A battle is raging about what our schools are for. Ideas about ‘white privilege’ and the inbuilt racism of all ‘white’ societies are being embedded in pupils’ minds in more and more English schools. The outcry following the death of a man killed by the police 4,000 miles away in the U.S. mid-West prompted heads in English public schools simultaneously to feel they must announce reviews of their curriculum. The everyday language of some schools is undergoing radical change, with activists advising them to use only gender neutral terms, abandoning traditional expressions like ‘boys and girls’ and ‘mums and dads’. A London school’s geography lessons abandon geographical knowledge for discussions about pupils’ own identities. The names of Elizabethan heroes Drake and Raleigh are excised from the buildings of a Devon school for the sake of ‘inclusivity’.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
Where does the pressure for these extraordinary developments come from? It is not from our current Government, though it has done precious little to stem the tide and even at times indirectly helped to accelerate it. It is certainly not from parents or the vast majority of the population. It is from school leaders themselves, ‘education experts’, teacher educators, universities and from a wider elite dominant across our major cultural institutions convinced of its own rightness and virtue. Its origins are in what the French call a pensée unique, a single way of looking at things that sees the world as divided between oppressors and oppressed, distrusts the nation state, seeks the overthrow of ‘Western hegemony’, redefines ‘anti-racism’ to mean a never-ending assault on ‘white privilege’, puts equity before liberty and believes in the subjectivity of all knowledge and values. It is a hydra-headed ideology and is threatening to corrode what schools should really be for.
A recent international ‘Education Summit’ in Budapest organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Hungary’s largest private educational institution, discussed how best to counter these threats also being experienced by some other countries represented at the conference. It was clear that the ideological divide in education is no longer just whether one is for or against the kind of progressive teaching methods that derive from Rousseau and Dewey, but of where one draws the line between indoctrination and education The focus of the conference was on how to uphold an education based on the transmission of what Matthew Arnold, 19th-century poet and school inspector, described as “the best that has been thought and said”, not on using schools as a means to shape young minds into taking the party line on whatever social causes – gender ideology, anti-racism, Net Zero – are in vogue at any one time.
The names ‘classical’ and ‘conservative’ were used at the conference to describe the kind of education that is under threat. Traditionally it has been called a ‘liberal education’, from the Latin liber meaning free, an education that enables pupils to free themselves from the constraints of their time and place, not tie them to it, and to use the knowledge they have acquired to make judgements about the world and their own lives. It is ‘liberal’ in a sense completely different from the radical progressive (and often very illiberal) ’liberalism’ of many on the Left.
Matthew Arnold is sometimes thought to have been advocating an education that was little more than learning lots of facts. Nothing can have been further from his mind, the purpose of a good education for him being to enable people, through acquiring access to their heritage, to turn “a stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits”. A liberal education therefore exists for its own sake, as something of value in itself, not for utilitarian purposes such as promoting social justice, reducing our carbon emissions or preparing pupils for the 21st century economy. It may, by producing knowledgeable and thoughtful young people, help achieve all sorts of desirable social aims, but that is not its purpose.
It involves helping pupils acquire knowledge and understanding of the Platonic triad of ‘the true, the beautiful and the good’ and the habits of mind and sensibility that will enable them to grow into the inheritance of their civilisation and of their country’s common culture. It has a curriculum centred on the main academic disciplines and on physical and artistic activities. It provides pupils with the core knowledge needed to hold their own in public discourse within their society. The U.S. educationist E.D. Hirsch calls this “cultural literacy”. It also gives them what Hirsch calls “national literacy”, the knowledge needed as part of that induction into membership of the nation state that schools ought to provide.
In the humanities a liberal education focuses mainly, if not exclusively, on the dominant influences shaping one’s country, in this country on the Judaeo-Christian, Greco-Roman and Enlightenment roots of European and Western civilisation. It promotes Aristotle’s intellectual virtues – love of truth, acceptance of refutation, care in judgement – and does its best to inculcate the habits of behaving morally, focusing on duties more than rights. It aims to leave pupils with the habits of learning and a thirst for further learning throughout life.
What a liberal education does not involve is the constructivist notion that most things can be learned through discovery. It does not take advantage of the fact that pupils are a captive audience to indoctrinate them with beliefs and attitudes to which adults are proving resistant. Liberal education draws the line at being told to ‘decolonise’ its curriculum if the purpose is to root out ‘white knowledge’, make pupils take an excessively negative view of their history and to study works chosen because of the race, sex, gender or sexuality of their creators rather than for their intrinsic cultural value. A school following a liberal education also does not see a main purpose as offering a therapeutic programme to meet pupils’ emotional needs. It provides an environment in which it hopes pupils learn to behave well to each other, accept that sometimes one must agree respectfully to disagree, can talk to staff about their problems, and are (for most of the time) happy at school. It does not offer ‘happiness education’ or sessions about ‘wellbeing’ or take over responsibilities that belong to parents.
