Freedom of speech is not an option for education.

In universities and schools across the Anglo-sphere, students and faculty struggle for freedom of speech.

“A family of four is sitting around playing dominos.  The father-in-law suggests that they all drive to Abilene, Texas, for dinner, which is over 50 miles away. Thinking that’s what everyone wants, the individual family members all agree to go.

The family drives to Abilene, has dinner, and drives back, but with everyone exhausted and unhappy. When they arrive back in Coleman, they ask each other why they went to Abilene in the first place. They then realize that no one actually wanted to go, but they went along because they thought everyone else wanted to go. Everyone thought that they were in that minority but were in the majority.”

This is the Abilene paradox. Most teachers would agree that exposure to different views is essential for the healthy development of the child. Indeed, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child enshrines the right of young people to free information, along with the International Baccalaureates’ learner profile.  And few of us would want to see children or faculty punished for words or thoughts.

Yet the absurdities of cancel culture, safe spaces, no-platforming, sensitivity readers, trigger warnings, decolonising the curriculum, have become pervasive.  In universities, knowledge and understanding must be understood and presented through the lens Intersectionality, identity politics, and critical social justice(CSJ). Academics that do not self-censor risk punishment, in the form of cancellation mobbing or bullying.  Anyone failing to abide by the cult of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) must “do better” or “educate themselves”. Compulsory Anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-ableism “training” sessions abound, to instill right-thinking.

In universities across the Anglo-sphere,  students and faculty  struggle for freedom of speech. So critical is the situation, the UK government has been compelled to intervene to guarantee freedom of speech and roll back the cancellation of “controversial” speakers. In the US, Harvard University is now ranked 248^th in free-speech rankings.  Discussions that revolve around evolution and biology could run the risk of cancellation, as those who participate do,  should they fall foul of the prejudices of activists .

While Rome is gets toasted, some educators are busying themselves hammering in their own nails into the coffin (apologies for the mixed metaphor)

Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is the director of Don’t Divide Us, a group that challenges the beliefs that schools should be teaching the belief that all white people enjoy “white privilege”, and that Britain is systemically racist.

She was due to speak at a recent conference hosted by Rethinking Education, before being cancelled at the last minute, at the behest of seven co-speakers. The mere presence of an individual with differing ideas made them fear for their safety, according to the organisations director. Ironically her topic was ‘What is indoctrination within education and how can we avoid it?’. (the Free Speech Union will be hosting this talk on Monday, the 16^th)

Rethinking Education, how could you be so cowardly and allow the light of education to sputter in your hands! Why didn’t you call the bluff of these seven ideologues?  How could the words spoken at your conference, now be anything but hollow?

As Dr Cuthbert herself pointed out, safeguarding is for children, not adults.

Who will provide for the actual “psychological safety” of children, who bear the moral accusation and stigma of being labelled as having “white privileged”? Or have been fed the unrealistic view that life’s set backs are attributable to being form a “marginalised group”?

Who will defend their futures, as they see their life-chances frittered away by narcissistic, virtual-signaling activist types who prefer to throw their literacy in the trash, as they turn classrooms into platforms for ends-justify-the-means political activism.

Oh, sorry “transformative classrooms”.

Commitment to the aims of CSJ at classroom, local authority, or national level, can impact all kids, perhaps the disadvantaged, more so. Their parents have less resources to give enrichment opportunities such as extra tuition, music classes, trips and visits, or study time necessary to offset the sub-standard and accountability-free outcomes of unstructured inquiry-based learning, the preferred modus operandi of the politicised classroom.

In this sense, CSJ political activism substitutes imaginary systems of systemic injustice, with actual systems of systemic injustice.

Children may also suffer from Critical Pedagogues hostility to knowledge and learning per se.  Whether children become literate, whether they can distinguish between a noun and a verb, or know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, or any knowledge is consequential only to the aims of delivering political objectives. As the influential Bell Hooks wrote:

“education is not about transmitting knowledge, but about empowering students to challenge the status quo and create a more just and equitable society.”

Yet as divisions and radicalization and civil destruction seem to increase in western societies, this more “just and equitable society” seems as far away as ever. 

In reality, the by “psychological security” and “safe-spaces” referred to, is not that of individuals, but of critical theory, an ideology so in need of protection, that it crumbles in the light of day.

Suppression of speech has been justified as a matter of accountability. Cancel culture, they argue, is little more than privileged people being held “accountable” for what they say. But this merely restates Idi Amins dictum: “There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” The distributed authoritarianism of cancel-culture is tyranny by other means.  

Education minus the freedom to think and speak along certain lines is indoctrination. With what alacrity we give this precious right away!  

Critcal theory and pedagogy is a totalising dogma, along with its’ conspiracy-theory like qualifications, exceptions-to-the-rule, and being rooted in the wishful thinking of the standard social-science model. As such it admits only evidence that fits its forgone conclusions and ignores evidence that does not fit. The differing exam attainment amongst non-white communities in the UK would be a case in point. Why then follow the weird and racialist assumption that children must be taught by somebody with the same skin-colour in order to raise achievement for underperforming groups?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is an organisation that advocates free speech in universities in the US. It ranks universities on such factors as  ‘comfort expressing ideas’, ‘disruptive conduct’, ‘tolerance for speakers’, ‘openness’  Harvard (yes that Harvard) comes 249!

The subjugation of universities to CSJ does however provide a constant flow of recruits into the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) make-work program.

The US alone is predicted to spend over 24 billion dollars by 2030 on this a colossal waste of money. Far from such programs promoting more harmonious workplaces, DEI training is intended to sow division and resentment. Schools, downstream of universities, receive a flow teachers and ideas.

Once DEI is included into a school as an initiative- or worse-as policy- it creates fears, chills freedom of speech and necessitates the mobbing of dissenters. “we don’t talk about this” As one teacher put it, when I was researching this article.

