Not so long ago I rewatched the original Jurassic Park and was struck by Ian Malcolm’s monologue in which he says to John Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It struck me that this unintentionally captured the essence of a growing problem in today’s education system: EDI. School managers and teachers are so eager to rush into whatever is trending in EDI. So convinced are they, without any evidence, of EDI’s supposed moral, ethical, educational and societal benefits that they neglect to consider whether they should be promoting it.
The virtues of EDI are extolled throughout the education system and my own school is no different. Schools openly bow down to EDI and an entire industry has developed to ensure EDI is embedded across the education system, despite evidence that it has had detrimental effects in the workplace. It is commonplace now to see schools advertising themselves as “inclusive” and numerous websites have popped up to promote EDI, such as the Inclusive Schools Network. The EDI approach has ostensibly been embraced because Britain is now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society and it’s supposedly essential to help tackle discrimination, break down stereotypes, facilitate better communication and foster social cohesion. However, I think the push for “inclusivity” distorts education, disempowers the individual and poses a threat to a free society.
One assertion that’s frequently made these days is that “inclusive language” should be used in lessons. But what, exactly, is it? Who defines it? And how can such a thing exist in any case? The economist Ludwig von Mises observed in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis how Marxism thrived on “dialectic artificialities” and a “word-fetishism” which made it “possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands” (e.g. Queers for Palestine). This linguistic sleight of hand can be used to brainwash the broader population, and this is exactly what “inclusive language” does. Those who advocate “inclusive language” claim it’s a tool for promoting open conversations. But for “inclusive language” to exist and function, it must by its very nature be at odds with intellectual diversity, free speech and democratic values. It requires a central authority to dictate what is or is not inclusive, thereby strengthening that authority’s power, while discriminating against those who are deemed to have said something offensive.
The drive to use “inclusive language” and to be “inclusive” is in reality exclusionary and intolerant. A cursory glance through some typical ‘guidance’, such as that produced by the University of Leeds, reveals that it usually focuses on what not to say rather than on what to say. The implications of this are worrying as it’s a method of importing identity politics and ideological authoritarianism into schools. As John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty, “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”. By pursuing “inclusive language”, school managers are going along with this linguistic totalitarianism and, in my experience, are never open to any discussion about whether they are embarking on the best approach for pupils and staff.
On one level, the emphasis on “inclusive language” encourages others to find offence where none is intended and in doing so undermines resilience. It feeds a culture of victimhood and is hardly beneficial to learning, where failure is often a necessary precursor to success. On another level, it establishes a right not to be offended. This type of approach is fundamentally unworkable, as we have seen through inane legislation like Scotland’s Hate Crime Act. By seeking to protect certain identity groups from being offended, it introduces a form of bullying into a school since it provides bad actors, both pupils and staff, with the perfect cudgel to attack their opponents.
Offence is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. It requires no evidence other than someone’s claim they were emotionally harmed by something that was supposedly said, regardless of the speaker’s intention. It is extremely easy to make an unfounded allegation because it’s so difficult to challenge without seeming to disbelieve a ‘victim’ about how upset he or she really is, and, therefore, extremely hard to defend against. Besides teaching children to simply accuse, rather than debate, an obvious consequence of this is the sewing of suspicion and distrust. According to the Mental Health Foundation, 20% of adolescents currently suffer from some form of mental illness. Mental Health UK notes that 92% of teachers distrust their line manager and 88% of teachers say there is a negative ‘team culture’, with 86% saying they don’t feel supported at school. One cannot help but wonder whether EDI initiatives, which promote linguistic totalitarianism and thereby create an environment in which one must constantly tread on eggshells, are contributing to this state of affairs.
Besides being contradictory in a theoretical and philosophical sense, the censoring of language is extended into censoring or distorting curriculum content. This is why we see misguided initiatives, embraced by the Historical Association, among others, to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, as well as a growing tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of British and Western history and culture. Thus, as many readers will no doubt already be familiar, pupils are spoon fed narratives in which Britain is cast as an evil slave trading nation with few redeeming qualities, if any. Little mention is made of all the other countries that trafficked in slaves, or of Britain’s key role in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade.
This highly selective approach is fundamentally driven by ideological activism and some schools encourage this by engaging in their own types of cancel culture, such as changing the names used within their own house systems for fear that the original names might cause offence. As Doug Stokes points out in Against Decolonisation, this constant denigration of Britain’s history and culture may even have serious implications for national security by virtue of the fact they instil no love and respect for, or understanding of, our country.
