I. MY FEELINGS
Hopefully I've laid the foundations to now give a short report on what the school environment feels like – day in day, day out – when survival isn't a constant struggle.
Needless to say, what follows is entirely subjective. It's probably also 'unfair' and 'judgemental'. But there are any number of other teaching memoirs, Panglossian in their dishonesty, which the outraged reader can seek out.
Although I love classroom teaching - warts and all - the rest of the job is mostly horrible. The first thing to stress is how teachers carry the fear of imminent failure, whatever level or experience they've achieved. That's what makes it a nervous and exhausting job. The sense of foreboding originates (and is actively promoted) within the profession itself. When the pupils became vaguely manageable, I finally realised how the true problems arise from other teachers.
On the whole, they're an unsettling bunch – rarely the types anyone feels at ease with. For parents, think through the parents' evenings you've attended and the background impression that was created, your underlying feelings about the profession in general. Anxiety, lingering unease and childish neediness are toxins teachers get basted in which become ineradicable. No wonder so many are divorced, become drunkards, have breakdowns and end up on Crimewatch (ok, a slight exaggeration).
It's quite the norm for members of SLT to have delinquent offspring, wives addicted to dogging, and highly dubious personal habits of their own, frequenting bizarre dating sites for similar bourgeois burnouts. Perhaps this simply reflects how sociopathic and nihilistic our middle classes have become, with teaching distilling it down to a heady liquor. I've already listed specific issues about the teaching body, but the overall environment is extraordinary – at least for someone who's worked in others.
I think it's the sickly dishonest mix of 'kindness' with robotic adherence to ideological and managerial dogma. Of course, they're traits which are incompatible with creativity and a love of literature for its own sake, the freedom of expression and need to engage with reality not utopian fantasy. That's why English teachers in particular are such a dispiriting bunch, seemingly uninterested in the glories of our literature and sharing them with pupils.
But teachers in general are now leaders in that wider phenomenon threatening our freedoms and culture: the constant monitoring, reporting on and restricting of what's being said. Many give the impression of being teachers' pets themselves, eager to seek favour and suck up to the implacable forces of 'wokedom'.
It's time to discuss the massive cultural changes occurring whilst I was teaching.
II. TEACHER HUMOUR IS NO LAUGHING MATTER
To paraphrase the great Spike Milligan.
In our current climate of licensed rather than free speech, it's not surprising most teachers are terrified of making jokes. Given how funny the environment is – and how useful humour can be – that's terrible.
I loved using awful puns in teaching, occasionally getting summoned to ‘meetings without coffee’ for a daft reprimand. My favourite involved a newspaper story, about some chap who’d been prosecuted for having ‘an intensely physical affair’, with his horse. The enthusiastic rider explained in his defence how he intended to marry it.
I shared the extract with a Year 10 group, under a title…drumroll…expert timing…
‘Was it a stable relationship?’
Teaching that same group, lessons were often disturbed by a noisy irritant – appropriately, one Jessica Bull – violently booting at my door as she passed in the corridor. One day she unwisely shoved her head in. ‘What do you think this is, a china shop?’ I shouted.
The outraged door-kicker burst into tears and departed, to jeers from my class. Her parents complained that I’d ‘bullied her’. I’m afraid I answered the complaint e-mail from her Head of Year: ‘It’s bull.’ Fury ensued: I’d behaved ‘unprofessionally’. As ever in teaching, it blew over when I threatened to resign if action were taken against me. But the door-kicking stopped. A few months later, she was moved down to this group and did very well; it helped that we'd had this earlier bust-up.
On a gentler note, I loved telling that class (when teaching An Inspector Calls) how I’d survived the sinking of the Titanic, expertly swallow-diving into icy water as she slid beneath. One mother at parents’ evening politely asked if I’d been on board.
She then demanded: ‘And did you tell her sister in Year 8 that unicorns aren’t real? That’s for parents to break gently.’ I apologised, unwisely adding: ‘Good job I wasn’t discussing Father Christmas!’
III: SCHOOL ABSENCES AND COVID
Roughly a fifth of all secondary pupils in England are now persistently absent; that’s more than double the pre-Lockdown level. I remember saying to colleagues in March 2020 that we shouldn’t be shutting schools, since the appalling consequences would take years to recover from. Mine was an unpopular and reviled opinion. The most support I ever got was one person saying it was an unwelcome but vital step. Most teachers felt we shut down too late and went back too early. A fair few were fanatical pedants for every ludicrous aspect, showing absolutely no common sense or even basic humanity.
I’ve heard boys screamed at for picking up footballs, with claims they were endangering lives. My own daughter was told by a teacher that she was to blame, for this idiot not being allowed to see her aging mother. This to a little girl whose own grandmother was sliding into irreversible Alzheimer’s, imprisoned in a care home - someone she saw only twice more before her death.
