We don’t need no indoctrination: the politicisation of education
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According to a new book by Dr Joanna Williams, The Breaking of the Education Contract: Why we need to keep politics out of schools, schools are on the frontline of the culture wars. Some have signed up to Net-Zero or pro-migrant campaigns; others host events to mark Pride or Black History Month. In some Personal, Social and Health Education classes, children learn that some people have ‘white privilege’ or a ‘gender identity’.
Sometimes such concerns are dismissed as the febrile, exaggerated, paranoid imaginings of anti-culture wars commentators. But Dr Williams has the receipts, arguing that this is not just a few activist teachers. Government ministers call for schools to tackle misogyny and challenge the spread of misinformation, while even traditional academic subjects – like history and geography – reflect contemporary concerns with race, gender and sustainability. What’s more, politicising education may also come at a cost, creating tensions with parents who may not share the school’s progressive values or making it harder for teachers to pass on to children their intellectual and cultural inheritance.
Nor is this simply a problem in the UK. In Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation, Bella d’Abrera notes this transformation of education has been happening across Australia, Britain and the United States, with schools abandoning the transmission of knowledge in favour of political and ideological activism.
On the other hand, if conservative religious parents oppose the teaching of sex-ed in the classroom, don’t teachers have an obligation to challenge attitudes at odds with today’s more enlightened norms? Don’t schools have a role in socialising the young, without having to contend with accusations of indoctrination? Education has never been neutral or ‘value free’. Political, social and historic context has always informed what’s taught or studied; what’s defined as object knowledge and which subjects are prioritised over others. Even if not explicitly acknowledged, haven’t curriculum choices always legitimised certain ideologies and beliefs while ignoring or stigmatising alternative approaches?
What all sides may agree on is that education has long been an important tool to build the capabilities of young people. We teach them to challenge themselves and ideas in order to develop a capacity for critical thinking grounded in proper understanding. If that is true, is there a danger that educational institutions are trading intellectual challenge for prescriptive moral imperatives, often reflecting political fads rather than encouraging independent thinking? In recent years, there’s been a surge in pupils believing they are born in the wrong body; the majority of teenagers believe that it’s an incontrovertible fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and even very young pupils are well versed in identitarian linguistic tropes, believing that lived experience trumps objective knowledge. What part have schools, and what is taught in them, played in normalising such progressive orthodoxies amongst the young?
Dr Williams’ book calls for schools to set politics aside and return to a focus on education. But is the politicisation of education really a new phenomenon, or have our lessons always been riddled with moral norms and assumed beliefs? As the triumph of so-called radical progressive beliefs increasingly pervades our institutions and everyday perceptions, can schools ever be immune? If indoctrination is corrupting education and young minds, how can it be resisted?
