Who owns Britain’s schoolchildren? Parents or teachers?

Steven Tucker

October 25, 2024 13 Reactions

Hey teachers – leave those kids alone!

Williams’ initial focus is upon the newly compulsory subject of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE), which came into effect in 2021, under the supposedly “Conservative” government of PM Boris Johnson. Prior to this, there were long-standing Sex Education lessons in British schools, from which parents had the legal right to opt-out their children, but the introduction of the brand-new “Relationships” element was now to become every bit as inescapable as a child learning their ten times tables.

Why would a “Conservative” government pull a stunt like this? Maybe it had something to do with the WHO and UNESCO officially pushing what Williams terms “a shift from sex to sexuality education” in the classrooms of compliant nations (i.e., not those in the Middle East, Africa or Asia, where Burkean intergenerational chains still remain largely rust-free).

In RSE lessons, “Children were taught not to assume that cisgendered people, heterosexual relationships or the traditional family are in any way ‘normal’”, even though they are. This is not the same as being told some people are gay, some people are single parents, and some men wear dresses, or whatever, but something fundamentally different, an active politicised promotion of the non-normative over the normative, and an attempt to wean children off the ideas of normality they would have absorbed previously at home (unless they had six polyamorous gay dads or something, in which case, fine, that kind of “normal” can remain safely untouched by the State).

Ironically, a safe withdrawal from these new Sex Education lessons was impossible. This was bad, as it quickly proved a prime field for outside quackery. RSE is a completely new, completely invented subject – at least in terms of the “Relationships” element of things, it’s already biologically well-established what men and women are, why males can’t have periods, that kind of basic Year 7 thing. As such, Williams reminds readers that “It has no disciplinary basis, no substantive body of knowledge, and … there is no such thing as a relationships ‘expert’”, not even Oprah Winfrey.

Hence, most teachers being understandably reluctant to stand up in front of their class and say “I’m a leading expert on under-age child sexuality, in fact it’s my personal hobby,” many effectively had next to no idea of what to actually teach their pupils about this stuff.

This led to an open door for biased activists and pressure groups of dubious motivation to push their way into schools to begin warping infant minds with openly paedophilic nonsenses like so-called “sex positivity classes”, which involved informing children of the importance of “stepping away from heteronormative and monogamy-based assumptions”.

In Williams’ account, “This could involve children being taught about topics such as masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, fisting, rough sex, gender queer or polyamory, with the youngest children expected to engage in activities such as drawing penises and making vulvas out of Play-Doh.” When I was at school, if one of the children doodled a penis in their exercise book, they were given detention; now they get a gold star from Antonio Gutierrez.

Citizens of the world

Another non-traditional subject now taught across Britain is Citizenship, which became compulsory in UK schools under Tony Blair’s New Labour government in 2002. At the time, I recall this being sold as being all about “instilling British values” like tolerance, diversity, etc (actually Left-wing values disingenuously universalised, but never mind) within the minds of poorly-integrated immigrant groups like Muslims in the wake of anti-Western terror attacks like 9/11.

However, Williams demonstrates that, actually, the Blairites’ public justification for Citizenship lessons was false. The initial report into the whole idea of Citizenship lessons was produced in 1998, under one Professor Bernard Crick, who said they should aim at creating “no less than a change in the political culture of this country, both nationally and locally”.

In other words, to systematically brainwash children in values directly opposed to those of their own families.

Many UK readers will at this point protest that, depending upon their age, “I/my kids never had any Citizenship lessons at all!”, which will probably be quite true. Rather than timetabling specific Citizenship lessons, schools were given the alternative of quietly delivering their content unspoken, via the covering medium of the other, more traditional subjects. By disguising a particular subjective political value as an “objective” answer in other lessons, Williams demonstrates how “Children are encouraged to take on board a particular moral outlook without the capacity to disagree.” For example, if children learn in Geography class that fair trade is better than free trade, or that the whole planet will die without an immediate transition towards Net Zero, answers they are subsequently required to slavishly reproduce on exam papers or fail, they are highly likely to absorb the automatic assumption that these opinions are not opinions at all, but simple indisputable facts.

