest children and saying You must start here they're telling us things for which there is no evidence that if we follow their way our results will go up and we're kind of mute we are muted um I mean I took some comfort in thinking our silence at the end of three three sessions where no new knowledge was taught where no teachers were given any new skills it was diabolical nothing new and at the end of it no one had any questions and there's a huge reason for that it's because weirdly some of us felt that our silence was powerful so I always speak oh and in a borrower Naomi Fisher was allowed to stand up during a conference on rethinking education where she said something like when children are allowed to make decisions such as walking out of a classroom if they don't like what they're hearing that's when everything's going right it's undermining teachers and and teachers do actually think it's just that we're scared to say especially in certain bars are really scared to say what we believe in think or question anything thank you thank you very much I mean that's uh it's clearly an authentic voice of someone who is worried about speaking out well that's what the Battle of ideas is all about Free Speech definitely allowed okay ofsted hasn't been mentioned there's some really good campaign a positive after reform officer is taken with his values he's taking tolerance and saying you're not teaching uh this Therefore your review is is coming from good to bad and there's been uh there's been a direct reviews to private schools um religious schools and so on and you can see offset it's not being held accountable by Parliament so when people say conservatives are not conservatives I also think of departments that are actually having more influence in National curriculum right I mean just one question for the world very quickly Kobe has also left a phenomena of homeschooling I would like to ask what do the panel think about that potential solution that seems to be other people are thinking about okay great thank you homeschooling is that a solution to the problem of indoctrinalization we've already had the conservative government that we've had parents now we're bringing offstad in whose responsibility really is this so what's your question um I just wanted to ask do we think that teacher Authority has been hollowed out which is why these competing ideologies have kind of been allowed to come in and then how do we start to repair that because I share uh the ladies fears and I just like to ask how do we start to repair and rebuild teacher Authority really good question how do we start to repair teacher Authority that's great question I wondered what the panel thought of the current role being played by third-party providers in uh smuggling in critical social justice theories through the back door certainly uh it's certainly true in Brighton and hope where I live and I I had something to do with exposing the racial literacy 101 teacher training with the help of don't divide us which Emma uh mentioned and um that was very much the um that was very much the uh the work of a consultant that was known to uh Brighton City Council leaders who was just appointed to do a um teacher training across every single School in the in the city and is continuing to do that's working uh their way around every single school started with the primary schools so the question what about the role of third-party providers and I just wanted to say also on the issue of critical thinking the the very thing that is being fraudulent fraudulently um delivered into schools by by these third-party providers is the idea here that there that their critical social justice theories are indeed critical thinking they are pretending fraudulently and teachers are buying into this that what they're doing is uh is helping teachers to uncover the truth the critical race theory is of course the truth it is merely uh helping teachers to help pupils to understand that systemic racism is has you know is baked into everyday life and so it's a kind of it's a kind of you've got to watch out for this thing because in Brighton they keep saying no no it's nothing to see here it's we are indeed just teaching critical thinking skills thank you thank you very much okay so we've got this uh this uh issue has come up several times in questions now about uh outside actors coming into school you know it's not about the parents or roster or whoever the teachers it's about outside actors I wonder what the panel thinks about that I'm just going to say we've had this idea of contested uh ideas coming up but what about things like climate change and so on which if you ask across Society is that a very contested idea I don't know but it seems to often fall into this uh basket of schools are indoctrinating around climate so I wonder if that's something that any other panelists might want to reflect on I'm um I'm going to come uh back to the panel I'm going to start with uh Debbie and then we'll go to Sean after that and then we'll go to Emma and Elka uh yes third party providers are a problem uh in my previous school where I had taught for 20 years we were instructed to teach the an RSE scheme uh but the only schemes we had were coming in from third party providers and each one that came in I was able to look at and able to critique and say well this this is not this fails on at this point this this is not compliant with the law et cetera etc etc now on one hand we're told to teach this stuff but on the other hand we're relying on third-party providers in that school we just didn't teach it because every every every plan that came in uh I felt we felt was not uh was not suitable I think the problem is is that teachers don't have teachers can be aware that there's an issue and when I was in when I was discussing my colleagues in that school my colleagues were aware there was an issue with this but nobody had the language to call it out and that's what I was saying about