Critical Race and Gender Theories Have Been Taught to a Majority of British Schoolchildren: Report

Children walk home from Altrincham C.E. aided primary school after the government's policy to close all schools from today due to the coronavirus pandemic in Altrincham, United Kingdom, on March 20, 2020. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Several million UK children may have been taught radical left ideas in their education, a report has found.

Leading researcher into cancel culture in the world of academia, professor Eric Kaufmann, has written a report for the conservative think thank Policy Exchange, which argues that UK education is almost as captured by ideologies as America.

“The Political Culture of Young Britain” (pdf) examines the demographics and political beliefs of a sample group of 18–20-year-old British young people.

Kaufmann told The Epoch Times that the young have always been more or less left-wing but the context of what being left means has changed, where identity politics has led to more moral absolutism and illiberalism among young people

“But the gap between the young and old is sort of twice as long as it normally is historically, the young are a lot more left than the old today, since about 2015. It’s an unusually large generation gap in these cultural values,” he said.

Kaufmann found that a majority, 59 percent, of British school leavers say they have either been taught, or heard from an adult at school, about “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” or “systemic racism,” three concepts associated with Critical Race Theory (CRT).

CRT is a Marxist ideology that defines class struggle between “oppressors” (white people) and the “oppressed” (everybody else), as with Marxism’s reduction of human history to a struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”

Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at BirkBeck College, London. (Screenshot/NTD)

Radical Left Ideas

He said in terms of these CRT concepts, young people are encountering them first on social media, but the schools are reinforcing them and not challenging them.

Furthermore, the 59 percent number rises to 73 percent if critical social justice (CSJ) approaches to gender, such as the idea of “patriarchy” or that there are many genders, are included.

Two-thirds of young people who were taught CSJ concepts said they were not told that there are respectable counterarguments to these ideas. This, he said, suggests that several million children may have been “taught these radical left ideas as truth.”

Young people who were taught such concepts are also significantly more likely to endorse political correctness than those who were not.

Furthermore, one “significant negative effect” was that 40 percent of those exposed to all CSJ concepts in school said they felt “fearful of being shamed, punished or expelled for voicing their opinions on controversial subjects compared to 17 percent of individuals exposed to no CSJ concepts.”

There was also an indication in the data that students exposed to CSJ concepts in school experience somewhat worse mental health than those who have not been exposed, suggesting that this culture could be one factor in the rising incidence of mental health problems among young people.

“The typical retort is that this is just a moral panic drummed up by the right. But I think that once you have a representative survey sample, that’s like taking a random draw from the young people in the country and they are reporting this level of teaching of these radical concepts, it’s no longer possible to brush this away as a few anecdotes,” said Kaufmann.

Calvin Robinson in an undated file photo. (Courtesy of Calvin Robinson)

Losing Ground

Kaufmann also said that CRT is endemic in British schools and that the data show that UK education is almost as “captured” as America’s.

However, despite some media coverage, it is not as high on the agenda as in the United States, and British conservative politicians have not raised it.

“A lot of Republican voters have low trust in schools but none of that has happened to the same extent here,” he added.

British political adviser, commentator, educator, and Don’t Divide Us member Calvin Robinson told The Epoch Times by email that CRT is “harming our young people and damaging their future prospects.”

Don’t Divide Us is an organisation set up to take a stand against the UK’s “divisive obsession with people’s racial identity.”

“We should be raising the aspirations for all young people,” said Robinson.

“Proponents of CRT are teaching young white children that they’re racist oppressors and young black children that they’re victims who’ll never achieve anything in life because the system is against them. If you tell young people this often enough they’ll start believing it. CRT is a self-perpetuating cycle of toxic division and therefore has no place in our schools,” he added.

Warning

Kaufmann warned that unless politicians begin to take these issues more seriously by “moving beyond public statements and readily-evaded abstract guidelines” it seems likely that “cherished values” such as “free speech, scientific reason, and national heritage” will lose ground in the years to come.

“It’s pretty extensive here and it has been rising. It’s just that the political parties haven’t got a hold of it yet here. That’s to do with the Tory party, who is generally a business liberal party in this country, so they are not willing to really go there,” Kaufmann said.

“Certainly there’s potential in this issue. These issues tend to divide the left and unite the right, so they are naturally a wedge issue for the Conservative Party to go after, if they have the guts to do so,” he said.

The report recommends that the UK’s school inspecting body Ofsted be made more accountable to Parliament and that it should “issue clearer impartiality guidance, and that this be enforced as part of the inspections regime.”

The report also recommends that curriculum materials be made available to parents upon request, and that outside providers must accede to their materials being made available to parents before they can be engaged by a school.

A Department for Education spokeswoman told The Epoch Times by email that “schools are required to remain politically impartial and should be mindful of the need to not promote partisan political views to pupils.”

“Political issues relating to racial and social justice can be taught about in a balanced and factual manner, just as pupils are often taught about a range of different views on other topics,” she added.