All but one of my six children have now finished at school. Over the years, they’ve come home with occasional stories of classroom bias. Sometimes overt, like the teacher who couldn’t conceal his bile for Boris Johnson and Brexit.
But, more often, insidious. The history curriculum is obsessed with American Civil Rights, while ignoring the English Civil War, one example of many.
To pretend that schools only ever act as impartial pedagogical guides or provide an unbiased transmission of neutral knowledge defies reality. To varying degrees, schools reflect the values, not of the people who fund them or founded them, but of teachers.
Somebody once told me that fully half of the Labour Party’s membership consisted of teachers. I have no idea whether this is true, but it has the ring of plausibility. Because it would confirm what many of us suspect. That there is an institutional co-dependence between the teaching profession and Labour.
Many teachers rely on a Labour government to make their lives easier (fewer exams and inspections and more pay). While Labour relies on teachers to instil in the next generation of voters a worldview that accords with ‘Labour values’. It is a textbook example of the ‘client state’.
The teaching unions fund Labour and extract favours. In return, schools become a reliable ideological production line of future Labour supporters.
The exception to this rule is private schools, which attract teachers who have often found it hard to go with the flow of a state sector where obeisance to the teaching unions is a given.
Private schools plough their own furrow, refusing to discard traditions and reset the educational clock to a Leftish ‘year zero’.
This is one reason, perhaps the main reason, why Labour’s comically inept Education Secretary, Brigitte Phillipson, has declared war on independent schools. For a particular type of Labour activist, adding VAT to school fees, forcing private schools to hike them by 20 per cent, was never about raising revenue. It was about killing off any provision of education that could not be controlled by the State.
And it’s working. More than 100 private schools have closed for good since the application of VAT last year. Vandalism dressed up as redistribution. The work of decades, sometimes centuries, was destroyed in days.
But this cosy stitch-up has a sell-by date. Should Reform win the next election, there is a real possibility that (what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called) the slow march through the institutions will receive a serious check.
This week, Suella Braverman chose St George’s Day to unveil her ‘Patriotic Curriculum’, a program to transform what is taught in schools in England within the first 100 days of a Reform government.
Teachers have turned too many of our schools into factories of national self-loathing - Colin Brazier
|Getty Images
It includes plans to insist that schools fly the Union flag and put up a picture of our Head of State in a prominent communal place.
In many, nay most, countries, this would be utterly uncontroversial. But in Britain, it is Kryptonite to a certain type of teacher/activist.
Should this policy be enacted, a Greek chorus of union organisers will complain that flying just one flag in schools where pupils hail from a diverse list of countries is not inclusive.
For teachers who consider themselves Republican (a far higher proportion, I’d guess, than the population at large, two-thirds of whom still support the monarchy), the idea of venerating a picture of King Charles III is also anathema. Too much like lending support to white hereditary privilege.
If nothing else, this is why Braverman is right. The Left wins the culture wars through the lethargy of the Right. By inches, the Left shifts thinking, not by consensus, but by pernicious, slow-motion infiltration.
The Right must learn to patiently push back. To recapture lost ground. To acknowledge that resistance, in order not to be futile, must be tenacious, patient and unending.
Her plans for the flag are one thing. But it is what Braverman has had to say this week about what is actually taught in class that really sets the cat among the pigeons.
History, for instance, must stop being “taught through a progressive lens” and “retrofitted to justify mass immigration”. In a Reform-future, pupils, according to Braverman, “will learn more about Wilberforce and the West African Squadron than about reparations”.
Instead of endless lectures about Malcolm X or the Atlantic Slave Trade, there will be an insistence on learning about the punctuation marks in our own island story.
The signing of the Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union, the Enlightenment and Britain’s unique role in the Industrial Revolution - will all feature more prominently and less apologetically.
Again, you can already hear the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in progressive teaching colleges, those taxpayer-funded indoctrination camps for future teacher/activists.
But such frothing ignores what’s at stake. As Braverman notes in an article laying out her plans in the Daily Telegraph, six in ten young women in Britain now believe the UK is a racist country.
She might also have added that a day before her announcement (and presumably too late to be included in her article), a survey showed that half of young Britons would not fight for their country, under any circumstances.
As the conservative commentator Douglas Murray has noted, when the barbarians are at the gate, nobody cares what your pronouns are.
There is a sense that we are now entering a world where priorities are shifting. Where luxury beliefs are incompatible with national survival.
We have communities in Britain where the state's writ is weak. Where British national identity is not just waning, but non-existent. Where the call to prayer is more important than a call to arms in defence of Britain. And where a woke worldview trumps any other affiliation.
Left untouched, this rot runs deeper. More future generations will learn to hate Britain, its history and institutions. They will feel no reverence for the symbols of national unity, the flag, the sovereign and the anthem.
Do I really think that the balkanization of Britain can be avoided by a little bit of tinkering around the edges of the curriculum?
That we can reverse the trends of dissolving social cohesion by running up a flag outside the local comprehensive? No, it will not be that simple. But it will be a signal to those who have ushered in this era of national self-loathing that their days of dominion over our culture are over.
One final thought about the author of this policy. Suella Braverman’s critics are often snippily personal in their attacks. Even her supporters might have seen her taking on the education brief for Reform as a demotion for a former Home Secretary.
But I think she understands something quite profound. That our future security depends on many things. Sorting out immigration, welfare, and defence, to name but three.
But without a population that understands what kind of country this is - that is comfortable and proud in calling their nation home - then all those other policies are rendered pointless.