critical thinking what teaching that course I don't think had much impact on on the kids but teaching that course gave me the thinking gave me the language to be able to identify what the problem was here and to call it out and once you've called it out other people then other colleagues look around and say yeah we can't do this can we not so I do think it comes back to teachers teacher Authority and as teachers we're supposed we we claim to be highly trained and highly educated professionals and if that's the case we need to be able to uh lead on this and use our thinking skills and have the language we need to call out this uh this this material because it is dangerous it is Insidious and it is harming our children great thank you Sean I think the gentleman at the front raised the basic question which is underlying all of these which is do you tolerate um radical ideas uh being put forward and the control by Irving seized by those who are promoting them and it seems to me the answer is you can you should tolerate ideas but not look at the control um and there's been a lot of talk about critical thinking critical race thinking critical uh education thinking what have you to me it may just because of these the academic discipline I come from it's really about evidence-based thinking if the evidence is there and it supports the idea of being put forward then absolutely fine but of course what's being said and is that a lot of the ideas being promoted don't have good evidence basis and so essentially it's only that if you know what is the evidence underneath the claims that you're making and if there is no evidence and the claim should collapse but it won't collapse unless we address the issue that one or two others have raised so I forget exactly who which is about who is in control here because third party providers are only able to get into the sort of end of the system if they're allowed in by heads or local authorities or whoever is doing it and that's why it seems to me the key the figures are indeed head teachers authorities examples and ofsted and if ofstit doesn't need to be more accountable then absolutely so be it and that's something where it will have to be the building over the road that does it but in the end teacher Authority is undermined from above uh or from those who have been allowed in by those above and can only be strengthened with the support of those above and that's the way it seems to me those areas are key thank you very much Emma oh well so many good questions so I'm going to try and be as brief in addressing um as many of them as possible um I want to begin as you just did there with the the first question about tolerance because I do think that is the Crux of it and I agree that the idea should be tolerated and this is this is Karl Popper's tolerance Paradox it's actually the subject of my research so please come back to me in a couple of years time and I'll see if I have an answer um but it's Carl poppers tolerance Paradox so yes the ideas should be um tolerated but the problem is when those ideas themselves lead to censorship and so that's the ultimate problem with radical ideologies it was the same as the issue um with islamism and that's why tolerance is probably defined in the British values um so to quickly come back to the point that you made about climate change um I think the issue with climate change actually may be that it is something that is contested but it's something that hasn't been able to be contested by many people in many settings because it is being you know I was I tuned into the BBC for the first time because I'm staying in a hotel um in a very long time and just watching um to do with David attenborough's frozen planet and things like that the coverage um doesn't even acknowledge any other aspect to the what is an ongoing discussion even within the scientific community on that subject what do you think of schools have what part do you think schools have played in that if any Emma do you think schools are responsible for that kind of climate of Conformity around that idea um I imagine probably um but I'm I'm not into entirely sure um because I don't have first-hand experience of it but I think that probably um the primary broadcasters have an awful lot to do with not actually giving an opportunity to any um dissenters to actually air their views and to take those views seriously and to approach them with critical thinking because people may be wrong but if you if you want to be in a tolerant open Society you actually have to allow everyone to air their views and to have those um views uh you know able to be you know people say sunlight is the best disinfectant so um I quickly want to come back to um two points that were made at the back there about um about teachers um and a teacher's Authority and the children walking out of class basically allowed to hold their teachers hostage um because I think as we were saying that you know the parenting has been handed over to schools but in many ways the teacher's Authority has been completely undermined and so what you We've Ended up with is we talk often about going back to climate change the cult of the child and teach and child-centered learning um this attitude that um you often hear teachers saying things like um I learn more from the students than they learn from me if that's the case and something is very very wrong um on homeschooling I think um to be completely Frank if I had children now I would be considering homeschooling them and I don't think that that is a perfect solution because I think there are some things such as the community aspect of schools that can't be replaced schools are at the center of communities and anybody who experienced you know being at school probably before the the 2000s maybe the 2010s will recognize how how significant that Community aspect is I don't think that can be replaced with homeschooling I know some people are trying by forming homeschooling