I WENT to my son’s primary school open day in Glasgow in 2004. One of the things I remember most about this meeting was being told that my five-year-old son would be taught “Race Awareness 1, and Race Awareness 2”.
As someone who had been an active anti-racist for many years and thought about racism and the challenge of it as a political thing, I asked the teacher why she thought it was the job of a school to talk to my son about racism.
Today, I would like to pose the same question to the Scottish Government, and Education Scotland, who have announced that they will be “Embedding race equality in school”.
Will children, I wonder, be exploring critics of modern anti-racism like Marxist writer Kenan Malik, who illustrates how radicals adopted their own “progressive” form of racial thinking with their celebration of “different cultures”? Or the conservative Douglas Murray who argues that the promotion of “diversity” helps to separate groups, including children, into their own identity boxes?
READ MORE: Stuart Waiton: Anti-racist witch hunts help nobody
Perhaps schools will be engaging with the American Christopher Lasch who believes that modern anti-racism has become an elitist expression of Western self-loathing. Or perhaps they will read the book by Lasch’s daughter, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn entitled Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.
If this education of anti-racism was in fact education, I wouldn’t mind, but what we are looking at is a new form of indoctrination, a form of indoctrination that has adopted many of the tenets of the highly contested critical race theory.
When the government says, “A new package of support materials…. will embed anti-racism and race equality into all aspects of school life”, they really do mean “all aspects”, with talk, for example of, “As the child grows, they can see diversity” in all subjects, including, “mathematics”.
Efforts will be made to “decolonise” the school curriculum and to challenge the presumed biases and omissions in the education of children. In the early years this, we are informed, can be assisted with correct, “dolls and figures, dressing up clothes, picture books and wall displays (that are) all ways to normalise diversity”.
This idea that we need to decolonise the curriculum is based on a massive presumption that we white educators, often subconsciously, fill our lessons with loads of white stuff, white people, white thinkers, white bias and so on.
READ MORE: Diversity report has failed to engage objectively with the issues
Ironically, from my experience, what we often find is a bunch of educators, all of whom are against racism, falling over themselves to manufacture ways of teaching even more critical stuff about history or to invent anti-racist maths, science and computing lessons. The result at times is hysterical, in both meanings of the term.
There is also talk, and full acceptance, of the much-contested idea of “white privilege”, a self-loathing label that ridiculously sees privilege in even the poorest of white people, as well as helping to elevate the idea that whites and blacks are fundamentally different, and that racism is everywhere.
Of course, while this misanthropic perspective and this so called anti-racist education programme labels all white people, it also helps to divide society into the “aware” and the stupid, the enlightened educators and the backward, ill-educated parents.
This is the real essence of the elitist anti-racist indoctrination being launched in our schools – a perspective that sees a need to “get them early” to get them away from their racist parents and to challenge the presumed “systemic racism" in society.
Here we find the biggest tragedy and irony of all. Just as colonial and imperial racism was a prejudice most virulently promoted by the middle and upper classes. Today’s bigotry and belittling of people comes in the form of the new elites’ obsession with the imagined racist masses.
If education is ever going to recover in Scotland, we need to refocus on education itself. A first, useful step, would be to start a campaign to Depoliticise the Curriculum.
Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel