Let the youth be politically correct

From Compass magazine

In October last year, our primary school children were invited to take part in Walk to School Month. The theme was the ‘local environment, and how walking to school can help create sustainable local communities’.

Walk to School Month is a ratcheting up of that vital part of our children’s education, Walk to School Week, which took place earlier in 2007 and included a leaflet featuring a cartoon foot called Strider, who attacks the ‘evil pollutants’ created by cars that create global warming and will ‘destroy’ your planet. Sure beats maths, doesn’t it?

Our children might not be able to read or write but by golly they will become politically correct citizens.

The erstwhile Education Secretary Alan Johnson, insisted there should be geography lessons that would ensure children learnt about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’. Very New Labour, but quite why he thought this blatant propaganda might work when half the nation’s under-16s are ‘quite literally’ incapable of placing Britain’s major cities on a map – some London children even placing their own homes somewhere in the region of Cardiff – is a mystery.

But when a Secretary of State of Education talks like this, one thing that is certain is that soppy PC sentimentalism is fast replacing academic rigour in our schools.

In June this year a report entitled The Corruption of the Curriculum published by the think-tank Civitas claimed that crucial elements of the school timetable have been dispensed with in favour of trendy subjects. Teaching at state schools has been infused with politically correct dogma.

‘Traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender-awareness, the environment and anti-racism,’ it says. ‘Teachers are expected to help achieve the Government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.’

No sooner was the report published than the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) announced that secondary schools should ditch lessons in academic subjects and replace them with month-long projects in subjects such as global warming. In pilot schemes history, geography and citizenship have been merged.

‘The challenge for schools is to create a nourishing and appetising feast that will sustain learners and meet their needs,’ said the QCA’s curriculum director Mick Waters.

This vapid rhetoric tells you all you need to know about how political correctness is infusing our education system. The challenge for schools, surely, is to teach children to read, write, have a core understanding of scientific principles, be able to develop logical argument, compete in sports, win or lose with good grace and develop the skills to become responsible adults. It is not waffling on about nourishing the needs of ‘learners’.

Nor is it issuing them with a Home Energy Check from Creative Environmental Networks (cen) for mum and dad to fill in, or questionnaires to measure whether primary schools are improving children’s psychological wellbeing, as planned by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. What, pray, might they be asking them: ‘I feel stressed and it’s doing my head in’ please mark from number one to ten, where one is ‘strongly agree’ and ten is ‘strongly disagree’. Or maybe, I’m like, really hassled a) never; b) sometimes; c) often; d) always. Please discount trips to McDonald’s, Legoland or play zones.’

Some staff are not unnaturally exasperated by this nonsense. A petition signed by 130 science teachers protested at the removal of some of the academic content of a science GCSE curriculum because it requires pupils to discuss ‘issues’ such as pollution but not to learn ‘hard science’ such as the periodic table.

What is so disgraceful is that the period of the great one-size fits all comprehensive experiment has been the one where social mobility has been at its lowest. The educated middle class either tutor their children, move house to be near to a school that actually teaches its pupils or pay for their children’s education.

And they might be doing so for some time, if Mick Waters gets his way with timetables built around the ‘needs’ of pupils. ‘The idea is to offer less prescription and more opportunity to interpret the curriculum,’ he says. ‘Cutting across all subjects are curriculum dimensions; a set of themes including creativity, cultural understanding and diversity.’ Not much chance of the periodic table fitting in there, then.