collectives so it might be a temporary measure but it's not going to be the ultimate one on third third-party providers I think that is a really big issue because we basically opened up a market for these third-party providers to come in and to not be questioned and when I did some research some years ago on prevent within the curriculum and and looked at some of the resources that were available to very busy teachers who go online and try to find whatever they can as quickly as they can even then and that was some years ago they were I would say counterproductive resources if you were trying to create a sort of cohesive Community they were very much based on identity Politics on that point um don't provide us I think I've done sort of work looking into the kind of resources that have been supplied and so I don't know if you want to address that point out or anything else thank you yes I did and I wanted to talk about the parent School division of labor on the third party organizations we've produced a report on the back of the Brighton and Hove campaign that Adrian mentioned we identified at least 60 there are a lot more providers over whom nobody has any oversight at all these are providers at local councils are drawing on to draw up their policies for schools okay we did not have the resources to contact every single school because schools since 1988 have local autonomy in these matters so some may be drawing on the more than others some may be using them more critically than others but the point is nobody knows and this is what I meant at the beginning we do not have anybody at a political level at a professional level at the level of the teaching unions at the level of the exam boards or even at an ofsted level who is prepared to stand up and just say we value education this is what we understand by education is essentially a transmission of knowledge that is we can we expect we understand there's a difference between knowledge claim and opinion and a belief we expect our teachers to know the difference between this and if we do if they don't know the difference between these three different claims and the type of evidence that is needed to back each claim then we need to ensure that they do know it right we need to look at teacher education I'm just going to press you on that point now because Debbie was saying you know the solution to that perhaps is to teach things like critical thinking to teach teachers and students how to think critically but I I got the impression that you weren't necessarily not so in favor of that idea but simply because you know I don't think you can generically and un uncoupled from the substantive disciplinary knowledge I find it hard to see how you'd you have to be critical about something right so as a English teacher for example um you know to just be critical about taking a critical approach to Shakespeare for example which which is now kind of a dominant mainstream Orthodoxy that would teach English or meant to teach it critically without knowing um about Shakespeare in his own terms as a dramatist as a person Etc you need to know about the subject but can I get back to what I wanted to say please and I just I think also there's a way that thinking proper thinking is itself inherently critical right because it's not thinking is to question it is to follow the implications further it is to look for patterns and then test those patterns and then decide which conclusion you think is more credible so it's kind of inbuilt if you like anyway what I was going to say is so yeah we've got six over 60 providers all based all teaching um sets of them so I don't I wouldn't call it knowledge or curriculum it's set of beliefs in their mindless activities to promote these beliefs that are based on critical race Theory you know Britain is an Institutional racist and if you're white you do have white privilege um and if you are but actually suffer racism even if you don't see yourself as Southern racism so this step is horrible it's really vicious and nobody has any oversight over it right there's nobody calling these people like what are their educational qualifications actually some of them might have educational qualifications but you look at them they're not proper educational ones right they're they're like experts in educational technology you know marketing race everything other than actual scholarly knowledge like these are not the kind of people we should have in our schools teaching children Foods I'm just I'm sorry but no right and in terms of it okay so just quickly very very quickly that does not mean I'm for banning all this right because at higher education level universities yes of course every idea must be had had out but we need the freedom to debunk it and preferably refute those ideas the problem is as Emma said is that this radical theory is now just going extending outside of the seminar we're into the Practical and ethical practice of the institutions and that's curtailing that freedom okay thank you very thank you very much um there seems to be an awful lot of agreement in the room and I'm just anxious in case we have people in the room who uh feel that uh this is not a an accurate depiction of the situation and that some of the things we've been talking about should be in schools if there is anybody in the audience that thinks that I do hope you feel you can speak up um you know but on the other side if there is this wide agreement then why do we think we're in this situation if this room represents Society at large so many people against the kind of things we're talking about uh what do we do about it and why is it taking place if there's such wide disagreement okay hi yeah so my question was originally about curriculum yeah and it's now turned out there's no one accountable for this not even ofsted that's dealing with this because if 20 of our kids are coming out at Secondary School level illiterate don't somebody have to worry about reading and