The drive towards ‘inclusivity’ and all the associated EDI dogma contributes nothing to education and everything towards indoctrination and the destruction of critical thinking. In my ‘lived experience’, an ‘inclusive’ curriculum often means talking more about LGBTQ+ or BAME people, although the ‘climate curriculum’ is not far behind. Charities with specific ideological or political agendas, such as Stonewall or Schools of Sanctuary, are consulted and sometimes paid to help make lesson content more ‘inclusive’ without any regard to the provisions about not indoctrinating children in the Education Act 1996. This extends into the creation of bizarre extra-curricular activities, such as LGBTQ+ lunchtime and after-school clubs. Schools also embrace various forms of positive discrimination in order to tackle imaginary biases and prejudices, such as girls-only IT competitions. It’s not clear how this sits with the emphasis on ‘inclusion’, given its prohibition on boys’ participation and the lack of provision for a boys-only competition. This is hardly a strategy for improving the performance of the demographic group most overlooked: white working-class boys. But ‘inclusion’ is nearly always about extending perks to officially recognised victim groups and rarely about helping the genuinely disadvantaged.
Furthermore, as each subject on the curriculum is forced to genuflect to the latest ideological fad, less intellectual diversity is tolerated and more groupthink emerges. The push for promoting minority narratives and victimology across every subject means the school curriculum ceases to be about academic exploration and more about ensuring a single message or narrative is instilled in pupils’ minds. Friedrich Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom that it was “not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought”. Through the policing of language and narrowing of curriculum content, inclusion agendas are facilitating the destruction of individual autonomy by limiting the opportunities for pupils to critically evaluate prepackaged narratives. While this is what we might expect in a Chinese-style re-education camp, it should not be the model adopted by British schools.
A generous observer might conclude that those who signal their virtue on inclusivity simply haven’t thought this through – they mean well, even if their initiatives have terrible unintended consequences. A more critical observer might conclude that those who push EDI initiatives do so with an ulterior motive. I’m in the latter camp, and as I’ve said previously this leads to a perpetual cycle in which victory can never be secured until complete equality of outcome between different identity groups has been achieved. It’s also fuelled by self-interest. Those who work in the multi-billion-pound EDI sector need to keep finding new dragons to slay to justify their funding, often as the expense of the taxpayer. Besides, the very essence of EDI-based initiatives, such as anti-racism and unconscious bias training, is to teach individuals to take offence and actively seek out things to be offended by. This is why we see schools embarking on crusades to eliminate the use of “Sir” and “Miss”. By planting the seed that one may be committing a microaggression and establishing a culture in which speech and expression are policed, the logical response of some may be to avoid interaction altogether. Why take the risk of inadvertently treading on a landmine? Or giving a bully an excuse to persecute you? This type of backlash within the workplace has already been documented by the Government.
Why, then, are schools endorsing EDI? If we were to explore the legal roots of this phenomenon, we might look to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Race Relations Act 1976, the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice in 2001 and the Framework for the Inspection of Schools in 2003. By the late 1990s, a perception had emerged that the colour-blind approach in education had failed. Among numerous other points, the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999, recommended that schools develop strategies to prevent racism and for the National Curriculum to be revised so it extolled the virtues of multi-culturalism. But academies and free schools, which as of January 2024 account for nearly 82% of all secondary schools and nearly 43% of primary schools, don’t have to follow the National Curriculum. Independent schools, which constitute nearly 10% of schools, don’t either. Thus, it is the Equality Act 2010 and schools guidance from 2014 which form much of the bedrock of current practice. The relevant parts of this legislation basically set out a duty of care and make it illegal for schools to discriminate against pupils based on their protected characteristics, such as race, religion, sexual orientation or gender.
Where there is a possible misstep legally speaking is in schools’ conflation of, and confusion between, content and delivery. Section 2.8 of the 2014 guidance, which advises schools what they need to do to comply with the Equality Act, says curriculum content is excluded from discrimination law but the manner in which it’s delivered is included. According to section 2.9, schools are “free to include a full range of issues, ideas and materials in their syllabus, and to expose pupils to thoughts and ideas of all kinds, however challenging or controversial”. This is important because the advocates of EDI in schools typically appeal to the Equality Act, claiming they’re obliged to roll out these initiatives to comply with that Act, when, in fact, that’s just an excuse for pushing their ideological agenda.
