Schoolchildren need to be afforded the ability to make up their own minds on political matters rather than being “indoctrinated” into particular positions by teachers, Education Secretary Nadhim Zawahi said on Sunday.
Amid growing concerns about far-left ideologies such as Critical Race Theory being pushed upon British schoolchildren in school districts such as Brighton, Conservative MP and the government’s Education Secretary, Nadhim Zawahi called on schools to maintain impartiality.
Zawahi is reportedly investigating Brighton and Hove city council over teachers being coached up on the latest leftist views on race in “Racial Literacy 101” courses that told teachers that children are not “racially innocent”.
In an open letter written in The Sun newspaper on Sunday, the education secretary — who is supposedly in charge of England’s national curriculum — stressed the importance of schools being free from political proselytising.
“Children need to form their own views at the same time as they learn to respect those of others,” he wrote. “This is how we prepare young people to take their place as a well-balanced and tolerant member of society.”
“That is why parents and carers need to be able to trust schools to be totally impartial. They need to be confident that their children can learn about political issues and begin to form their own independent opinions, without being influenced by the personal views of those teaching them.
“No school should be encouraging young people to pin their colours to a particular political mast… Put simply, it means education, not indoctrination.”
The education secretary admitted that while “legal duties on political impartiality have been in place for many years,” the government has not clearly defined the perameters of play when discussion contensious polical issues “like the legacy of the British Empire or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
In a veiled comment on the Marxist Black Lives Matter movemet, Zawahi said that when teaching lessons surrounding racism, teachers should impress upon children that it has “no place in our society” but should refrain from endorsing organisations “that have widely contested political aims or views.”
He said that to combat the alleged confusion of schools surrounding political impartiality, guidance will be published for teachers next week by the government to prevent such indoctrination from occurring.
The op-ed from Zawahi comes amid ongoing controversy surrounding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Brighton and Hove council.
In January, it was reported that the Green Party-controlled city council had embarked on conducting seminars for teachers in which they were told that children as young as three and five-years-old could be the beneficiaries of so-called “white privilege”.
In an interview earlier this month, Green Party Councillor Hannah Clare questioned why the teaching of CRT principles was seen as controversial, claiming that the Marxist doctrine merely seeks to “talk about racism”.
She said that because white people “potentially experienced benefits from their race” it was important for teachers “to tackle” how “white privilege and institutional racism impacts our city’s pupils and staff”.
The Deputy Leader and Chair of the Children, Young People and Skills Committee for the city council went on to say: “This isn’t some covert thing it’s been going on for over a year.”
Aside from Critical Race Theory creeping its way into the UK education system, there has been a longstanding push to “decolonise the cirriculum” by leftist educators in response to the alleged deliterious impacts of the British Empire and slavery — a practice first abolished by Great Britain, which took great pains to stamp out slave trades throughout the world.
Targets of the woke decolonising drive have included Issac Newton, sheet music, Medieval English literature, the Queen, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and even lectures on tropical viruses.
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