writing and other bits before you start bringing in all this critical race Theory and climate and my second Point are we making a doom and gloom for our children everything's about something it's going to die something's going to end what kind of society we're going to have suicides everywhere in 20 years time but I'm really seriously worried now by what you said so nobody is accountable for this I thought there must be somebody accountable to say let's concentrate on this first before we bring in all this other stuff you know you're going to need to read and write before you leave school brilliant questions thank you very much okay so thank you I was an elected official of the edu and I think my role that my union have played an appalling role in all of this um I would say um I think what I'm worried about is that most teachers are not activists but they are nice liberals who are afraid to say we are against diversity equity and inclusion which are the buzzwords now they are not in Daily terms of critical race theory that means something entirely different Equity is a quality of outcome okay diversity doesn't mean diversity of ideas it means diversity of race all who agree with critical race Theory and inclusion means turns up turn up the sensitivity so that no one feels threatened in this space and object to any idea that you think you don't like so it's there were a set of appalling ideas now teachers unwittingly go along with this my friend the other day posted something about you know we've got a certificate that you know including diversity inequity I hear the um hope teacher at Harris Academy Crystal Palace is saying you know we're going to decolonize the curriculum they unwittingly take this on most teachers are not activists activists are about one and a half percent two percent of the Union but they're unwittingly taking it all on we've got to help those teachers speak up including the person at the back who mentioned that earlier because we have to come into these ideas are false ideas and they're modern Bailey terms I just like to very directly look at what Sean said about who is who's responsible in terms of you know offstad head teachers etc etc my point is you can't turn to them and expect them to sort this out because they instigated it all of them I I think you would be hard-pressed in this country standing up against this stuff I hope Alka knows maybe a couple it's so useful it's no question which is why you get third parties walking through the door promoting whatever silliness they want to because they're allowed to because it's expected and then you also not just in education this is not just a problem of Education weirdly if you look at business is littered with this there is not a single mainstream business that isn't having the same educational instruction for their employees and managers about diversity training all the rest of it that's not happening in schools it's uniform so this is a a problem of society that's occurring the skill can I just ask you uh if I had were to stand up and challenge these things and then I was a head teacher I have now retired reading to that what you like right the answer's there you dare to do it you are not going to stand up for very long so I'm very very synthetic to your position and so looking at teachers as if they're going to stand up and suddenly come out and say no we reject all of this well they're going to lose their jobs aren't they that's the truth and that they will be targeted and picked off now if we all decide to do it politically that's different and so in this room we've got to decide are we prepared to try and Forge some consensus against this and that's I think the way it works that's that's great thank you if there's any other um I'm sitting here and there is a lot of interesting opinions and that it gives me a lot of help but what I'm thinking is because I'm immigration as an immigration teacher I find it there are lots of cultural values it's um it's quite difficult to choose so I'm thinking since we sit here and discussed about these things so I think it's more dangerous about how many values our teachers give to Children unconsciously unconsciously very interesting that's a really good question what about the unconscious transmission of values or not thank you our point on Sean's opening remark if I may unless if I misunderstood you you said that the word indoctrination is challenging because it implies that there is an end goal and it seems to me that there is one that it that is the basically demolition of all the pillars of Western Society I mean if you were consciously planning to destroy Western Society what would you start if not the question what is a woman that seems to me that that's sort of the goal but being a bit pessimistic about this I wanted to ask the panel a question and that is I don't think we are going to be able to hold anyone accountable at least for a long long time now they're offset not the Tories not the labor not anyone so with that in mind what do you see the near 10 15 years the students that are coming out what would they look like and you know what would they be thinking thank you to put me to just play with a little can of worms for a moment taking this in maybe a slightly different direction Sean you were saying a moment ago about uh the fact that basically we need a rational scientific approach to this we have beliefs and if the evidence doesn't stand up then we need to dispose them that's you know obviously a strong enlightenment idea um but then you know the enlightenment ended and things moved on um which is why I wanted to ask about faith schools which also you mentioned in your opening remarks um as someone firmly on the fence but I move in lots of different um religious and spiritual circles let's say um there seems to be a great diversity of viewpoints on on this from you know that truly is indoctrination to send your child to a school where um the tenets of a single