Bridget Phillipson is vandalising education

Anyone who cares about education should feel anxious as we head into this new year. Labour’s review of the English school curriculum, announced by education secretary Bridget Phillipson just days after taking office in July, looks set to replace the last vestiges of subject-based, knowledge-led education with the deadly hand of diversity, equity and inclusion.

The Department for Education’s terms of reference for the review, revealed by the Telegraph last week, state that the updated curriculum should ‘refresh’ what is taught in England’s schools. With this, Phillipson wants to ‘breathe new life into our outdated curriculum’. But the idea that subjects like literature, history, maths and science are ‘outdated’ only reveals her ignorance. Why must a genius like Shakespeare need to have ‘new life’ breathed into him? Do his works not stand for themselves? Can we not trust talented teachers to bring his words alive to a new generation of children? Apparently not.

Phillipson’s agenda should be clear. Let’s not forget that her first response to last summer’s riots was to argue for children to be ‘taught how to spot extremist content and misinformation online’. We have an education secretary who seems to think the entire purpose of schools is to solve social problems by shaping the political outlook of future citizens. There’s a word for this: indoctrination.

Of course, Phillipson is not acting alone. She may have initiated the review and set the terms of reference, but many of the ideas are coming from the educational establishment – a group Michael Gove labelled ‘the blob’ when he was education secretary. It’s this motley crew of teaching unions, think-tanks, university teacher-education departments and so-called learned societies that is at the forefront of politicising schools.

Proposals submitted by this blob include calls to ‘decolonise’ subjects they have branded ‘mono-cultural’. Teaching unions are calling for subjects like English literature to be less ‘traditional’ and ‘more diverse’. One union wants to ‘embed anti-racist and decolonised approaches’ in the curriculum, while another warns that, currently, ‘ethnicity and sexual orientation are under-represented’. Out will go literature by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen and 20th-century classics such as Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm. In will come contemporary identity-fiction such as trans-focussed novels like Dreadnought and If I Was Your Girl, or race-obsessed titles like Noughts and Crosses or The Hate U Give.

Exam boards are sending the same message. The Oxford and Cambridge exam board wants children to be taught more about climate change and diversity. It argues that teaching should ‘be focussed far more on the world as it now is and is going to be’ rather than on ‘canons of knowledge which have been built up over centuries’. The arrogance of dismissing hundreds of years of collective human wisdom and replacing it with modern-day moralistic instruction on climate change and diversity is truly astonishing.

Anyone looking at Britain’s schools and concluding the problem is too little politics badly needs a reality check. Children are already being subjected to gender-identity indoctrination in relationship- and sexuality-education classes. They are taught by campaigning teachers who ask them to ‘fast for Gaza’. They are subjected to assemblies and workshops inspired by critical race theory. The idea that the current curriculum promotes white nationalism through a diet of Shakespeare, Tennyson, the Battle of Waterloo and Churchill is a fantasy. In calling for more diversity, Phillipson is tilting at windmills.

The ‘updated’ curriculum will inevitably degrade education further. In attacking subjects such as English literature and history, children will be left not just academically impoverished, but also alienated from their own national heritage. All children can learn to love classic works of literature and understand the good and the bad in British history, irrespective of their skin colour, sex or sexuality. Constantly banging on about diversity is guaranteed only to divide children from each other and distance them from their family and community.

Phillipson is holding the doors of the Department for Education open to philistines that have no sense of beauty, truth or the importance of knowledge. Her own sympathies were made clear when she announced the sudden end of funding for a programme allowing state school pupils, particularly those in economically disadvantaged areas, to learn Latin. A subject that provides a gateway to the past and unlocks languages will no longer be accessible to thousands of children. In the guise of tackling elitism, Phillipson made the study of Latin a privilege available only to children from the most well-off families.

This petty virtue-signalling at the cost of children’s education sums up Labour’s plans for schools. There will be no escape from indoctrination. Plans have been announced to tighten up rules on home education and the new curriculum will be compulsory in all state schools, including academies that were previously free to opt out. And with Labour’s VAT raid on private schools, parents who had just about managed to scrape together money for fees now find they can no longer afford what the government deems to be a luxury.

Labour seems hell bent on playing politics with education. The upshot will be children skilled at reciting ideological platitudes, but alienated from the cultural heritage of their own nation, bereft of knowledge garnered from previous generations and without a basis for critical reflection. The curriculum review is an act of educational vandalism that cannot be allowed to proceed.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.