Education is not indoctrination

A recent poll for the NEU (National Education Union) has shown a massive collapse in support for Labour, but a huge leap for the Greens. The NEU is the biggest teaching union.

The poll asked for teachers’ voting intentions compared with how respondents voted in the last general election.

Predictably it shows vast support for left-wing parties and very low support for right-wing parties.

Zack Polanski’s hard-left Geen Party was the biggest winner among those polled.

Why does this matter?

Well, it shouldn’t matter in the classroom. Teachers are professionals and ought to be able to put their own political prejudices aside.

But in an environment in which almost everyone has the same political prejudices makes subconscious bias more likely.

When I was teaching in the state sector some years ago, most of my colleagues were left-wing. So, it is nothing new, although the percentage of left-wing teachers appears to have risen even further.

Of more concern to me is the fact that more teachers seem to be expressing their views in the classroom and are influencing children.

Education is not indoctrination.

But why are teachers more likely to be expressing their political views today?

I think in this era of identity politics, inclusion and cancelling views that you don’t like there is more pressure to identify with the left-wing education herd. There is a real fear of being cancelled.

If, for example, a teacher were to align themselves with Reform – a party polling above 30 per cent – they might well be shunned and avoided by colleagues.

There is more pressure now than ever to take the left-wing line.

More radical left-wing views are being openly expressed in society and the more traditional left of centre and right of centre opinions are being pushed aside.

Perhaps a bigger concern than teachers influencing children in the classroom is that radical leftist proponents tend to believe that progressive ideas in education are always the best way forward.

This is not true.

There are lots of radical ideas in education that just do not work. Take for example the Summerhill School of the 1960s, where students decided what they wanted to learn and what they didn’t want to learn.

This was pupil-centred learning in the extreme with no structure or proper curriculum – disastrous!

Before the National Curriculum was reformed by the Conservatives in 2014, the educational so-called experts had furnished the governments of the 1990s and early 2000s with a highly progressive curriculum. It sent us down the international league tables.

The main purpose of education is to ensure children are literate and numerate as this is the foundation children require to study other subject material.

If the vast majority of the teaching profession is left-wing then we are more likely to see these wacky ideas introduced as teachers and education professionals climb the promotion ladder in the unions and within political parties to positions of power.

Since the curriculum changes in 2014 things have improved, but the new Labour government is destined to make the same mistakes all over again and take us back to a version of the free-for-all of the 1960s.

ends