The National Trust — Britain’s biggest and richest conservation charity — invited groups of schoolchildren to lecture staff on the evils of colonialism and the slave trade, it has emerged.
According to the Telegraph:
The Trust arranged for staff and volunteers to be told about the impact of the British empire by so-called “child advisory boards” at a number of “selected properties”, the charity said. None of the Trust’s team was forced to take part.
The staff were lectured about imperial history by school children who have been taking part in the Trust’s Colonial Countryside project, in conjunction with academics from Leicester University.
The hope is that the process will ensure that “British imperial history is fully represented in the organisation’s country houses”.
Hmm. Children lecturing adults on how to think correctly. Where have we heard of that before?
Oh yes. China’s Cultural Revolution, for one: when kids were encouraged by the Communist regime to denounce and reject their parents and when members of Mao’s Red Guard brutally ‘re-educated’ adults out of their bourgeois reactionary tendencies in so-called ‘struggle sessions.’
The National Trust’s version of this was to recruit ethnic minority children from primary schools (ie children of 11 or younger) to ‘reverse mentor’ those adults unfortunate enough to have to endure hearing children regurgitate information which they had presumably been spoon fed by their leftist teachers.
According to the Daily Mail:
Reverse-mentoring ‘pairs people who might otherwise not come together,’ according to the government. ‘It ensures mutual benefit to both the mentor and mentee. The mentee gains new skills and perspectives, the mentor gains valuable insights.’
The trust said 100 primary children, most of whom are of African, Caribbean and South Asian heritage, have visited 10 National Trust houses to craft fiction and short essays which are then presented to live, print and digital audiences.
This is just the latest example of the National Trust’s relentless slide towards terminal wokeness.
Previous examples include:
Putting Churchill’s old home – Chartwell – on a naughty step list of properties associated with ‘colonialism and slavery.’
Praising Black Lives Matter as a ‘worldwide human rights movement’.
Amplifying ‘global warming’ propaganda with unscientific claims about how ‘climate change’ could change Britain’s formal gardens forever.
Exaggerating the importance of LGBT issues in the National Trust’s heritage – even encouraging hapless, often elderly and conservative volunteer staff members to wear rainbow badges.
All of these developments, it ought to go without saying, are anathema to the National Trust’s primarily white, middle class base, who just want to be left alone to enjoy Britain’s landscapes and country houses without prissy, finger-wagging lectures slily accusing them of barely-suppressed racism, homophobia or climate change denial.