At The Daily Skeptic an Anonymous Teacher from England writes “I’m a Teacher and My School Has Become a Woke Indoctrination Factory.” It’s not just the wokey teachers. It goes up all the way to the national government in Whitehall.
[T]he Department for Education aims to give “all children, young people and adults the knowledge and skills to thrive in the green economy”. It asserts students (referred to as “learners”) “need to know the truth about climate change – through knowledge-rich education” so they can become “agents of change”.
But it was ever thus. Back in the day, of course, in Britain, the Powers That Be were tracking down Puritans and Dissenters. Then they got all nice, and they passed the Toleration Acts. Which meant that you could worship your Puritan god, but you couldn’t go to university or serve in government.
So, a chap like William Godwin, of Political Justice, the son of a Dissenting minister, couldn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge back in the 1770s. So he went to a 35 student Dissenting Academy in London for his university education. Then he went on to marry First Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, so that was all right.
When the Prussians reformed their education system and founded the university of Berlin in the Napoleonic Era — the Germans call it the Age of German Liberation — the idea was not to let the German kiddies get a good education in Reading, Writing and Enlightenment Philosophy. The idea was to make Germany strong so it could stand up against the French, who had spent the previous 200 years mucking about in Germany. Hey, maybe even give the Frenchies a dose of their own medicine at the Battle of Sedan.
When Horace Mann became the “father of the Common School” in the 1830s the idea was not to open a vista of educational freedom for evermore. No. The idea was to cure the Irish in Boston of their Catholicism, and to indoctrinate the little kiddies with the glories of Transcendentalism, then the fashion in the intellectual set in the US. Ralph Waldo Emerson didn’t go live on Walden Pond for nothing, you know.
Then there was the high school movement in the early 1900s. The idea was to provide students with skills “for life” in the industrial economy. In their own best interests. And obviously, from the New Deal onwards, US public schools were all about teaching children about the glories of the National Recovery Act, labor unions, Social Security, and, of course, the crown jewel of the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps.
By the 1960s we were teaching the kiddies about the horrors of Jim Crow and the perfect world to come with the enactment of civil rights for blacks and women.
Today the schools are teaching the kiddies all about the horrors of climate change. And also about the injustice of systemic racism, because apparently those dastardly white patriarchs managed to kneecap the civil rights revolution by killing Emmet Till. And all the teachers and administrators and Education Department bureaucrats are all on board for this sacred quest. All except those “far right” conspiracists.
So, the fact that the kiddies are being taught all about climate change and systemic racism is nothing new. ’Twas ever thus.
The ruling class always uses its power to indoctrinate the kiddies in the Regime Narrative.
I wonder what the next ruling class will teach the kids.