There is, in other words, no legal obligation or reason why a school should indulge in changing (or removing) curriculum to comply with the Equality Act. Schools may of course do this for a variety of reasons, such as capitalising on teachers’ specific knowledge or appealing to pupils’ interests to promote more engagement. But we ought to be mindful of the predilection many teachers have for engaging in social justice activism. It is in fact something which is implicitly encouraged by those who’ve written the material that finds its way onto teacher training courses. For example, Robert Jeffcoat, who describes himself “with pleasure a radical Marxist” due to his “particular view” on injustice, is cited approvingly in a PGCE textbook that’s still in use today.
However, by pitting of one social group against another, as required by various fashionable teaching resources, and teaching children about concepts like white privilege, some schools may in fact be in breach of the Equality Act, which requires publicly-funded bodies to promote good relations between groups with different protected characteristics, which includes white boys. And by developing a curriculum centred on EDI, schools could well be limiting pupils’ academic opportunities and, as such, failing to provide the broad and balanced curriculum that they’re supposed to, as set out in Section 78 of the Education Act 2002.
At a fundamental level, the whole EDI agenda within schools overlooks one simple, crucial and fundamental issue: the provision of education, not indoctrination, will do far more to help disadvantaged children make socio-economic progress in the long term. A report commissioned by Pro Bono Economics, The National Literacy Trust and KPMG earlier this year found that 30% of five-year-olds were behind their expected reading levels. The National Literacy Trust also found in 2023 that only 43.4% of children aged from 8 to 18 enjoyed reading. Obviously, multiple factors contribute to these findings but one cannot help wondering whether one solution might be for teachers to spend less time promoting ideological fads and more time focusing on actually educating children. And perhaps literature promoting woke narratives just isn’t that inspiring. Why should children enjoy reading books that are constantly scolding them for not being ‘better allies’? Those schools which have embraced woke identitarian dogma are abusing their duties and responsibilities, and failing pupils and society in the process.
The reality is that schools cannot truly be ‘inclusive’ precisely because it is a contradictory, unworkable and illogical idea; exclusionary practices and outcomes are an inherent and inevitable part of education and life in general. Not every pupil will achieve an A* at A-level or a 9 at GCSE. Not everyone who applies to work at a school will be accepted and not everyone within a school will be friends with everyone else, despite the claims made on schools’ marketing materials. And, due to practical considerations, not every school will have the capacity to accept every child. An inclusive curriculum is also itself a unicorn precisely because it must, by definition, exclude certain content that is arbitrarily deemed to be discriminatory or insensitive.
The claim that adopting an ‘inclusive’ approach will prepare pupils for life, as my school and many others do, is a fallacy. Such an approach is based on flawed assumptions, fosters unrealistic expectations and leads to troubling outcomes. It fails to instil resilience, encourages children to abdicate personal responsibility and attacks the individual’s ability to think critically. The only people who gain from such an approach are those looking to carve out easy and lucrative careers for themselves. All EDI does is provide a platform for narcissistic managers to crush dissent and signal their virtue so they can gain the requisite peer approval for career progression. The people who lose are pupils, parents and those teachers who have maintained their integrity.
Teachers can bring EDI to the classroom, but they need to start reflecting on whether they should.
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Israeli situation is discussed here.
https://www.rintrah.nl/suppression-of-the-innate-immune-system-the-main-cause-of-the-pandemic-of-the-fully-vaccinated/
We’re two months behind Israel.
Many thanks for posting that. It explains so much that is puzzling.
I thought of trying to summarize it, but no. It really does require reading in full. Just never get on the treadmill of these mRNA vaccines. (The Chinese may have got away with this, though the worry with their vaccines has always been ADE, so the jury is still out on that one.)
I think it’s rather telling – or rather, not telling – that we don’t distinguish between the experimental non-mRNA and the experimental mRNA pre-infection treatments when recording “vaccination” status along with critical care and deaths.
I’d love to see the breakdown in AZ versus Pfizer and Moderna.
This one I can corroborate – my sister-in-law, an ICU nurse, has reported empty, or nearly empty covid wards at the two hospitals she works at for several weeks. Given what most of us believe about the dangers of the ‘vaccines’ esp. OAS/ADE, wouldn’t we expect to see something more akin to Israel? How can we account for the difference? I’m baffled.
One difference would be that many-to-most UK citizens at high risk (i.e. the elderly) were dosed with Astra Zenica, the non-mRNA experimental treatment.
Apparently:
“Since more than half of ICU admissions have not been vaccinated, this suggests an intrinsically milder virus rather than just increased protection from vaccination.’”
