DfE says no more anti-capitalist teaching in England.

[tim]

Perhaps a compromise will be reached where the views of these 'extremist' groups can be aired in the classroom but only delivered by actors' voices?

Gerry Adams seems to have retired from frontline politics so is probably available for voiceover work.

 

[A380]

I think it’s great and long overdue. Paris, Rome Cardiff yes, but in this age of google why do kids have to learn about Canberra, Chisinau or Nouakchott anyway?

 

[The39thStep]

As someone who, long ago, taught politics to secondary school kids, I'd respectfully disagree with that.

Fine but I can’t remember my education or the kids for that matter containing any material that sought to overthrow capitalism .

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Occasionally the ACG, AF/ACF were asked into schools at the request of students and teachers to do presentations on anrchism, so that would be illegal/unlawful now

All you need to do is give a talk at a school as an individual. I’ve given PowerPoint presentations to schools locally on anarchism and on WW1, as an individual. After all, you aren’t a representative or delegate of any organisation, just a geezer with views many kids will not ever have encountered. Getting schools to agree in the new climate may be more difficult, but on the other hand some teachers may be more receptive cos of the government’s attitude.

 

[Raheem]

Fine but I can’t remember my education or the kids for that matter containing any material that sought to overthrow capitalism .

It's not the material. Per the guidance, it's the provenance. So, on the face of it, no evaluating Soviet propaganda as a historical source, for example.

 

[planetgeli]

Fine but I can’t remember my education or the kids for that matter containing any material that sought to overthrow capitalism .

It's not just about overthrowing capitalism.

The guidance states:

Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances...examples include but are not limited to;

...the encouragement or endorsement of illegal activity
...a failure to condemn illegal activities done in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people or property

My history O level contained a whole section on 'The Irish Question' (as well as China in the 20th century). Southern Universities Joint Board for school examinations 1980.

I was taught by a local Conservative councillor. To his credit he encouraged me to pursuit my interests and critical lines. None of this would have been possible were I not able to use primary sources from the various historical entities of the IRA or loyalist paramilitaries and their parties.

This guidance would wipe out the teaching of that.

As jolly and funny as it's been to see some responses here bemoaning no more Bakunin in assemblies, this misses the point. There are and have been for some time progressive changes in the teaching of some syllabuses. Guidance such as this seeks to limit that teaching and I'd be surprised if anyone here would really seek to support that - and just as surprised some people might not recognize the culture war this is part of.

 

[Raheem]

...the encouragement or endorsement of illegal activity
...a failure to condemn illegal activities done in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people or property

This would appear to catch any organisation that fails to condemn Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Emmeline Pankhurst or dumping Edward Colston into the drink.

Are publishers of history textbooks going to have to use headings such as "The Luddites - be in no doubt they were bastards"?

 

[The39thStep]

I’m not supporting it just very cautious about it’s impact tbh. I learnt my politics outside of school through work, people I worked with and trade union members and political parties . However I saw that political education as a way of improving wages and conditions , defending working class communities , influencing others and possibly changing society.

 

[brogdale]

Fine but I can’t remember my education or the kids for that matter containing any material that sought to overthrow capitalism .

Mine neither, tbf, but it's kind of depressing that the Tories want that re-establsihed.

 

[The39thStep]

Mine neither, tbf, but it's kind of depressing that the Tories want that re-establsihed.

Yes I agree , but not sure it explains why my two daughters , separated by a year, voted Lib Dem when they were doing A levels and my son who left at 16 and did crappy jobs voted Labour .

 

[planetgeli]

I’m not supporting it just very cautious about it’s impact tbh. I learnt my politics outside of school through work, people I worked with and trade union members and political parties . However I saw that political education as a way of improving wages and conditions , defending working class communities , influencing others and possibly changing society.

And I learned mine by being brought up in poverty despite having a dad who worked his arse off. Such things led me to wanting to learn and study about movements that did not support the status quo.

Having an education inside and outside academia are not mutually exclusive.

 

[The39thStep]

And I learned mine by being brought up in poverty despite having a dad who worked his arse off. Such things led me to wanting to learn and study about movements that did not support the status quo.

Having an education inside and outside academia are not mutually exclusive.

Wasn’t saying they were pal. Polytechnics were made for that

 

[The39thStep]

And I learned mine by being brought up in poverty despite having a dad who worked his arse off. Such things led me to wanting to learn and study about movements that did not support the status quo.

