It takes a lot of trust when you take your child to school and hand them over to a teacher. They believe that they protect their offspring and give them the chance to learn to read, write and do arithmetic.
They hope they will also support them in making friends, protecting them from bullying and teaching them to understand and discuss the world they are growing up in. They trust the school to provide instruction based on known and verified facts.
So what on earth do you do when your child comes home and reports that they are learning things that you disagree with or do not support – and their teacher, whom you should be able to trust, responds by saying that he just can’t tell you anything about it?
That question came up this week at a state secondary school in south-east London, where teenagers were reportedly being taught that some of them had “white privilege” and were part of “discriminatory systems of power”. In other words, a set of catchphrases related to the identity politics that have taken hold in the United States.
A violent image was shown to a 13-year-old in an art class in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests. Concerned, the parents of a girl at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College complained and asked to see copies of lesson plans
In the wake of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, parents say a violent image was shown to a 13-year-old in an art class. The poster showed white and black people stabbing each other.
Posters produced by the children in response featured an image of a girl who had been shot in the head and slogans such as ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). The students were played a song by rapper Dave that included the line “our Prime Minister is a real racist”.
Concerned, the parents of a girl at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College complained and asked to see copies of the syllabuses so that they, as parents, could assess whether their daughter’s syllabus was unacceptable.
It seems a perfectly reasonable request. After all, you are responsible for your own child. And you don’t sign that authority at the school gates.
Remember that a parent has the right to withdraw their child from sex education or religious education if they feel such subjects are unsuitable for their family.
I remember being sent to a Catholic elementary school as a very young girl because her academic reputation was second to none. We weren’t Catholic, so my parents demanded that I be barred from religious classes and meetings. Instead, they sent me to a Church of England Sunday school. Her decision didn’t harm me and I was quite relieved that at the age of six I wasn’t taught that any wrongdoing I committed would result in me roasting in the fires of hell.
Jenni Murray (pictured) argues that parents have a right to know what their children are being taught in class
But the family in the most recent case have been told that any mother or father can request a timetable, but the school is under no legal obligation to provide it.
What? It’s unheard of for the school system to assume that what a child is taught is ultimately none of their parents’ business. What is happening here is the politicization of the curriculum. It is profoundly wrong to consider secret details of what children are learning. Why would a school consider it okay to keep something so important to a young person’s development, understanding, thinking and questioning ability under wraps?
And yet it seems to be an increasingly common attitude. So how do you react when your child says someone in a sex ed class told them, for example, that there are dozens of different genders and that anyone can change their biological sex?
Given this situation, I would have to answer that the school was wrong. And then, as a parent, I would have to ask myself why I didn’t know that such nonsense was being taught to my child as fact.
Clare Page, the mother in question, had previously complained about the classes on race, sex and gender, concluding that her daughter was being indoctrinated.
This latest controversy was the last straw. Ms Page wrote to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the problem – and pulled her daughter out of school.
All of these issues—race, gender, and gender—have come to the fore in recent years. Yes, it is important for young people to discuss and understand them. But they are highly political and must be treated with great care.
I remember when choosing a school for my two boys, I asked serious questions about how the principals would go about instilling in all their male students the importance of gender equality.
They didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Another said he has a few “ladies” in the art department. A third said there were discussions about housework and washing up for the little ones, approval for the big ones, and he had brought in women for math and physics classes.
Boys, he said, need to know that women aren’t just good at art and English.
This is the school I went to. My choice. My right as a parent to know.
These WAGs can change the world
Carrie Johnson and Brigitte Macron in Germany this week as their husbands put the world in order. Jenni Murray asks why they agree to be photographed like this
A series of highly intelligent, powerful women envisioned looking decorative as they hike through the German countryside while their husbands put the world in order. Why do they agree to be photographed like this? They are the world’s top women, not the WAGs of the World Cup soccer players on the struts in Baden-Baden. Stop it. around the table. do something useful.
Victoria Brignell (pictured) was stuck on a plane for an hour and a half because no one could lift her into a wheelchair
Airlines are failing disabled travelers
My strong back means I can’t walk far and assistance at the airport is essential. Too often I’ve been stuck on a plane waiting for a wheelchair. When I recently returned from the States, everything was going smoothly – so I dared to hope that the airlines would finally solve this tricky problem. But then I heard the horror story of my former colleague Victoria Brignell, about how she was stuck on a plane for an hour and a half because there was no one to hoist her into a wheelchair. Unlike Victoria who is paralyzed, I can get up and walk if I have to. There is no choice for her and it is disgusting that she was left without help. That’s not new. It has been going on for years and shows total disregard for disabilities. It’s inhumane and needs to be sorted now.
- Zoriana’s WhatsApp, temporarily back home in Lviv after renewed bombings in Kyiv and the destruction of a shopping center in central Ukraine. “Everything so bad. i cry every day Poor people. For what reason?’ What for?
My postie is not really a caring type
Jenni says there’s little consistency in who delivers her mail. They rarely put letters in their mailbox
As an older person, I’m not sure I would trust my postman to keep an eye on me as suggested this week. It’s never the same one that shows up at my door, so there would be little consistency. They come sometimes at dawn, sometimes late at night. They rarely drop letters in the mailbox I taped by the front door, and instead push them through the door to be eaten by the dogs. Worst of all, half the time they bring me mail from a neighbor a few blocks away just because we have a similar-sounding address.