But what, in the Geography exams of tomorrow, will British schoolchildren be required to answer to any questions about whether Brexit was good or bad? After the 2016 “Leave” vote was won, the UK’s Education Secretary was Justine Greening, a pointless pale dribble of a woman whose sole notable achievement in the role was to use it as a very public platform to come out as being a lesbian, thereby winning automatic applause from her already successfully re-educated parliamentary peers. Clearly recognising one of their own successfully installed in position, once they saw the Brexit vote take place against their wishes, Williams reveals how a number of Remain-voting headteachers and high-ups in professional teaching and education unions wrote Greening a letter demanding she subvert Citizenship lessons even further so that:

“Their focus was not national, but global citizenship, whereby children are taught to think of themselves not of members of a nation, but of the world. In other words, the role of Citizenship education, in substituting an international focus for affinity with the nation state, was to pose a direct challenge to the sentiments that were assumed to have led to British citizens voting to leave the EU. In this way, citizenship classes were also to distance children from the values of their parents, an older generation held responsible for the result of the 2016 referendum.”

Thus, having lost the referendum first time around, democracy had to be systematically subverted so that, in a few decades’ time, a new vote could be held in which a younger replacement electorate, successfully brainwashed into EU-loving transnationalism, could vote Britain back into the EU, once their evil, braindead, fascist parents and grandparents had finally died off and gone to Hell, where all racist Leave-voters clearly must dwell, alongside their clear historical antecedents, the Huns and Nazis.

In this way, explains Williams, “the interests of a small group of curriculum planners are recast as universal moral values” in the susceptibly empty minds of the young.

If children are the future, God help us!

Of course, some parents are still quite young when they have their children – especially if they’ve been impregnated at the age of six or seven thanks to the helpful influence of the kind folx providing them with free sex positivity classes next to the swings – so take an annoyingly long time to die off, often lingering on for several decades and performing politically unacceptable acts like doubting male pregnancies are real, or continuing to use real petrol-powered cars instead of toy electric ones whose engines don’t work properly.

In these sad cases, says Williams, “On matters such as climate change or gender identity, children are expected [to come out of school primed] to educate their parents and other adults, rather than the other way around,” a complete inversion of the way things are meant to be: hence the contemporary eulogising of the strange Swedish Child-Saint, Thunberg.

Examples are even provided by Williams of arrogant Red Guard schoolchildren disciplining their own teachers for using supposedly sexist “speech crime” phrases like “Hi guys!” when a girl is present, or getting a lowly-paid playground assistant sacked for openly doubting whether little boys should be using skipping ropes. The mad little Maoists are then supposed to take these attitudes back home with them and employ them against their parents too. But why don’t their mums and dads just strangle them with their skipping-ropes in response, as all self-respecting adults would have done until quite recently?

Williams’ answer is that parenting itself has become deliberately pathologised across the West by those who would seek to subvert and ultimately destroy the family unit for weird, Marxist-type reasons. She specifically mentions Sophie Lewis, the extreme anti-family activist author of Abolish the Family, who argues that said institution is “a shitty contract pretending to be a biological necessity” and the place “where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder.” I always thought that was the Middle East?   

Williams demonstrates how many parents today have become relentlessly paranoid, far away indeed from the almost blasé attitudes of their forebears. Due to the combined influence of politicians, media, academics, psychologists and others, neurotic adults in the 21st century West have moved from simply “having children”, a simple natural activity even families of monkeys can do, to something much more allegedly “professional” called “parenting”, which can apparently be learned from books, courses and pamphlets.

And, if parenting is a professional practice, it must perforce primarily be left to the trained professionals, not mere amateurs – i.e., the teacher must play the largest role in raising the child, not the mother or father. Parents thus become merely “assistant managers” in the raising of THEIR OWN CHILDREN by the State.

Hence, oppressive situations like the following now occur across Britain on a daily basis: Mum packs a bar of chocolate in her daughter’s packed lunch as a treat. Then, the teacher/qualified Food-Stasi agent inspects said packed lunch as part of the school’s Department of Education-mandated “Healthy Eating Policy”, deems it inappropriate, confiscates said chocolate (probably to eat it herself) then calls mum in for “re-education” – what a parent feeds her own child is now a matter for the ever-benign State, evidently. I’d be tempted to lace the soon-to-be stolen Mars Bar with cyanide, myself, to teach the teacher a genuine lesson in life: namely, mind your own business. Fun Fact: some teachers are big and fat. So are some present UK government ministers, like Idi Amin’s current body-double, David Lammy. Should priggish schoolchildren inspect and confiscate their meals, too? 