Having an education inside and outside academia are not mutually exclusive.

I always remember some kid at PNL saying at a union meeting he’d come to PNL and was here to study but not for politics and your mate Pete said ‘fuck off to university if that’s what you want’ .

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

We had a speaker from the Croydon Anarchists come and give a talk at our school on anarchism one lunchtime, probably sometime in 1972. Those were the days.

 

[not-bono-ever]

UKG trying to publicly enforce this with sanctions or warnings would look utterly imbecilic.

 

[two sheds]

At least the tories under Johnson and Cummings would fall under the same edict

 

[teuchter]

It's not the material. Per the guidance, it's the provenance. So, on the face of it, no evaluating Soviet propaganda as a historical source, for example.

I don't think that's what it means when it talks about "resources".

If Soviet Russia were offering you a ready-made teaching plan, then the guidance suggests you should think twice about using it.

The detailed wording and conditions are stupid - but the overall theme seems to be about teachers being careful about where teaching resources have come from. I'd say a resource is something that is prepared specifically to help the teacher do their work. That's a completely different thing to a historical (or even contemporary) source - something that is brought into the classroom for discussion or evaluation.

 

[Jay Park]

I’m sorry but my school didn’t even teach us about this ideology called capitalism. Ever. That word was not uttered in any class I or anyone else I know remembers

 

[Humberto]

perhaps they are scared in daily express letters land

 

[brogdale]

Anyone who's ever had any experience of teaching will know that there has always been indoctrination in our schools based upon resources and inputs from organised religions, fossil fuel corporations, financial corporations, food corporations, the EU supra state and the like. Not to mention Gove's bibles.

 

[smokedout]

This whole thing is weirder than it appears, so bear with me if this seems a tangent. The new guidelines do not ban anti-capitalist groups from schools, they ban anti-capitalists groups from teaching Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) which is all the guidelines relate to. RSE has obviously been controversial with the protests against No Outsiders, whilst gender critical activists led by the seemingly obsessed Tory semi-grandee Baroness Nicholson have been lobbying hard to kick trans charity Mermaids out of schools (*spoiler, Mermaids barely go into schools anyway and even then only to train teachers not kids - according to their annual report they only delivered 138 training sessions to all kinds of organisations in 2019). This group are utterly convinced that insidious forces like, err Stonewall, have been going into school persuading gender nonconforming kids they are really trans and are equally outraged that LGBT inclusive sex education means actually telling young people how LGB people sometimes have sex. References to anal sex in particular has been one area of major concern with the LGBT charity The Proud Trust attacked over admittedly quite cringy teaching aid that gender critical activists felt gave the message to girls that is was okay to have anal sex. Just as an aside , there's shades of QAnon here with some, but by no means all, activists thinking this all represents some dark paedophile plot to sexualise children and undermine consent.

Last week Liz Truss anounced the Government would not be going ahead with reforms to allow trans people to self ID if they want to change the sex on their birth cerificate, however her announcement fell short of her earlier somewhat unexpected pledge to strengthen the law around single sex spaces and prevent children from making lifelong decisions about their bodies (which some had hoped meant a move to ban trans healthcare for young people). This announcement appears to have thrown the government into disarray with big corporate bodies like google, Sky, Disney and the Financial Times issuing a panicked letter to the government worried about the kind of bathroom bill which almost bankrupted North Carolina. So to cover for Truss' u-turn they've been looking at ways to try and show they are shitting on trans people without actually doing anything. Hence these guidelines, which have a whole section about how organisations going into schools musn't tell children they are born in the wrong body or that if they are gender nonconforming they are really the other sex, which no-one really did. They also highlight that RSE materials must be age appropriate, which was always pretty much the case. So not much is likely to change in terms of RSE content and in fact the guidelines still recommend Stonewall as a teaching resource to the dismay of those convinced they have an agenda to 'trans' children.