Faith are being taught um and there's no scientific evidence to back it up to the other end of the spectrum these schools are one of the last places where vestiges of what you could call Traditional Values that we've been discussing can actually be found and are being taught um and that they can see how valuable that is for the children at these schools so I I'd love to hear 30 seconds from each of you on on that point I I haven't heard anyone talking about how schools are mandatory or at least really close to mandatory for people and recently uh there is there has been a thing passed on that suggests that if you want to homeschool your kids you have to register as a like a homeschooling thing and this is the thing there is no way out of this this is why we need we need to walk literally out of the classroom we need to let our kids walk out the classroom or out of the school we don't your kids don't need school they did in schools they get schooled like like literally brainwashed to to the to to do whatever and again if the ideology captures that system all you get is this that the the introduction everything like that and again doesn't matter if you agree with the with the critical research it can be captured by any kind of religious it's it's not your values you you need to teach your kids you need to take responsibility of your kids and you need to change that laws that says schools should be mandatory uh the the lyrics is spread of legislation uh is suggesting that it's going to become more and more difficult to home educate your school that's an important Point okay we're going to go back to the panel panel you can't respond to all of that I want you to respond to just one or two points so that we can get back out and grab some more comments uh Alka if you'd like to go first uh okay uh so I'll pick up on the question about what things what values we might be passing on unconsciously that I think a lady asked I think as a teacher if you if you have to have to have a commitment to impartiality to teaching and passion in an impartial way and I want to just give an example a very concrete example this is from a teacher that has been in contact with us type assembly or a psog lesson and the tailing down of statues Edward Colston for example has been in the news you might want to discuss that with your class you might want to have a lesson on that okay and that is fine that is absolutely fine but if in that lesson all you talk about are well why do people want to take this statue down if the only homework and work that is set is asking pupils to address that question or perhaps think about who they might wish to replace Colston with then I would argue that is closer to indoctrination than education the reason why is because they have completely obliterated from the discussion any idea that there is a respectable opinion that does not want Colston to be taken down it is assumed from the start that a whole Sway With opinion with which many people agree is illegitimate and it's that unspoken assumption that is really at the Crux of the car the way this indoctrination is working it's much less through overt support BLM although that does happen but it's much more through assuming that certain viewpoints that are majority Heralds are illegitimate and that is the worry one of those being you know Universal approaches to anti-racism for example it's like oh so old hat so boring oh you can't really believe in that anymore can you that's stigmatizing that is not educating so there's that on on that sorry I've got about seven minutes left to go so uh Sean nice and quickly thank you answer to two points uh in ten years time when I look at my own University which is Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge and of course we go to Cambridge University nearby and people often ask do we get a lot of the sort of student activism at Langley Ruskin compared with with Cambridge and the answer is no because our students are absolutely focused on their work on getting the degree and and it's led me to really to think that a lot of this activism is a child of middle class privilege um frankly and that those who are really focused on on the work don't have time for it doesn't mean they won't engage with ideas but but there's a different work ethic and those sort of Faith schools point it's it's an interesting one they're set me thinking quickly Faith schools provide an alternative set of principles and I think um their role is potentially much more interesting than people have realized um and if you say faith schools then people will some some people sort of cut off because they are not religious that's not the point it's the fact of having a different set of principles by which to uh on which to structure the education that goes on that I think is the message which Faith schools could actually and the earnings is on them promote much more um forcefully uh and perhaps with a bit more thought about how to do it but I think there's an opportunity there which they could very well fulfill thanks Sean yeah lots of people sending their children to Faith schools kind of in spite of the indoctrination for the quality that Faith schools uh they believe provide um yeah I'd like to pick up on the home schooling uh when children are at school they are influenced they're influenced by their teachers who most of us are nice liberals and their peers if they're being homeschool who is influencing them then what we do at school is we take their funds away from them for about seven hours a day and that's important and it was during the two periods of lockdown when children were homeschooled for lengthy periods of time this problem in my view exacerbated because children were being influenced not just by teachers or their peers but by online influences on Reddit on tick tock on YouTube uh on on the social media platforms and we had no control or knowledge of what they were being influenced with and that's what worries