Suffer the Children

Mary Bousted is at it again. The Marxist co-leader of the amalgamated power-grabbing glorious socialist comrades teaching collective – the National Education Union – now wields considerable and harmful influence over the people we should trust to educate the next generation. While supermarket workers, and others who have no hope of maintaining effective social distancing, have kept us in provisions the teaching unions are arguing about whether it is safe for them to go back to work. And they are right to have concerns.

But I have a graver concern and that is; is it safe for your children to return to the left-wing activist factory? Give me the child until seven, the Jesuits declaimed, and I will give you the man. And there’s the problem; you hand over your wee darlings in loco parentis to strangers you simply have to trust, with little or no control over the influence they will have. We have all heard the stories about what gets taught; remember all the kids being told their own parents were ‘destroying their future’ by voting for Brexit?

I am sure that all teachers believe they have the children’s best interest at heart and I am equally sure there are dedicated senior management teams who abhor the idea of politics at school, but in the classroom any teacher with a stance can drip, drip, drip the poison into their ears. We learn facts and principles, methodology and expression from structured lessons, but we learn social mores and ideology simply by being immersed in it. These lessons within lessons stick.

A Twitter account posted the image below with the explanation: “My daughter’s ‘Geography’ classwork for today. We need to start challenging the political bias and climate alarmism our children are being subjected to.”

It’s not even subtle, and whatever the merits, or otherwise, of the argument, this is overtly political and should never have been used. Over the years we have seen countless example of school textbooks with left wing ideology embedded right through, like the writing in a stick of rock. No super-woke ideology is considered off limits. Drag queens telling stories to toddlers, gender as a social construct and the constant, ‘Britain is a nation of immigrants’ rhetoric. The best hope we have is that this period away from school might just have given some parents a chance to hear and challenge some of the things their offspring have been taught and be emboldened to demand to know why and how this has come about.

I don’t believe children should be involved in politics or activism, whether that is by being dragged along to protests by their parents, or by being nudged towards adopting a political stance before they have developed the basic skills to discern fact from fiction. Children believe in ghosts, for goodness’ sake, yet children’s television is riddled with messages about left wing moral and social hobby horses. I have no recollection of anything in my youth which did any such thing, except, perhaps, for the annual guilt trip which was the Blue Peter appeal.

They say the cure for socialism is to live it. It is also well observed that most people turn away from the left as they grow older, acquire responsibility and particularly when they begin to accumulate any personal wealth. But by inculcating the notion that such aspirations are contrary to being a good citizen the desire to acquire becomes a sin. The cognitive dissonance this creates is resolved by the simple hypocrisy of ‘do what we say, not what we do’. Highly paid socialists like Mary Bousted no doubt tell themselves that their wealth is their just reward, but exactly what lesson is this teaching our junior comrades?