We are fortunately far removed in England (Scotland may be a different matter) from the current practice of some U.S. schools – private ones in the lead – where the curriculum appears to have been taken over by CRT (Critical Race Theory), anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. We have a national curriculum which ought to provide an overall framework within which a liberal education can be developed, as well as GCSE and A level syllabuses in the main subjects which in some cases are a major improvement on earlier ones.
What we lack is a shared overall vision for the liberal education that I have outlined and, in the absence of this, the ability to interpret and add to the prescribed curriculum in ways that support the deeper objectives of that vision rather than undermining them. We also lack in many cases in schools the will to do this and indeed frequently a will to do something antithetical. A Daily Telegraph survey of 300 teachers in 2008 found that three-quarters agreed with the statement that it was their responsibility to warn pupils not to feel good about their country. Sixteen years later it is difficult to imagine that the situation has got any better. What we do not lack are the schools, some private, some state-funded, where, despite the pressures, the unquenchable Delphic flame of a liberal education is still burning. It is these we need to celebrate and from whom we need to learn.
Dr. Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). In that capacity he was chief adviser on the school curriculum, assessment and qualifications to both Conservative and Labour Secretaries of State for Education. He is the author of What is education for? and The conservative case for education.
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this is just the latest fad which schools have illegally promoted. They used to promote European political integration, probably still do.
Speaking of battling, this clip shows a quiet suburban street in Missouri with “American” teenagers. Who can blame teachers for quitting in droves?
Libs of TikTok on X: “GRAPHIC: A student in @HazelwoodSD is in the hospital in critical condition after being brutally beaten with her head smashed against the pavement by a mob of students. Multiple people watch and do nothing. You won’t hear about this story on the MSM. https://t.co/dGzr2Kn6HP” / X (twitter.com)
The solution to the corruption of the educational system is to empower parents via a voucher system. Those schools which provided a traditional, liberal educational would likely prosper. Schools teaching little of value, preferring instead to instil leftist propaganda would likely fail. Teachers who didn’t meet the needs of their consumers would suffer consequences.
Spot on – let the parents choose. Also let the schools choose what they want to teach. Some may want to concentrate on sport, some might want to offer vocational courses for pupils whose gifts are with practical rather than academic pursuits.
The market would surely provide a more tailored schooling for a higher proportion of pupils than the one-size-fits-all state comprehensive system we currently have.
There are plenty of 12 year olds who cannot see the point of learning about continental drift, Othello and Henry 8th – but who would be more enthused working on car engines, building walls or building computers. Why not let them – and allow the pupils who want to study academic subjects do so – with less disruption from the bored and disengaged?
Absolutely right you are. I don’t know how US schools operate now, but in the middle of the last century, all the kids were kept together in the same high schools, but just took different types of classes, depending on their abilities and choices. There were “college preparatory” classes with academic subjects, “home economics” classes with cooking, sewing and household budget management, “vocational” classes with mechanical, carpentry, electrical, business accounting and secretarial touch-typing, as well as other useful things, like driving a car, foreign languages, art, playing a musical instrument provided for free by the school, singing in the choir, and sports of all kinds.
It helped that every child had already been taught to read music in primary school. It also helped that every kid had a tall, narrow school locker to put books and coats and boots in, so they didn’t have to carry everything around with them all day, and they didn’t get soaked or freezing walking to school in just a uniform. They had 15 minutes between each 45-minute class to nip to their locker to fetch things, and have a friendly chat with the neighbouring locker owners, regardless of which classes they were taking.
The great thing about that system was that it was all paid for by taxpayers, and all except some extra sports, private dance and music classes were within normal school hours. The driving instructors would take 4 kids in a car at a time (aged 15), taking turns driving in a large paved area, while all the others in the class watched from a safe distance, awaiting their turn to practice things like controlled skidding in rain, ice or snow. In order to hammer home safety, everyone was required to watch a horrific film showing real motorway accidents and casualties caused by cars and trucks following too closely. Some kids fainted in the aisles during the film, but the lesson of safe, defensive driving was imprinted for life. Even the girls were taught to check the oil, keep the radiator topped up, and change a tire. Things have changed a lot since then, but the basic principles would be valuable in any school in any country.
The market would surely provide a more tailored schooling for a higher proportion of pupils than the one-size-fits-all state comprehensive system we currently have.
There’s a market in so-called higher education and the article is about stopping the effects of this market from spilling over into schools. In fact, comprehensives, instead a more targetted schools system such as the one (still) in existence in (most of) Germany were already such a spill-over from the market-driven higher education sector.
Schools are for teaching children “How to think”, not for teaching them “What to think”.
I believe the greatest threat to education is that schools seem to just teach by rote.
They no longer teach kids how to actually think for themselves.
I don’t blame the teachers, it’s the Orders from on High that are to blame. No time or place for arguing the whys and wherefores.
Why. – Probably the most important word in the english language.
I mean I was taught how to think – and it’s not done me any harm, err…
When such educational changes are uniform throughout the Western World it is a deliberate act. So who puts “equity” over “liberty” and why is this not taking place in Russia or, the communist countries of the world? Who is undermining the West? I can see Xi Jinping grinning with his hand stuck up a Klaus Schwab sock puppet.