me about taking children outside the social environment of the school socialization in school very important I think uh Emma to build uh briefly on what Alka said um I think actually that in many ways and it goes back to what we're saying before about this new guidance to do with transphobia in education discussing women's rights be being balanced in in teaching is actually now viewed as being in some way phobia transphobia or racism to discuss what the other side may be that's viewed as being somehow um verboten and I think going going back to um the point that was made about liberals teachers just being nice liberals I think actually sometimes um because of the way that the language is actually quite confusing um that teachers can end up as being almost sort of woke adjacent they are not themselves activists and that goes down to what the point about the unconscious transmission because it's not just unconscious transmission to the students it's also unconscious transmission to to the teachers themselves and and I think that that has really thrown things um out of kilter what we should be doing is teaching to go back to the first question Reading Writing and arithmetic you teach properly and the student teachers are educated properly then all of the rest um will follow and I think that the the issue fundament mentally is that for T not just for teachers but across the board the the threat um to to people's livelihoods is just far too high and just to finish on on this one final um uh comparison um this is not dissimilar from what we see in the police that the mark Rowley um putting the emphasis as an example instead of on the policing being on challenging all of these different isms within the police force we need our institutions and our sectors to serve the function that they're supposed to do so to go back to my original Point teach traditionally teach properly and all the rest will follow great thank you very much right as a parent I'm saying it's very difficult as a parent and as a worker in a big corporate these ideas are everywhere and it's very very difficult to speak up you feel very Alone um I you know I wish there would be more so don't divide us it's given me a lot of support just not feeling alone but uh we don't all have the opportunity to homeschool and do it well so I agree homeschooling has a lot of screens involved people have to go to work um so I just really want to play Devil's Advocate to some extent because actually I agree with most of what everybody said but as a parent I look at what two people what this lady said which is these ideas are out there and the gentleman went no it's out there and this gentleman said yeah it's it's the middle class ideas that's where it is which is true as a parent I want my child to leave school and get a nice middle class job do I just say that's okay do it because that school's teaching you what's out there and I want you to learn the language and everything that's great thank you and say okay thank you thank you very much you know is it is it what you need to know to get on in the world these days okay panel we have literally just a couple of minutes left so one minute from each of you please uh in the order in which uh we originally started so Emma would you just give us one minute of your final thoughts please um on that final point I think it's people's duty to resist this and to stand up against it and the reason why it's it's not okay to just simply say Well they're learning the language of the situation that we're currently in is because that is bowing down to what is essentially a form of authoritarian oppression and that's just simply not acceptable this is destructive and if we want to live in a good open Society where people are free to discuss their ideas then we have to ensure that that starts it has to start in the family and it has to start in education thank you very much Emma Sean just hold and we'll thank them in a minute Sean just always ask for the evidence whether it's a parent whether it's a teacher people giving you these ideas what is the evidence what is it based upon and don't let them say such and such a book I read but what was the evidence on that the book was based on so always use that and you can't go too far wrong thank you very much Sean Debbie uh critical thinking Again by the sound of it what do you think yeah the ideological capture has been deep and successful and we're very foolish to think that we can overturn it in a minute uh it will not be uneasily and why it will not be easily unwind and wound and for the starter we need at least give people teachers especially but also children the language to call it out thank you very much and final work we'll go to Elka okay parents are citizens as well teachers are citizens as well okay we have more than one role so whatever you say to your child in private in terms of how to get on that's fine but you also have a duty as a citizen and um you can come to don't divide us or any of the other groups around these issues where we do not have the answers but you will meet like-minded people where you can rehearse the arguments you can go through the arguments you can find out what other people have said and get help in how to frame letters of questioning or objection to heads or how to you know for teachers for their head to their line managers to raise objections we have a head who is now rewriting a policy for schools and third-party providers you know and bit by bit at the end of the day I quite agree with the gentleman who said you can't look to it as long as we look to someone else we're doomed right I'm gonna stop you there because then someone's looking at me telling I'm telling me I'm doomed so uh thank you very much thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: worldwrite

Views: 2,826

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Id: SzWo9n3qXAY

Length: 84min 56sec (5096 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023