It might be true that some parents really are unacceptably damaging to their children – some do kill, beat, burn, strangle, torture or eat them, after all – and the State should obviously intervene to rescue kids from aberrant monsters like these. However, says Williams, “the targeting of expertise has shifted from “problem” families to all mothers and fathers instead”, even those doing a perfectly good job of raising normal infants, not baby burglars or junior jihadists. In this strange, intrusive new world, a mother feeding her daughter a Mars Bar now becomes reclassified as a form of gross “child abuse”, and yet more evidence that Teacher – or Nanny, perhaps – Knows Best.

“I’m up for a fight over nanny state accusations,” Britain’s new Labour Party PM/Headmaster Sir Keir Starmer has said. “For a government to say ‘well that’s none of our business,’ I just think is fundamentally wrong.” So speaks the authentic voice of contemporary Left-wing #BeKind totalitarianism.

Some people never learn

At this point, certain regular readers will immediately jump in and type furious below-the-line responses like “Ah! Ah! Ah! But didn’t Catholic schools once used to teach helpless toddlers they’d go to Hell if they didn’t accept Jesus? Ah! Ah! Ah! What’s the difference between priests indoctrinating them in that and blue-haired transexuals from Stonewall indoctrinating two-year-olds into the world of queer sex?” To which Williams’ response would be as follows:

“Schools [of the past] have, at different times, sought to instil in children particular attitudes and values, such as obedience, religious piety, national pride, or respect for [not forcible worship of] multiculturalism and sexual equality. Such values rarely attracted the ire of parents because they were shared by most adults in society. Schools reflected the broader culture: they were not attempting to change it. Just as there was general agreement about the values to instil in children, so too there was a general consensus about what schools should teach.”

For example, probably not queer sex.

I was once a teacher in a Catholic all-girls’ school myself, one so traditional all the students still had the correct chromosomes. One day, a colleague returned from a course waving a worksheet in which pupils were to be asked to imagine they were trapped in an elevator with another child of their dreams, and list which specific deviant sexual practices they would most like to perform upon them. We chucked it in the bin as a satanic one-off. Now, I suspect we’d be forced to deliver such materials, in some form or other, or else face immediate woke defenestration.

Were the staff of the school all infant indoctrinators ourselves, though? If so we were very inept. Most of the pupils there clearly didn’t believe in the truth of Christianity any more than I believe in the truth of gender ideology, but they were never actually forced or pressured to do so. Outside of actual RE lessons and prayers in assemblies, the place wasn’t really all that religious at all. Indeed, some Muslim girls attended, and emerged conspicuously unconverted. Precisely the same applied when I attended a Catholic school myself as a child. None of my classmates became nuns or priests. Very few of them even emerged as regular church-goers. I’m pretty sure some of their modern-day equivalents today will be coming out as fully-formed brainwashed Commies, trannies, or obsessive climate-activists, however.

Plus, parents pretty obviously had a choice of whether or not they sent their kids to a Catholic school; there were plenty of local fully secular schools they could wave them off to instead, as is their perfect right. Do British parents get an equally meaningful choice about whether or not to send their kids to a Queer School these days?

Not really: as RSE lessons are compulsory in all UK state schools, that means they are now compulsory in Catholic schools too. The only way left to avoid them would be to enrol your offspring in an illegal underground madrassa. Either that or educate them yourself at home – which, if they read Joanna Williams’ excellent report into these matters, I suspect many parents soon will be. How pleasingly ironic it would be if, in its appalling attempts to destroy the liberalism-retarding power of the traditional family, the modern Leftist British State just ended up boosting its influence over infant minds instead.

“Give me the child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man,” the Jesuits used to say. The only change since those days is that the religion being proselytised by contemporary Woke Jesuits like Sir Keir Starmer today is a secular Social Justice one.  

Parents: do you have confidence in what your child learns at school about “relationships”?   

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

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