I recall when at primary school in North London wondering why it was that I, as a precocious – albeit only in this one regard – atheist, should be forced to sing hymns every morning. Who had decreed, exactly, that children should be subjected to a supernaturalist belief system (admittedly, as advanced by the good ol’ C of E, a rather mild one)? Surely, in a liberal democracy, the young me thought, the state should be strictly neutral as far as the imposition of beliefs was concerned?
How times have changed. Now the local state in Brighton is having school kids under its care taught that Christianity was a contributory factor to the slave trade. Brighton and Hove’s Green council has been putting all its teachers through a mandatory Critical Race Theory (CRT) re-education course. The above claim is one of the ‘facts’ the teachers have been instructed by their CRT kommissars – provided by the ‘diversity’ training companies engaged at great expense – they must now pass on to the little darlings. Another good one is that science, apparently, ‘upholds the status quo’. Very educationally helpful.
The council leaders, when challenged by local parents and councillors to reveal the content of the suitably Orwell-sounding ‘Racial Literacy 101’ sessions, surprisingly refused to do so. Despite Greens usually banging on, rightly, about the need for greater governmental transparency, they gave some rather corporate sounding blather about the need to maintain commercial confidentiality. However, the power slides used in the presentations have been leaked. It is asserted as a matter of fact that ‘Between the ages of 3 and 5, children learn to attach value to skin colour; white at the top of the hierarchy and black at the bottom.’ And the evidence is..?
If the whole spooky project was not sinister enough as it is, teachers have been informed that children are not ‘racially innocent’; an updating of the notion of Original Sin I was taught all those years ago at New End primary. Apparently, there is ‘ample evidence’ to justify this incredible assertion, though nothing, of course, is provided. Another killer line is that teachers must NOT, under any circumstances, tell pupils that ‘race doesn’t mean anything and everyone can work hard and be successful’. Ergo, it’s racist to be anti-racist.
What is interesting about this racist New Left nonsense is how CRT dovetails with postmodernism. In particular, the belief that people other than those forwarding the ideology, obviously, are not in control of their own mental faculties. According to the postmods, we are ‘socially constructed’ by dominant ‘discourses’. Western liberalism is part of the ideological apparatus that maintains oppression by spreading the lie that we are fully human, have agency and the potential for rational thinking. What’s needed, then, is for us to submit to more unconscious bias training.
Is it not a bit disturbing that entire sections of the public sector, including the police, are using taxpayers’ money to indoctrinate sections of our society with this anti-liberal madness, including now primary school children?