According to the UKHSA there are around 5x more deaths in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated — now, that’s perhaps just because the vaccines are protecting them, but…
…Why aren’t these dying vaccinated people getting a bed in ICU? Are they dying before they get a chance to get admitted? Or maybe there’s a secret society of unvaccinated doctors turning the vaccinated away from ICU?
Or are these figures just really dodgy, as usual.
3 things spring to mind. Anecdotally, there seems to have been an upsurge in sudden deaths. These would appear to be predominantly among the vaccinated, so yes, dead before they get to ICU. Secondly, isn’t it possible that the treatment of patients may differ according to their vaccination status? If the unvaccinated are getting poorer treatment due to nhs staff bias, then maybe they’re more likely to deteriorate and need intensive care. Thirdly, I believe that ICNARC and UKHSA use different estimates for their unvaccinated population. ICNARC uses the ONS estimate, which likely underestimates how many people are unvaccinated, and therefore overestimates the proportion of unvaccinated that end up in ICU.
I have suspected for some time that treatment given in hospitals will differ according to jab status.
I’ve no proof, just a gut feeling as 20+ yrs experience of working with the medical profession means I am well aware of what some of them are capable of.
If everybody gets the same treatment why is one of the first questions about your jab status?
I agree. I can’t help but think there is something sinister, or at least very questionable, going on. A few weeks ago a relative (also a sceptic) told me he’d read an article in The Times which presented an anecdotal frontline report from an A&E doctor. In the report, reference was made (in passing) to having to identify the vaccine status of covid patients, as they were put in different areas “reflecting the need for different treatment”. What this meant in practice wasn’t explained.
The almost 5x was pure numbers, not proportion — in the last figures it was 5012 deaths with 2 or 3 doses, and 1177 unvaccinated.
I realised that. My comment about defining “unvaccinated “ denominators was just in response to your comment “or are these figures just really dodgy, as usual”. (If they can fudge something as basic as the uk population, what else will they fudge? Another one, clearly, is their definition of “unvaccinated”.) It wasn’t intended to explain the discrepancy per se. Perhaps I should have clarified at the time.
Yes these figures are definitely “dodgy”. I believe they don’t include admissions from care homes and have my suspicions that unvaccinated patients are rested much more regularly (and possibly at a higher cycle rate?) than the vaccinated. As you point out the vaccine shows completely different figures for deaths – around 80% jabbed. So the vaccine means that once hospitalised you are at a much higher risk of dying then? Or the figures are manipulated junk?
Spiegelhalter is a regime gatekeeper. Nothing he says can be taken at face value.
Israels problems may be related to the number who have been quadruple stabbed.
As the damage to the immune system is acknowledged to be cumulative, it may well be that the Israelis have many more over a threshold where their immune system can no longer cope?
This is just abuse of the term “vaccinated.”
Hospitalised but no injections – unvaccinated.
Hospitalised after one jab but exceeding the timeline for injection two = unvaccinated.
Hospitalised after two jabs, but not boosted to heaven, yet = unvaccinated.
I completely agree (see post). Add to this list “Unknown” which are also classed as “Unvaccinated”.
One can only suppose that this misinformation is being supported by doctors, just as they don’t report teenage heart attacks as adverse reactions (see Tommy Robinson’s Telegram posting yesterday – sorry, I can’t link to it) and continue to cash in on injecting while refusing to do their job of actually seeing patients.
The Australian tyranny is just a test run
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-australian-tyranny-is-just-a-test-run/
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Delingpole’s article is superb – and the film is well worth watching (especially if they’ve sorted out the original volume problems)!
I think it is important that any time the term “Unvaccinated” is used it really needs to be in quotation marks since an unknown number of them have been vaccinated.
We need to show scorn and contempt for the way the term is used, as we should also for the term “Cases” and “Asymptomatic Infection”.
The German health and panic minister stated yesterday that Israel’s problems stem from too few elderly being vaxxed and boosted in comps with Europe.
As far as I can tell, that statement is completely fact free/a lie, it contradicts the statements from doctors there that 3/4 of the ICU patients are vaxxed and the general booster overload and lead there.
But even if it was true, it would then confirm that vaccinating people not at risk and younger ones was and is a misguided strategy and that any vaxx mandate for them, which he is now planning to introduce, is medically ridiculous.
Omicron seems to be having a much more significant impact on the population in both Israel and the USA.
Both of these countries used almost exclusively mRNA vaccines. The majority of adults in the UK were vaccinated with the Oxford Astra Zenica vaccine (at least the first two doses) Could it be that AZ is more effective at protecting from serious illness in the longer term than the mRNA vaccines?