Pupils simply won’t say anything that runs against the DEI narrative, for fear of social exclusion and mobbing. Often DEI initiatives focus on schools creating an elite cadre of students, ventriloquised in DEI doctrine. This can be used to compel changes to policy, or patrol the remainder of student body- and staff.

It can also be used to facilitates malicious accusations and misunderstandings. Critical Theory demands that we seek out hidden meanings and challenge them, leading to teachers and children being required to assume worst-case intentions, to look for the prejudices that are said to be present in every conversation, real or not. That’s an approach which undermines the fabric of schooling, which is built on the opposite, trust, openness, forgiveness and the process of free inquiry.

Franz Kafka had it when he said “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy".

The much-loved and respected Canadian headteacher Richard Bilkszto faced a false allegation of racism during DEI “training” sessions, for questioning the slur “white privilege”. Others in the meeting piled on. He lost his job but won a lawsuit against his former employer. However, in the face of social exclusion, stigma and the fallout of continuing court action, he took his own life.

“Inclusive language” as a matter of school policy, sounds benign, yet is a slippery slope. It may seem reasonable to expect staff and students to avoid using pejoratives in our workplaces, but it is an ideology without boundaries, demanding the restructuring of history, religion, literature, language, science, and reality itself.

The UKs largest teaching union, the NEU, demands teachers drop gendered language. Further examples are The UKs General Medical Council removing the word 'mother' from its maternity guidance for staff, or Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust charity describing a vagina as a “bonus hole”. All done in the name of “inclusivity”.  

Similar justifications are behind efforts to rewrite literature and history. The author Roald Dahl has suffered hundreds of changes and cuts to his works, for example.  The talentless wits behind these are described as “sensitivity readers”.

In reality, they ensure that writers conform to politically correct thinking. A recent children’s book  rewrites British history, claiming 'a black country more than 7,000 years before white people came and during that time the most famous British monument was built, Stonehenge'. The BBC has  published a children’s song on similar lines. Additionally “Inclusivity” demands that all languages be reconstructed to remove any references to gender, an act of cultural supremacy that rivals in its’ audacity, even erstwhile colonialist efforts to spread European languages!

That these efforts are loathed  and considered an affront by the vast majority of native speakers, seems to be inconsequential to the ideologues perusing the pie-in-the-sky dream of forcing societal change through language.   

As educators we owe it to children to do what we do as honestly and truthfully as we can, irrespective of such pipedreams and beliefs.  Yes, some words might cause temporary discomfort, but safe-spaces and censorship don not allow for the building of resilience, critical thinking and problem solving. A “no-discussion” paradigm, them-and-us, in or out, line in the sand culture should be an anathema to education and learning. It’s on the basis of truth that we hope for the best from our wards, not the relativism of post-modernism.

Individuals that does not wish to use “inclusive language” becomes “problematical”. The opposite of “ally” is an enemy after all, the term ally itself a euphemism for social justice warrior, or “advocate” to use coded language often found in schools.  Social Justice is extra-judicial mob rule. Social=mob and justice=rule. There can be no justice without judgements and punishment.  

Parents, children and teachers that do question any elements of  the social justice agenda can expect their concerns  to be dismissed and find themselves labelled extremists. Recently thousands of parents in Canada took to the streets to protest their right to know what is being taught in school in regard to sexualising education.  5000 parents attended in Ottawa alone.

There is an ideological context to this. The default position on families and parenting of identarian and intersectionality is that parents and families are primary source for socialisation that perpetuates supremacy in its various forms.

This aggression towards the family is validated  through blank-slate ideas such as innocent socialisation, that values and behaviour is somehow create themselves, irrespective of evolutionary pressure.

From this perspective, splitting kids off from their families, and active deception of parents is not only desirable for a more “just and equitable” society, it becomes an obligation.

"Parents have a right to know what their children are being taught in school, but that right does not extend to every detail of the curriculum. Intersectionality and identity teaching can be a sensitive topic, and parents may not be prepared to discuss it with their children. It is better for schools to keep parents informed about the general themes of the curriculum, but to leave the specific details to the teachers."

"Parents' Rights in Education: What You Need to Know" by the National School Boards Association, 2021.

By sensitive, they mean grossly inappropriate and divisive. As before, substituting an imaginary “hidden curriculum” with an actual hidden curriculum.

In the US, content that is so sexually explicit it cannot be read out in school-board meetings, has been placed in classrooms and libraries. parents who complain about the teaching of CSE and CRT have found themselves branded “domestic terrorists” .

The Safe Schools Alliance UK has compiled a vast amount of evidence  not only revealing not only sexually explicit and sexually leading materials being taught to children, but school efforts to conceal their shadowy activities.

Teachers and schools may not always agree with the values parents hold, but it cannot be right to assume bad faith on their part, on the basis of ideological priorities, or that we hold some kind of  moral imperative to correct their children’s values.

As educators, we want to get on with doing the best job we can for our young people. I for one, would be more than content to master the teaching of Design and Technology, and hand skills. Unfortunately, while we may not be interested in this culture-war, it sure as hell is interested in us.

While intersectionality, identity politics and the like are ideologies that must be examined, discussed, and challenged, they remain unfit in their direct application to schools and children. With many schools jumping on the DEI bandwagon, it might be wise to reflect on how they can do so in a way that explicitly excludes critical theory, forming an understanding around learning inclusivity, intellectual diversity and resourcing equity. Teachers can be wary of the content that comes out of the DEI war-machine and support our young people who draw attention to its flaws and logical fallacies.

The danger is that once the principles of critical theory have become institutionalised, the grim consequences for individuals who step out of line become something of inevitable.

It’s easier to raise our hands before we make the trip to Abilene.