Stop teaching white children to feel guilty
I honestly don't think ' Britain's strictest headteacher ' has ever said anything I disagree with. In fact, when I read her statements, I sometimes find myself light-headed with relief. In a landscape so thickly forested with absurdity, perversity and plain idiocy, a nugget of common sense shines like a stray diamond – and to follow that common sense with action is rarer still.
Yesterday was a case in point. Speaking at a conference for the Family Education Trust at the weekend, Birbalsingh – who runs the Michaela Community School in Wembley, north-west London – criticised schools for focusing on diversity to such an extent that any 'sense of British history' is lost. 'You've got various 'diversity days' bringing all different foods, etc. I am the most diverse person you'll ever find in terms of my background,' explained the 51-year-old daughter of an Indo-Guyanese academic and a Jamaican nurse, who was born in New Zealand and raised in Canada. 'But the fact is that there's nothing unifying the school.' She added: 'If there are no values that everyone buys into – whatever their background, whatever their religion – then there's nothing to hold them together.' Also: 'Why are they not learning algebra? That's what I'd like to know.'
They are not learning algebra, or indeed grammar, because of the moral high grounders who have decided that their virtue-signalling agenda is more important. Because once you're done explaining the legitimacy of every one of the 72 genders, that all white people are racist and that, as Brits, we should all be ashamed of our colonialist past, there's not much time left in the school day for the solving of equations. Never mind that we could consequently be launching illiterate and innumerate children into the world. These two things can devastate an adult's life chances and happiness, limiting their access to basic services alongside better-paying and more-rewarding jobs, and perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of poverty. Let's get stuck into 'white privilege', into self-flagellation and societal division!
Setting aside the gaps of knowledge these children may be left with (and the skewed historical perspectives they will be stuck with), how is any of this about diversity? How did a concept based on embracing variety and inclusion become about promoting division – about blame, guilt, and building walls where there were none?
We see it everywhere in adult life. As one gay, Asian friend told me: 'After a lifetime of nobody commenting on either my gayness or my Asian-ness, people are now ever keen to point out both, even in a professional context. They think it makes them 'progressive'. To me, it feels extremely regressive.'
In schools, Birbalsingh has seen the same thing happen, she says: children being split into ethnic, religious or LGBTQ+ groups, young people having their differences highlighted, purely so that they can be used to demonstrate how OK we all are with those differences. Not just OK but thrilled for them! This is 'wrong', but British teachers are mired in 'white guilt', she explains. So let them enjoy a night in with a hair shirt and a knotted cord – why bring the children into it?
What do you think the psychological impact of telling a generation of children that they are inherently bad will be? Off the top of my head, I'm thinking: not good. The teaching of ' toxic masculinity ' wasn't a massive success, was it? I mean, if the resulting disaffection, social dislocation, poor academic performance, and mental health epidemic is anything to go by. And the ' white privilege ' narrative is scarily similar: you're toxic, not because of your gender this time, but your skin colour and your country of birth.
In her book, The Power of Culture, Birbalsingh explains why what is taught by those who stand in front of a classroom is actually pretty similar to 'battling for the future of a civilisation'. 'For if the culture of our schools affects the character of our pupils, and the character of our pupils then eventually shapes the culture of our society, undoubtedly what we teach our pupils does make a genuine difference to the world around us.'
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