It could be, yes. I’d note that while all the vaccines induce a pretty poor cellular immune response (but lots and lots of antibodies), AZ produced the highest amount of t-cell response (still poor, but higher than the others). We’ve little idea how any of the vaccines are modulating the innate immune response (there’s some papers saying that the mRNA vaccines at least have an impact on the innate immune system, but really we need much more data).
Alternatively, it could be a vaccine dose separation issue — in the UK we started vaccinating at the same time as Israel, but delayed the second dose by two months. This has put us two months behind Israel ever since.
It is called immune erosion. This is from the head of healthcare in Israel.
The Israelis have had 4 jabs. Their natural immunity has been more effectively suppressed (wrecked) than our population with a sizeable number who haven’t been jabbed, or have only had one or two.
Why “excluding Scotland”. Surely with vaxpässen and muzzle mandates still in force here, we must have reached zero by now? That’s what The Science demands, and reality must defer to it.
”One mystery is why Israel’s Omicron wave is proving a rougher ride in terms of ICU admissions and deaths compared to ours.”
Really? A ”mystery” is it? Not to a lot of us who’ve read about what jabs do to the immune system – and Israel has certainly done a lot of jabbing.
The Propaganda Loyal BBC & the Highly Trust worthy health & Prime Minister, with their Cameras & Photographers would have been all over this if they had a few patients. Lest not forget how much we spent on Nightingale Hospitals either!
Why is Israel’s situation as regards ‘COVID’ ICU numbers and deaths recently than here in the UK? Probably becuase:
1) They’ve used the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines throughout, which appear (in my view from reports) to cause immunity fatugue, i.e. their effectiveness wears off quicker and quicker and once it doesm the more vulnerable people’s immune systems are worse off.
They may be ‘dependent on the jabs’ so much that it could induce many auto-immune diseases, as some scientists and clinicians have speculated. Unfortunately, some many not know until years down the line, whereby it’s too late to make much of a difference.
The Oxford/AZ one did not seem to be anywhere near as ‘bad’ on that front, whilst lower initial immunity, it appears to last longer and not induce this immunity deficit so much/soon. Noticeably most oldies here got the AZ jab (my elderly parents did).
Whether this now changes in the coming months, as most of the booster jabs appear to be of the Pfizer/Moderna ones.
2) The has been a lower take up of jabs in the UK, especially in younger people, and also young children have not had them at all – yet.
Combine this and, in England (which makes up the majority of the UK population) lesser lockdown restrictions and more ignoring of those rules, the virus (especially since it ‘got milder’) has been far more extensively circulating in the below 50s population here, giving many more the better, longer-lasting natural immunity.
3) Israel rolled out the boosters quicker than we did, they are now on No. 4, but they rolled them out at a time of the year when they were least needed, and thus, IMHO, wasted before the aforementioned immune system problems kicked in just as the worst of winter illness was approaching.
It also means that the immune system problems are worsened because many have 2, not 1 booster and in quick succession.
What appears to be now coming out is that the effects of mRNA vaccines are still relatively unknown over the medium to longer term. To expect entire populations, inculding under 50s who in theory have decades of life to live, to have these jabs which are not fully tested despite them predominantly not being those seriously ill is an utter disgrace.
As more have said, any vaccines should have gone to just the most vulnerable, with them and everyone else using a holistic approach to both treatment and boosting the immune system by way of better diet, exercise/fresh air/sun, including vitmain D, zinc and a couple of other supplements, especially in colder less sunny months.
All the less vulnerable/younger people should then have just got on with their lives as before, shielding the vulnerable at the lowest level required without destroying what life they have left.
To show the Covid daily death figures are nonsense if the current trend continues we’ll shortly have fewer people seriously ill with Covid in ICU’s than die every day with Covid. A clear contradiction.
What “mystery” re Israel? The “vaccines” make many more susceptible to illness, as their immune systems get attacked by the snake oil. As per Mike Yeadon. mRNA mayhem is in the pipeline now…
Medical clinics and hospitals in USA are denying life-saving Ivermectin medicine even with court orders. Big Pharma doing all that they can to push the vaxx and inoculate us while effective and cheap COVID cures exist. There turns out to be censorship that we have never seen before for those who are looking for these treatments. We say over and over again that indepenedent researchers found Ivermectin safe and very effective for these Flu-Corona symptoms. Getting Ivermectin is easy https://ivmpharmacy.com