The battle over the purpose of schools shows woke is not dead
Schools should be about education not indoctrination
Bagels, croissants, bacon, eggs, yogurt, fruit…. I’m a big fan of breakfast. And, having had three of my own, I’m quite fond of kids too. So what’s not to like about news that the government plans to trial free breakfast clubs in 750 primary schools ahead of a roll out to every primary school in 2026? Quite a lot actually.
First, there’s no such thing as a free breakfast. The money comes from somewhere. It seems odd that pensioners need to be means-tested to ensure they are sufficiently impoverished to warrant winter fuel subsidies but, eventually, all primary-aged children will be entitled to a free breakfast, no matter how rich mum and dad.
More importantly, routinely providing breakfasts for all young children is a major incursion into the role of parents. It is yet another way in which the boundaries between school and home, teacher and parent, are becoming blurred. Schools already dictate the contents of lunchboxes, when primary-aged children can travel to and from school alone and, soon, instruction in tooth-brushing. Children learn about sex and relationships, healthy eating, the importance of Net Zero, how to be anti-racist and what it means to be transgender at school. And now breakfast is being added to this mix too. What is left for parents to do? I wrote about the problems of blurring the boundaries between school and home - and the erosion of adult authority - in a report for Civitas earlier this year.
The role of parents is diminished when schools take responsibility for raising children. But education is also dealt a severe blow. When schools are transformed into canteens, clinics and social welfare centres, the actual business of teaching and learning gets squeezed out. Free breakfasts signal a government that has very little sense of what education actually means.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced a review of England’s National Curriculum. So far, the purpose seems to be political rather than educational. One of Phillipson’s first declarations, made against the backdrop of this summer’s riots, was that she wants children to be ‘taught how to spot extremist content and misinformation online’. The Department for Education says we need education that ‘sets all young people up for life and work’, while the Institute of Education says the review will ‘ensure a more inclusive and innovative approach’ to teaching. In other words, the ground is being prepared for a slimmed-down curriculum that focuses relentlessly on skills and values. Literacy with a smattering of government-approved-news. Word processing with inclusion. How to measure carbon emisions while determining your gender identity
If this is not enough to make your heart sink, then look at the recommendations the influential Oxford and Cambridge exam board is submitting to the government review. As Nick Tate points out in an excellent essay on The Daily Sceptic, this august institution thinks schools should focus ‘far more on the world as it now is and is going to be’ than on ‘the past’. The philistinism is astonishing. Centuries of literature, scientific method, history and philosophy will be ditched and the next generation confined to a permanent present. Rather than passing on to children their intellectual birthright, it suggests that exam board technocrats have already decided what is useful and relevant and children need only be taught that.
Rather than being inducted into humanity’s collective wisdom, children will be expected to acquire the ‘skills and confidence’ needed to meet the challenges of the future. In other words, they’ll be self-assured about their lack of knowledge. Of course, OCR doesn’t really want children to learn nothing. It thinks that climate change is ‘the biggest existential crisis of our age’ and wants ‘climate change education’ to help pupils become more ‘carbon literate’.
Inclusion, carbon literacy, Orwellian-instruction in identifying mis- and dis-information and, of course, all the sex, sexuality and gender identity stuff that was in the process of being removed by the previous government, all served up with only scant knowledge of the past…. if this is education, I cannot imagine what indoctrination looks like. And then there’s the free breakfast. At this point, schools begin to look like state-approved child-rearing centres, not educational institutions.
In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, some are now announcing the death of woke. One Times columnist asks if it was ‘ever more than a fad?’. These people need to take a look at what is going on in Britain’s schools and the attitudes and values being force-fed to the next generation.