Wake up to woke
New figures have shown a dramatic increase in the number of children being taught at home.
It’s possible that more than 100,000 children are not attending school – double the number before the pandemic.
Although parents got a taste of teaching during the lockdowns, they are not professionals and it’s hard to check what they are teaching their children.
There are obvious things that home-schooled children miss out on; socialising with peers, playing and learning in teams, being part of a school environment, not having specialist teachers and not learning independence.
Some parents, having had their children at home during the pandemic, just haven’t sent them back to school.
Others claim their children’s mental health prevents them from attending.
I would say to those parents – send your children to school if you possibly can. If you care about their education you should try and have them taught by experts.
Maybe some parents don’t value education. Maybe they hated school and don’t want their children to have the same experiences.
If so we need to convince them otherwise.
There might also be those from religious groups who don’t want their children being taught in a mainstream system. I say, send them. We want a society that brings people together and doesn’t seek to separate them.
However, there is one group of home-schoolers with whom I have some sympathy. It’s a small group but might well grow.
These are parents who home teach because their local schools have ‘gone woke’ – or teach things such as critical race theory and other US-inspired ideas that have little or no merit.
Already we are seeing in schools young children identifying as all manner of things. Lesbian one week, non-binary the next, then trans, then straight, then back to lesbian.
They treat it like fashion. And schools indulge them because they believe they have a legal responsibility to do so, and are scared to death of the reaction if they don’t. They are frightened of being cancelled.
When an 11-year-old boy tells a teacher he is now identifying as the opposite sex, the teacher, rather than say ‘not at school you don’t, you’re a boy’, says ‘Okay then’.
It seems common sense has gone out of the window.
Many children want to be ‘special’, but rather than pretending to be princesses or heroes as they used to, now claim to be trans or some other identity that has come from the US.
Humouring them really doesn’t help.
It’s not to say that a tiny percentage of children don’t have genuine gender dysphoria and should be treated accordingly, but not the numbers some schools report.
We are also seeing in schools other bizarre trends imported from America.
Just recently, New Mills School in Derbyshire organised a Pride event at which children were encouraged to dress in ‘full blown drag’.
A drag queen had been invited to read stories to the young children.
Parents kicked up a fuss and the event was scrapped.
But what does it say about our schools that this sort of thing is going on?
This might be normal for right-on teachers who have graduated from left-wing, woke universities, but as New Mills School discovered, it is not something parents approve of.
Drag is a long-standing art form that exists to entertain by ridiculing women with men wearing exaggerated costumes.
Why schools in the US (and now here) choose to have drag queens reading to children, rather than teachers, hasn’t been explained.
Critical race theory is another import that is taking hold. It has little or no basis in proper academic research as far as I can tell, and serves only to divide people – bizarrely – along lines of skin pigmentation.
Poor Martin Luther King must be turning in his grave. Make schools teach what Dr King believed in!
And it is not just in state schools where this is happening. Katharine Birbalsingh, the founder and head teacher of the Michaela Community School in London, which uses discipline and traditional methods to achieve success, has pointed the finger at posh public schools.
They too are succumbing to the woke agenda, prioritising feelings over facts and pushing theories without properly critiquing them.
We are also seeing in society more widely a trend of importing US-spawned ideas, theories and cultural habits that really have no place here because our histories and societies are so different.
Schools should turn out children who are able to assess theories, argue a case, understand what objective facts are, and not be too frightened or cowed to express and defend their opinions.
This is what parents want and what they should have. If schools knocked the wokeness on the head and instead concentrated on proper education there would be no need for concerned parents to home-school their children.