The ruling left-separatist party in Scotland has vowed to introduce “anti-racist education” in order to confront the “UK’s colonial history”.
The election manifesto from the Scottish National Party (SNP), dubbed “Scotland’s Future“, said that the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired the party to mandate that schools teach Marxist-style attacks on British history to their pupils.
“The Black Lives Matter movement has shone a powerful spotlight on continuing racial injustice and race-based violence, and the need for countries to face their colonial history,” said the manifesto for the party, which runs the British home nation’s devolved government — roughly equivalent to a state government in the United States.
“We will create a new programme of anti-racist education in schools, including support for teachers’ professional development, allowing every school to access high-quality anti-racist education. To track progress, we will improve the reporting and publication of data on racist incidents in schools,” the SNP continued.
The woke manifesto also called for “LGBT history, role models and equalities education” to be taught in Scottish schools as a bulwark against “homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic bullying”.
Responding to the leftist education agenda being pushed by the SNP, a professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh, Lindsay Paterson, told The Telegraph that racism has already been featured in the curriculum since the 1980s.
“The important point is that teachers are very experienced in teaching contentious issues in a balanced way. It’s unfortunate when politicians don’t recognise the good work that has been done, including the work that has found a way of dealing with controversial issues objectively,” Professor Paterson said.
“Politicians are better to leave this kind of topic to teachers, who know very well how to handle controversy sensitively,” the academic claimed.
Retired teacher and chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, Chris McGovern, was also critical of the manifesto pledge, saying that it is, in fact, “racist to teach history through the narrow perspective being proposed by the SNP.”
“Humankind’s capacity for good and evil has nothing to do with skin colour. The SNP’s education policy needs to stop playing truant with truth,” McGovern said.
The SNP candidate for the Motherwell & Wishaw constituency, Clare Adamson, defended the manifesto pledge, saying: “The SNP is committed to strengthening education for our young people and recognising the importance of having equality and human rights embedded in our education.
“Only by listening to the very real concerns raised, and recognising and learning from our past, will we be able to properly move forward together. It is not the case that teaching on racism should be even-handed. Racism is wrong and our schools should say so.”
Since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United Kingdom last year following the death of George Floyd in America, leftists at institutions throughout Scotland have taken the opportunity to further their iconoclastic aims.
Last year, for example, the Edinburgh University removed the name of Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume — a progressive in the 18th century — from one of its buildings over his now politically incorrect opinions.
Continuing the leftist assault on British heritage, Scotland’s oldest public museum, the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, announced in February that it would be hiring a “curator of discomfort” to highlight historical and modern “white supremacy”.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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