Educating Our Children in Fashionable Political Correctness

Fashionable political correctness is ruining education, according to a new Civitas report into the state of British schools. The Daily Telegraph takes up the issue on today's front page:

No major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference, according to the report published by Civitas.

"The traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the Government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students," it says.
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Civitas casts doubt on the value of much of what children are now "taught". History has become so divorced from facts and chronology that pupils might learn the new "skills and perspectives" through a work of fiction, such as Lord of the Rings, it says.

Teenagers studying for GCSEs are being asked to write about the September 11 atrocities using Arab media reports and speeches from Osama bin Laden as sources without balancing material from America, it reveals.

In English, the drive for gender and race equality has led an exam board to produce a list of modern poems from around the world without a single poet from England or Wales being represented.

The new 21st-century science curriculum introduced last September substitutes debates on abortion, genetic engineering and the use of nuclear power for lab work and scientific inquiry, it says.

The gap between independent and state sector education is ever-growing, in great part due to political interference in the latter. Ironically, this 'educational apartheid' is all in the name of social engineering, which in the last decade has infected everything from science to the arts. This ugly new apartheid which Civitas warns against is now as much about political causes as about standards. It is increasingly hard for a state sector pupil to graduate from Britain's schools system without carrying a litany of fashionable leftist grievances in their back pocket, let alone to have received a decent education.

The long-term implications are serious indeed. One immediate question, though: Can a pupil who doesn't hold fashionable leftist opinions on climate change, abortion, multiculturalism, or even 9/11 expect to pass their exams?