Growing up woke?

Childhood has been colonised by the promotion of progressive values

Photo by Meg on Unsplash

In many countries around the world, age and education are the best predictors of how people vote in elections. Qualifications correlate with voting intentions far more than social class, sex or race. In the UK, graduates were more likely to have voted Remain in 2016’s referendum on EU membership and to have backed the Labour party in recent general elections. In the US, those without a college degree turned out for Trump, just as in Hungary, Fidesz draws much of its support from regions where adults have lower levels of schooling. Almost everywhere today, left-leaning parties represent graduates whereas more right-wing parties have won the backing of those without higher education. This shift represents a fundamental political realignment but it has occurred without strikes, protests or petitions.

Neuroscientists argue that higher measures of intelligence correlate with socially and economically liberal views. But IQ tests, no matter how sophisticated, do not account for the transformation that has taken place in many countries, from left wing parties representing working class constituencies with low levels of formal qualifications in the recent past to representing an academic, social and cultural elite today. Clearly, the nature of political parties and, indeed, what it means to be ‘left’ or ‘right’ wing, have both changed. But so too has education. Whether measured through years spent in school and university or through numbers and levels of certificates, educational success means something different today than it did in the past. 

A century ago, the primary focus of schools was the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and values grounded in tradition, religion and national identity which were shared by a majority of adults in a country. Over the course of many decades, schools have embraced a child-centred progressivism and an orientation towards the future, rather than the past. This means that teachers are focused not on passing on knowledge from the past but on cultivating the attitudes, values and skills that they assume will be required by citizens of the future. This shift opens the door to the politicisation of education.

Today, time is found within the school day for new subjects such as Relationships and Sex Education and citizenship classes that have no body of disciplinary knowledge and are entirely driven by a focus on promoting particular views on sexuality, gender identity and the nation state. At the same time assemblies are given over to celebrations of Pride or Black History Month; school rules and dress codes reflect changed ideas about gender and ceremonies and traditions are abandoned or replaced. Academic subjects such as literature, history and geography continue to be taught but have been ‘decolonised’ and updated to cover skills rather than knowledge or topics that reflect contemporary concerns with race, gender and environmental sustainability. Collectively, the impact of all of these changes is that education has morphed into indoctrination. 

The result is that the longer people remain in formal education the more likely they are not just to come into contact with views that can be broadly characterised as ‘woke’ but to have imbibed these values and learnt how to reproduce them in the context of educational assessments. Many graduates in particular hold assumptions about gender, race, national history, the family, community and tradition that are not consistently shared by those who do not go to university. 

Children today are growing up woke. They are socialised into accepting a particular view of the world through popular culture, social media and interactions with their peer group. Ideas taken on board by a socially elite and influential group in one country, such as the US, now travel rapidly around the world and are most readily picked up by highly engaged young people proficient in English. Meanwhile, in countries such as the US and the UK, it is schools and universities that are most responsible for socialising children into woke values. These national education systems have produced successive cohorts of young adults who make sense of society through the prism of identity and, in turn, transmit their views online and through a globalised media. Yet this has happened with little public discussion and no national democratic mandate.

In the west, young graduates who vote for parties that espouse woke values in elections are a product of this politicised education system. Their ballot box decisions reflect the dominant ideas transmitted to them during their time at school and university. This is why the longer someone remains in formal education, the more likely they are to back the Democrats in the US or Labour in the UK. The best students, the ones most likely to be rewarded with certificates and other plaudits, are the ones who have most successfully imbibed woke values. They are also the ones most likely to continue to study for higher degrees or embark upon a career in teaching or academia.

Schools and universities are increasingly influential in shaping children’s attitudes and values because they assume a far greater degree of responsibility for raising children - that is, of inculcating socially acceptable norms, values and behaviours - than in the past. Traditionally, raising children has been the primary concern of the family. Teachers played an important role in introducing children to knowledge they were unable to pick up informally in the home environment. And by bringing children together, outside the home and in relationship with a teacher, schools introduced children to the world outside of the family. But there was a clear demarcation between the role of school and home: parents raised children and teachers transmitted subject knowledge. But this division of labour has been under sustained attack. 

Teachers have long been under pressure to abandon a focus on the transmission of traditional bodies of knowledge. A classical curriculum has, at different points in time, been portrayed as irrelevant to the skills children need to succeed in the world of work, unnecessarily elitist and exclusive, and overly focused on ‘facts’ which people can easily access via technology. Educationalists have made the case for a ‘relevant’ curriculum that focuses not on knowledge of the past but on the attitudes and values children need to cultivate for a socially inclusive future society. 

Just as pedagogues began to challenge the traditional role of the teacher, so too did psychologists question the capacity of parents to raise their children in line with the latest thinking on child development. Schools that gave up on traditional teaching found a new role in relation to the socialisation of children. Although schools have always been involved with socialisation indirectly, as a product of the curricular knowledge conveyed to pupils and the bringing together of children outside of the home environment, it is only in recent decades that this process has become increasingly explicit. Today, teachers assume greater responsibility for all aspects of children’s lives from the contents of lunch boxes to the ‘correct’ views to hold about sex and relationships.

For some children, most likely those from middle class homes with parents employed in professional occupations, there is little tension between the values espoused at school and at home. But for others, most likely those from more working class families, there are conflicts between the assumptions and expectations of teachers and parents. For example, in Birmingham and Manchester in the UK, muslim parents protested against a sex education curriculum they considered to be age-inappropriate and overly focused on homosexuality and transgenderism. In the US, parents have made their feelings about such lessons known through school board meetings and gubernatorial elections. 

Growing tensions between school and home show that the values teachers espouse are not broadly accepted but contested. They are not shared by all adults in a community but are imposed by a minority upon the majority. Some children effectively have to choose whether to be ‘successful’ and align with the values of the school, or ‘fail’ educationally and align with the values that are dominant in their home environment. Working class parents may confront an education system that views them with contempt. Their children are taught to re-educate adults into holding more enlightened views on everything from tackling racism to recycling. Collective adult authority suffers a devastating blow.

When schools replace teaching subject knowledge with socialising children in woke values both education and family life suffer. But democracy suffers too. Children provided with a thorough grounding in knowledge of the past are, as adults, free to interpret this knowledge as they see fit and create society in their own image. Children inculcated in woke values lack the knowledge necessary to understand fully what they have been taught to accept. Rather than being granted the intellectual freedom to critique society as it is, they are given only expert-approved notions of how the world should be. Academic freedom and a spirit of debate and disagreement has given way to a stifling culture of conformity.

The challenge for governments around the world is how to increase the educational attainment of children while simultaneously challenging the woke indoctrination that currently occurs in schools. For the sake of liberty and democracy, we need to reassert the foundational view of education as an intergenerational contract with teachers passing on to children knowledge they cannot gain from within the home environment. This requires reasserting the boundaries between home and school and leaving the primary responsibility for raising children to parents. 

Fortunately, there are growing signs that some young adults, rebellious members of Gen Z, are willing to reject moral conformity. In France, Italy and the Netherlands, anti-woke parties are gaining ground with young voters. There is much to welcome in this youthful rebellion. But, ultimately, only a return to a more classical, knowledge-focused education system can provide children with the intellectual resources they need to challenge woke indoctrination without getting swept up in a nihilistic backlash.