Andrew Tate isn’t the only form of hate schools are tackling in the classroom

It might seem like an obvious question, but how should right-thinking people really respond to the kind of online hate spread by people like Andrew Tate?

Seemingly every week we are faced with a new horror show from the digital Wild West. Misinformation movements like Q-Anon and antivaxxers have become mainstream, with representatves in US Congress and British parliament. The madness is, it seems, infectious.

But it isn't just new lies that the internet perpetuates – it's hideous old tropes, too. To help mark Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has just published findings from a report into the presence of antisemitism and Holocaust-denial in our classrooms. I’m desperately sorry to report the results are every bit as horrifying as you might imagine.

Nearly four in 10 teachers who teach about the Holocaust reported encountering antisemitism among their students, while 74.9 per cent had encountered students who repeated mistruths about the Holocaust that they had read online.

One teacher put it like this: “I have had students say to me that the Holocaust didn’t happen. So that concern is about what they are hearing at home. [But] I’m not even sure it’s at home. I think it’s stuff on the internet”.

This is happening in our classrooms. In Britain. In 2023. And it’s almost certainly driven by the extraordinary digital revolution taking place around us.

But let’s set to one side whether the internet behemoths could or should be doing more to police their domain – the Online Safety Bill being enacted just now will go some way to setting out a legal position. But for how long? How long until technology – and the wily-ness of young people who are growing up with that technology – overtakes it?

The digital revolution moves at breakneck speed; the legislative process in liberal democracies does not. That’s just the way it is – and I know it can’t be changed.

So let’s set to one-side the law. How should we respond in the here and now? As humans? As humans who have children? As humans who have children who we are trying to bring up? What should we do?

I work in education and think fairly hard about stuff like this, but I am at a loss if I'm being honest. And it’s not like I’m alone. I’ve run many focus groups with parents in which I’ve discussed the impact of social media on children and they too were, to a man and woman, broadly like me: muddling through but slightly out-of-touch, and hoping – just hoping – that some pernicious meme or idea or conspiracy theory doesn’t suddenly swallow up their kids.

In truth, I know only one thing about how we, as a country, should respond. Now, more than ever, we must put education at the heart of everything we do as a culture. And, importantly, we must recruit, retain and train the best bloody teachers we can.

As parents, we need them to help our kids with two things when it comes to dealing with the internet and all its deformed offspring: to learn the difference between what is historically or scientifically accurate and what is nonsense, and to develop the ability to critically analyse arguments that are presented to them. Both are much easier said than done.

There are days when I think that the only sane response as a parent to the digital revolution crashing over our society is to pack up my kids and head for the nearest mountain range with contour map, a gun and a 5G-blocking gadget. And then I realise that I’d probably miss pubs too much.

The next best thing is that we continue to keep talking to our kids about what is and isn’t true while explaining that there are a bunch of mendacious lunatics online who you need to be constantly vigilant for. At the same time we need to collectively accept the self-evident truth that we should increase taxes to pay for the best damn teachers money can buy.