What's weird is they have also added all this other stuff about political groups, cancel culture and anti-capitalism to guidelines on who can teach sex education. And what's weirder is that according to Schoolsweek the DfE have confirmed that the new guidelines are not statutory and as such schools have no legal duty to follow them. The far more benign guidelines which are still statutory and so which schools must follow can be found here. The whole thing seems to have been an attempt to use guidelines to schools to generate some kind of culture war row in the media, possibly signal future intent, or test the mood, as well as try to indicate they were getting tough on cancel culture and other current bugbears of the right. So they've banned the Socialist Worker Party and Extinction Rebellion from teaching sex education, except they haven't even done that. This is a very strange way of doing Government, I suspect influenced by Trump but also possibly because Ministers like Truss sense the leadership is weak and are using dirty tricks to try and force policy direction.

 

[Pickman's model]

Anyone who's ever had any experience of teaching will know that there has always been indoctrination in our schools based upon resources and inputs from organised religions, fossil fuel corporations, financial corporations, food corporations, the EU supra state and the like. Not to mention Gove's bibles.

i thought the national curriculum was very much about indoctrination

 

[Brainaddict]

This whole thing is weirder than it appears, so bear with me if this seems a tangent. The new guidelines do not ban anti-capitalist groups from schools, they ban anti-capitalists groups from teaching Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) which is all the guidelines relate to. RSE has obviously been controversial with the protests against No Outsiders, whilst gender critical activists led by the seemingly obsessed Tory semi-grandee Baroness Nicholson have been lobbying hard to kick trans charity Mermaids out of schools (*spoiler, Mermaids barely go into schools anyway and even then only to train teachers not kids - according to their annual report they only delivered 138 training sessions to all kinds of organisations in 2019). This group are utterly convinced that insidious forces like, err Stonewall, have been going into school persuading gender nonconforming kids they are really trans and are equally outraged that LGBT inclusive sex education means actually telling young people how LGB people sometimes have sex. References to anal sex in particular has been one area of major concern with the LGBT charity The Proud Trust attacked over admittedly quite cringy teaching aid that gender critical activists felt gave the message to girls that is was okay to have anal sex. Just as an aside , there's shades of QAnon here with some, but by no means all, activists thinking this all represents some dark paedophile plot to sexualise children and undermine consent.

Last week Liz Truss anounced the Government would not be going ahead with reforms to allow trans people to self ID if they want to change the sex on their birth cerificate, however her announcement fell short of her earlier somewhat unexpected pledge to strengthen the law around single sex spaces and prevent children from making lifelong decisions about their bodies (which some had hoped meant a move to ban trans healthcare for young people). This announcement appears to have thrown the government into disarray with big corporate bodies like google, Sky, Disney and the Financial Times issuing a panicked letter to the government worried about the kind of bathroom bill which almost bankrupted North Carolina. So they've been looking at ways to try and show they are shitting on trans people without actually doing anything. Hence these guidelines, which have a whole section about how organisations going into schools musn't tell children they are born in the wrong body or that if they are gender nonconforming they are really the other sex, which no-one really did. They also highlight that RSE materials must be age appropriate, which was always pretty much the case. So not much is likely to change in terms of RSE content and in fact the guidelines still recommend Stonewall as a teaching resource to the dismay of those convinced they have an agenda to 'trans' children.

What's weird is they have also added all this other stuff about political groups, cancel culture and anti-capitalism to guidelines on who can teach sex education. And what's weirder is that according to Schoolsweek the DfE have confirmed that the new guidelines are not statutory and as such schools have no legal duty to follow them. The far more benign guidelines which are still statutory and so which schools must follow can be found here. The whole thing seems to have been an attempt to use guidelines to schools to generate some kind of culture war row in the media, possibly signal future intent, or test the mood, as well as try to indicate they were getting tough on cancel culture and other current bugbears of the right. So they've banned the Socialist Worker Party and Extinction Rebellion from teaching sex education, except they haven't even done that. This is a very strange way of doing Government, I suspect influenced by Trump but also possibly because Ministers like Truss sense the leadership is weak and are using dirty tricks to try and force policy direction.

Interesting, thanks for this, makes things a bit clearer. What worthless arseholes they are.

 

[smokedout]

Interesting, thanks for this, makes things a bit clearer. What worthless arseholes they are.

I think the worry is that the kind of off the cuff legislating that has emerged in response to Covid is now leaking across government departments and whilst Ministers cannot unilaterally change the law they can use what powers they have to try and push things in a certain direction.

 

[Struwwelpeter]

Smokedout's post and the links are really useful at taking the spin out. I'm still concerned with this:

• promoting divisive or victim narratives that are harmful to British society

I can see how certain victim narratives might offend Daily Mail values and I won't always agree with a victim's perspective, but if victims cannot be heard, then that's a pretty poor reflection of British society whatever that means.

