First of all, for a flavour of the ideas encouraged in our
schools, look at a recent competition for ‘gifted pupils’. Let’s say this was
‘somewhere in Southern England’. Its theme was ‘2016: A Pivotal Year In
History’, which might seem harmless. But what were the 15-year-olds involved
actually doing?
The competition brief allowed for a wide range of topics to be
covered. Wide? Well, the winners discussed ‘prejudice in 2016’. What prejudice
was that? ‘Incidents of hate crime after Brexit, Islamophobia and the media
portrayal of these events.’ They also dealt with, yes, ‘gender, religious and
racial equality’.
Another team in this competition ‘highlighted’ the way in which
David Bowie and Prince ‘made people start to question social convention on
gender identity’. Others tackled ‘biased slants from certain media corporations’
by which I doubt they meant the BBC, and, of course, ‘climate change’ and
immigration, those two tests of correctness and acceptability among the modern
Left. Do you see a theme here? You should.
For not far away, in a different part of Southern England,
another parent tells me that his daughter recently came home from primary school
bearing a decorated poster with ALLAH across the middle. That parent says: ‘I
have yet to see a similar poster with GOD or JESUS across
it.’
His son, at a secondary school, is about to visit a mosque. So
far there have been no visits to Christian churches. But it goes further than
that.
At a recent parent-teacher meeting, which discussed ‘refugees’,
the head teacher spoke of ‘these dark days’ since the EU
referendum.
The boy has recently come home from school and – with a note of
disapproval in his voice – asked his father: ‘Dad, why do you read the Daily
Mail?’ It turns out that a teacher had asked the pupils how their parents had
voted for in the referendum, and when one of the pupils said ‘Brexit’, this
teacher had responded, in a disapproving tone, by asking: ‘Why did they vote for
that?’
Let’s not exaggerate. These teachers are not (yet) reporting
politically incorrect parents to the authorities. But what worries me is that
all the preconditions for surveillance and indoctrination are there. Socially
and morally conservative opinions are treated as phobias and heresies. Parents
who hold such views are undermined by their children’s
teachers.
Already, on the excuse of discouraging Islamic extremism, schools
are licensed to probe into the minds of their pupils. Once you’ve allowed this
for one supposedly ‘extreme’ opinion, it’s not a big shift to move on to
others.
In the meantime, might these attitudes affect such things as the
grading of coursework, job and university applications? I don’t doubt
it.
Governments come and go, supposedly Left-wing and supposedly
Right-wing – though the supposedly Right-wing ones usually turn out to be
nothing of the kind. But in the schools, the universities and most of the public
sector, the wild Marxist Cultural Revolution quietly continues its long march
through the institutions. Peter Hitchens.
Mail.
