Author Warns Critical Social Justice Undermining British Schools

Writer Jo-anne Nadler speaks to NTD's "British Thought Leaders" programme. NTD

A critical social justice “revolution” in schools is undermining British common values, says writer and campaigner Jo-Anne Nadler.

Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme about a report she authored on critical social justice in British schooling, Nadler said by “[bending] over backwards to encourage inclusivity, schools will end up “setting different groups against each other.”

The former journalist characterised critical social justice as seeing the world through the lens of “relationships of hierarchy and relationships of exploitation.”

While Marxism describes capitalists as explorers of workers, critical social justice “ranges over a number of different identities” based on race, gender, sexuality and more, Nadler said.

Most Students Taught Critical Social Justice Concept

Her report, published recently with civil society think tank Civitas, included the results of a poll that asked 1,168 students aged between 16 and 18 about their experience in schools.

Most of the teenagers (83 percent) have encountered one or more critical social justice concepts, such as white privilege, toxic masculinity, gender ideology, decolonisation, and intersectionality, in class, the survey showed.

Noting that the concepts could have come up in a lesson and were subsequently “conditionally dismissed” in some cases, Nadler also said, “we can’t necessarily assume that.”

Some 69 percent of students told the survey that they had been taught Britain used to be a racist country, while 42 percent learnt Britain is currently a racist country.

Nadler said teaching children in a multicultural society that the said society is “endemically racist” would potentially create “any number of grievances and psychological disruptions to impressionable children.”

Elsewhere in the survey, 41 percent of the students said they had been taught young men are a problem in society.

More than two-thirds (67 percent) of the student said they had been told by teachers or external speakers in school that sex is “assigned at birth.” Almost a-third (32 percent) were told “a woman can have a penis while one in five were told a man can get pregnant.

The teens were also taught about explicit sexual behaviour or kinks in school. Almost a quarter of the respondents (23 percent) reported hearing about bondage, dominance, and sadomasochism, and 59 percent had been taught about masturbation.

One in ten students said they had thought changing their gender or had done so, 29 percent reported knowing one such person, and 25 percent said they know “several” people who had changed or had considered changing their gender.

Three quarters of students said they were either worried about climate change, racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia, and/or feeling unsure or guilty about their own gender, ethnicity, or sexuality.

Just over half (51 percent) of the teens think it’s likely the world would end in their lifetime because of nuclear war, 43 percent believe climate change would end the world in their lifetime, and 50 percent said people should have fewer children to help prevent overpopulation and climate change.

‘It’s A Revolution’

Nadler said she believes critical social justice is revolutionising British education.

Instead of teaching students how to think, schools are now indoctrinating them by creating a “hermetically sealed vision” that not only posits the problem—namely “if you’re white and heterosexual and male, you’re almost certainly an exploiter in this system”—but also presupposes the answer, she said.

“I do think that there are agents coming into schools who have ideas which we would previously have considered partisan, and they’re being presented as though they are fact as though they are beyond discussion.”

Nadler attributed the reason schools are allowing the changes to the rise in importance of the equalities legislation, which obligates schools to “protect the protected characteristics of different people” on top of teaching traditional curriculum.

“And often what I think is happening is that the school leadership team don’t feel confident in this new area, and they call upon experts.

“There is essentially an industry now of these third party providers,” she said, “some of whom I’m sure are very competent, some of whom I’m sure are very well intended, but not all of them are.”

Nadler said websites of some third party providers show they were “pretty blatant about the fact that they were political operators” who were pushing maybe deeply, sincerely held, by partial worldview.

Instead of being a separate module, such materials are often embedded across all subjects. for instance, children learning maths can be asked to add up the number of rectangles in an LGBTQ flag or the number of transgender individuals.

Nadler said while parents have the right to withdraw from sex education, but is only a “very narrow element of this broader agenda.”

She also said these “very complicated and challenging ideas” are occupying the minds of children, who are “not coming home from school and discussing” literature, history, or engineering.

While legislation around protected characteristics is the same, some schools are more invested in teaching the ideology than others, Nadler said, noting that independent schools that are trying to sell themselves are “very much at the forefront of the more radical end of a lot of this material.”

Arguing for schools to focus on basic subjects, Nadler said “treating schools as a sort of breeding ground for ideology” is essentially “getting in the way of teaching the core subjects and giving pupils the solid foundation in knowledge,” and instead of increasing inclusivity, it would set groups against each other and undermine common values such as “a love of knowledge for its own sake, an appreciation of beauty, [and] an appreciation of great literature of music.