The Telegraph reveals that teachers will now be trained to challenge “whiteness” in lessons, with new guidance ensuring future educators are fully equipped to be “anti-racist” in the classroom. Here’s an excerpt:
Teachers will be instructed in how to “disrupt the centrality of whiteness” in schools, according to a best-practice document.
The term “whiteness” in critical race theory refers to social attitudes considered normal by white people, and guidance suggests that concepts including “meritocracy”, “objectivity” and “individualism” should be questioned.
Documents state that student teachers – if they happen to be white – should also be helped to develop and project a “positive white racial identity”.
Separate guidance has been developed in Scotland and England, and both documents have been endorsed by universities offering teacher training, including Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle, along with the National Education Union.
Documents claim that encouraging “anti-racist” teacher training will help to maintain a diverse teaching workforce, and will help to close the attainment gap between white and non-white pupils.
The Scottish “anti-racism framework”, drawn up by the Scottish Council of Deans of Education and endorsed by 10 universities, states that changes to the way in which teachers are taught will “disrupt the centrality of whiteness and enable different ways of seeing, thinking and doing”.
This process may involve more references to colonialism and racism in lessons, and instilling an understanding of the “impact of whiteness”.
This, it says, will help teachers project a “white racial identity grounded in reality and allyship” in the classroom, free from “false notions of superiority”.
Worth reading in full.
Teaching people about ‘white privilege’ doesn’t always have its intended effect. See this clip from Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I think this article is called damming with faint praise.
The praise seems to me real, and to have admiration in it. If anything, I felt it was the criticism that failed to go home
The British constitution will not matter a jot because Britain will cease to exist once white British people are in a minority.
But would it matter if changes to it had helped to make that possible?
Yes, that’s a good point.
I am not sure when the rot really set in.
My impression is that people in former times were generally happy to make observations about race that would now be considered “racist”. At some point that started to change and now people are afraid, even to admit to themselves, that they might hold “racist” views. Certainly since non-white immigration into the UK started in earnest, “anti-racism” has been drummed into us. Maybe it started with the drive to abolish the slave trade. I am not saying that the slave trade was right or that we should not have abolished it or that we should go back to it – but we seem to confuse quite rightly not treating people as property with the perfectly natural preference for your own tribe.
Yes, terrible confusion,
Both the author and David Starkey seem to take the view that the post-Restoration constitutional settlement was a universally good thing, only to be broken later by the likes of Blair and co.
This is a fairly conventional view, and carries with it a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that the political evolution of this country has been one of progress whereby power has been gradually transferred from an abolutist monarchy to our present representative democracy.
If only.
This view also informs much of what’s taught in schools as history, from what I can gather.
It was only when I read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) that I started to see things a bit differently.
Although it’s a novel rather than a political tract, it does mark the origin of One Nation Conservatism, which is still a view much in play even today.
Put simply, Disraeli’s view was that the post-Restoration political settlement had put too much power in the hands of Parliament, and by sidelining the role of the monarch, had left no voice to defend the interests of the common people of this country.
Then as now, Parliament was stuffed with vested interests.
The results at the time had become very evident. The common people, pushed off the land by parliamentary acts of enclosure, had in many cases become desperate wage slaves often living in shockingly bad conditions.
Disraeli correctly identified this, and tried to re-invent the Conservatives into the party which would balance the interests of the common people and the capitalists who had brought about such material and technological progress, thereby assuming the role which in previous times had been enshrined in the monarch.
With the rise of the Labour movement to power or a share of it in the early 20th century, maybe it was considered that Parliament had finally reached a balanced and fair representation of interests, and that at last the common people had proper advocacy in the seat of power.
In retrospect, we can now see that this was probably a high point and that things have gone downhill very badly since, with vested interests very much back in charge.
The Labour Party has morphed into a bizarre embodiment of bad ideas who only cultivate their client class of state functionaries and poorly-educated graduates. They certainly don’t represent what we might call the traditional Working Class. The Conservatives reject any kind of ideology so just go along with the drift, becoming the Socialism Lite party, continuation One-Nationers, whose aspirations never rise above a bit of managerialist tinkering.
Once again, the interests of the common people have been sidelined.
This vacuum is what has allowed our rulers to impose mass immigration on our society, something that the people were never consulted on and which had damaged and undermined our shared cultural identity.
We know who the beneficiaries of this are, and it’s not the common people.
The summer riots were a manifestation of this. Others may follow.
To counterbalance parliament as representation of the factional interest of society, something representing its shared interests is needed. This used to be (at least in Germany) a monarchial government existing above and besides parliamentary strife of the parties. This suggests that the problem we’re facing is how to strip parliament of its status as dictatorial institution of power with no regard for anything but itself to put it back into its bottle, force it to accept the existence of legitimate, extraparliamentrial institution of power it didn’t create itself, ie, not His Most Toniest Blairness’ quango straightjacket supposed to guarantee New Labour government even in absence of a New Labour government.
Even the US model of an elected head of government with real power who’s not part of the parliamentary machinery might be suitable for that. OTOH, the traditional model worked fine. It took the parliamentarists to major European landwars to abolish it.
Maybe the only answer is Swiss-style direct government through regular referenda.
Whether that would work in the UK is moot, given that we’re a bigger and more diverse country with a very different history.
It would also require a vigorous and free press and media, something under continual attack.
This essay is puzzling. Professor Alexander very obviously admires Starkey; his essay is full of praise of him. But the title promises, also, to tell us where he is wrong. As someone who also admires Starkey, I was keen to learn where he is wrong but, search as I may, I can’t find it, not much anyway, and nothing developed. It might be expected to follow the heading, “Now for the criticisms”. But it doesn’t, not distinctly.
To begin with, it contains more praise: “[I am] someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history … Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union … About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive … a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history … to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present … almost no sound voices from history [apart from his] … the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.”
Alexander is plainly struggling to find anything much wrong. He begins by lighting a damp squib: “His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is [not wrong but] badly formulated” and not all that badly either evidently, for, although “most historical comparisons are naive. In fact Starkey mostly avoids this naive sort of comparison … What he does instead is something subtler … to use the past to explain the present (not to explain what to do in the present, but to explain how we got where we are.”)
He does go on, “But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history.” But he has already admitted that Starkey doesn’t offer to use history to explain what to do in the present only to explain how we got where we are. So Alexander not only has not yet shown anything wrong, he hasn’t even shown us what the ‘problem’ is in what Starkey has to say.
There is, in fact, only one place where Alexander finds something wrong with Starkey that he doesn’t qualify out of existence and, even then, he introduces and closes it in a muted sort of a way: “Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion.”
And then this: “I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. … [The former] appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. … It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance.” And, even that he sums up as, “The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.”
I don’t think Alexander has himself got a story about Starkey. Except for Starkey’s blankness about religion (which, filled up, might show an unintelligent hostility), Alexander is (not unreasonably) a straightforward admirer. And the title of his essay is seriously misleading.