New teaching guidelines show ministers trying solve a problem that doesn’t exist

New advice on the teaching of sensitive political matters and history in schools is the latest example of the government (at least in England) intervening to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said he will bring forward new guidelines to ensure that discussions surrounding politics in lessons are “balanced”.

According to some reports there have been a number of “woke incidents” happening in schools, as if they were outbreaks of Covid or food poisonings. None of them amount to much. One class was encouraged to construct a letter of protest to Boris Johnson about Partygate as an exercise in constructing a case and in democratic accountability; one wonders if a letter aimed at Keir Starmer would have been so shocking to ministers. Johnson is, after all, in power, and so there’s less point in writing to Starmer. Six-year-olds are as capable of being appalled by the prime minister, or admiring him, as 60-year-olds. They are entitled to their opinions.

Leaving aside the now pejorative emphasis slyly laid onto to the word “woke,” which means little more than decency and good manners, there is in any case already a framework of guidance covering such matters. The duty placed on schools and teachers to be impartial is long-established and widely observed, and there is no great groundswell of parental concern about how such issues are handled. It is another “culture war” provoked by a government in trouble.

There is much in the education secretary’s guidance about “balance”. It is an innocuous word. In its place, balance is essential to encouraging debate and understanding. Yet, curiously it seems to be applied only to things that the government judges to be of concern, such as the British Empire, national figures such as Winston Churchill, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Imagine, though, if German schools were required to apply “balance” to the Third Reich. Or Italian schools ordered to point out that Mussolini made the trains run on time as well as using poison gas during the unprovoked war on Abyssinia in 1935-36. Now think about how accounts of the Indian Uprising of 1857 and the 1919 Amritsar massacre can be “balanced” as required by the Department for Education. Does it mean a jolly little session on the supposed benefits of forcible subjugation in the sub-continent, such as the English language, an impressive railway system and cricket. Trying to “balance” an atrocity is a very foolish thing to attempt. Much the same goes for Churchill. The more shameful episodes in his career, which are real enough,  need not be placed on one side of a ledger book. Pupils should learn all sides, and make their own minds up, or be encouraged to try.

Events, personalities, leaders, inventions, economic and social trends, wars, strikes, elections, massacres, famines, executions, whole civilisations are complex, and history should reflect that fact and the way that there is always more than one side to any story, or at release context. If students are interested in why the Black Lives Matters movement exists, they can’t be just told protesters are Marxists.

So far from “left wing” teachers attempting to indoctrinate the nation’s young, it is right-wing circles in politics and the media who seem set on propagandising the teaching of history. They wish to equate their good history with praise of British imperialism (and thus necessarily racism), capitalism and political and social conformism, downplaying the long struggle for racial justice and for equal LGBTQ+ rights (and thus reviving the notorious Section 28). The government’s guidance on history is, unfortunately, profoundly ahistoric.