As for divisive narratives, that's the government banned again.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Smokedout's post and the links are really useful at taking the spin out. I'm still concerned with this:

• promoting divisive or victim narratives that are harmful to British society

I can see how certain victim narratives might offend Daily Mail values and I won't always agree with a victim's perspective, but if victims cannot be heard, then that's a pretty poor reflection of British society whatever that means.

As for divisive narratives, that's the government banned again.

Yep. That one bothers me a lot as well. Sod Trump. That's straight out of Putin's playbook. Vague enough to be used against just about any marginalised group daring to stand up for themselves.

The subtext to that is that there already exists a thing called 'British society' that isn't divided. Pernicious stuff.

 

[smokedout]

It's very vague and potentially very far reaching. This clause:

• the encouragement or endorsement of illegal activity
• a failure to condemn illegal activities done in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people or property

Both the TUC and Friends of the Earth run programmes in schools, and both could potentially fall foul of this were it to be universally implemented, FoE have supported XR and the TUC the school strikes. Given neither are likely to be involved in providing sex education then it's unlikely to affect them yet, but it does potentially provide a two directional chilling effect were it to become broader policy. Firstly, the TUC don't go into schools to preach communism (sadly) but to do workshops on workplace rights and union membership and stuff like that. But under these guidelines it wouldn't matter, the fact they have previously publically supported illegal civil disobedience could see them banned from schools regardless of what they are actually there to talk about. The other side of it is that organisations which do a large amount of work in schools, may now feel unable to speak out on some social issues or offer support to to groups like XR and BLM in case it sees them banned from schools.

Should say this all comes with the caveat that as yet no-one has actually been banned from schools.

 

[Dogsauce]

It's not just about overthrowing capitalism.

The guidance states:

Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances...examples include but are not limited to;

...the encouragement or endorsement of illegal activity
...a failure to condemn illegal activities done in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people or property

It’s that ‘violence against property’ thing again. I might go out later and shout at a wall, just to test the boundaries of what’s accepted.

 

[Jeremiah18.17]

I agree that the way this has been floated is nonsensical and relates to limited areas of the curriculum. But as has been said, that is not what pronouncements of this sort are about, primarily. I think what we have here is a culture war green flag to every right wing conservative parent to launch vexatious complaints against schools or individual teachers for anything they don’t like. That has been part of the new right strategy for some time - it doesn’t even matter if the complaints are dismissed/rebutted - the point is to further implement the transformation of every public sphere (artistic, cultural and educational as well as political etc) into a field of battle for the culture war where people are asked to “pick a side” - and the “sides” are constantly changing due to religious/cultural/class differences in the population targeted for disruption. The benefits for the right/owning class are obvious - the more division in every sphere, the more those with formal, legally protected economic power can impose their will against fragmented and fractious opposition.

 

[killer b]

This whole thing is weirder than it appears, so bear with me if this seems a tangent. The new guidelines do not ban anti-capitalist groups from schools, they ban anti-capitalists groups from teaching Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) which is all the guidelines relate to. RSE has obviously been controversial with the protests against No Outsiders, whilst gender critical activists led by the seemingly obsessed Tory semi-grandee Baroness Nicholson have been lobbying hard to kick trans charity Mermaids out of schools (*spoiler, Mermaids barely go into schools anyway and even then only to train teachers not kids - according to their annual report they only delivered 138 training sessions to all kinds of organisations in 2019). This group are utterly convinced that insidious forces like, err Stonewall, have been going into school persuading gender nonconforming kids they are really trans and are equally outraged that LGBT inclusive sex education means actually telling young people how LGB people sometimes have sex. References to anal sex in particular has been one area of major concern with the LGBT charity The Proud Trust attacked over admittedly quite cringy teaching aid that gender critical activists felt gave the message to girls that is was okay to have anal sex. Just as an aside , there's shades of QAnon here with some, but by no means all, activists thinking this all represents some dark paedophile plot to sexualise children and undermine consent.

Just to pick up on this, while Stonewall and Mermaids etc might not 'go into' schools, their material is certainly available in (some) schools. My daughter and all her pangender mates have made liberal use of the books in the LGBT section of their school library. Is this aimed at removing these materials?