What struck me about pupils post lockdown was their lost trust in teachers, as adults. Understandably, I saw this in my 14-year old. They witnessed too many teachers behaving in a panicky and irrational way, clearly more concerned about their own safety than in the long-term effects on their pupils. They saw teachers as selfish and cowardly, since many were.
I recall my parents saying how little - if anything - was made by teachers on the outbreak of war in 1939. It was business as usual, with no sense of panic or silliness. I use that word deliberately. One buffoon science teacher at my school walked around in a hazmat suit, clearly enjoying himself, without a thought for how terrifying and stupid he looked.
Pupils are incredibly good at sniffing out bullshit. They knew that school shutdowns weren’t done with their interests in mind. It’s small wonder that many now see bunking off school as normalised. Doubtless some see the ‘working from home’ fraud first-hand, and draw their own conclusions.
None of the above will feature in any ‘discussions’ teachers have, about this catastrophe. Instead, they’ll demand more money, ‘support’ and understanding for their difficult role. For a profession which drones on about ‘reflective learning’, there will be zero analysis of how they behaved and the message it sent.
Sadly, many have lost the respect of that most vital group - their own pupils. I remember saying – in March 2020 – to the last class I saw before lockdown (another difficult Year 11 group who I adored but never saw again): 'Don’t worry – this country has been through so much – and always got through it. Don’t be scared.' Maybe this was more phony Churchill stuff, but too many had seen adults behaving in a panicked way.
I’m a natural sceptic. I’ve always been angered how little teachers understand what being sceptical really means. About ten years ago, I noticed many of my colleagues started to claim their opinions were ‘evidence-based facts’, dismissing those who disagreed with them as holders of wildly emotional prejudices. It was odd, since most had no experience of any activity involving empirical evidence, let alone scientific research.
After the 2016 Brexit referendum, this bogus stance increased massively. One chap loftily proclaimed that only people with 'academic expertise' should have had the vote. Instead of arguing with this antidemocratic view, I asked him what his qualifications were – and why he assumed they'd place him in the voting booth. They weren’t impressive, in an era when getting an English degree from some places is easier than obtaining a GP's appointment.
I cheerfully informed him that I'd get the vote under his scheme and he wouldn’t - on the hard evidence of his qualifications. If he found my undoubted conceit ‘offensive’, then better not to make such a foolish demand.
And then Covid struck…
Anyone who read the Guardian and ‘knew the evidence’ hogged the limelight, led in the media by Robert Peston. At school, the aforementioned democracy-hater switched his expertise to medicine. It was impossible to discuss the issue without lectures from someone instantly elevated to professorships in Virology, Epidemiology, Acute Medicine, Pathology, Immunology… you name it. Coming from a medical family, it was a delight to continue my second-hand medical education.
To be fair, this wasn’t restricted to teaching. A poet friend of mine, in email discussion, pasted articles from the BMJ, The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature. I have no medical training, so I asked him to explain what he was bombarding me with. Incredibly, this lecturer in Creative Writing seemed unable to.
During lockdown, I struggled through Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. This is an exemplar ‘novel of ideas’, set in 1913 Austria. The central character is a rich wastrel womaniser who’s also a distinguished mathematician and polymath.
He gets involved in interminable committee discussions on how to commemorate the 70th jubilee of the Austro-Hungarian emperor. But the main focus of the novel is analysing how scientific thinking (Musil himself was trained in science) contrasts with social and artistic ideas, progress and social advancement.
In short, Musil is concerned with exactly the central issue that Covid seems to flag. Namely, how – if at all – can technocracy fit with democratic accountability and, ultimately, validity? How can we avoid a tyranny of declared experts, some of whom will crush (often using ‘useful idiots’) those who know that science works by being unsettled, that it has never been a process of shouting ‘the science is settled’, of shutting down debate?
This applies to many issues: climate change; Brexit; the wars in Ukraine and Ghaza; gender identity; race; and so on. Most of our governing elite, like my teacher colleagues, pretend to be scrupulously evidence-based, to have banished emotion and prejudice. Simultaneously, they are filled – often to a fanatical extent – with just such things.
The only hope lies in restoring genuine rational and sceptical debate. It’s vital that pupils learn this. Sadly, the entire approach taken on Covid - imposing extreme measures, pumping out propaganda, silencing opposition and crushing dissent - taught them the exact opposite.
IV: IMMIGRATION
I cannot recall a time when immigration wasn’t a huge influence, on my own life and this country’s. My family background, with two Greek immigrant grandparents, will have contributed. Yet the issue is now quite simple: the very continuation, in a meaningful sense, of this country’s existence as something other than a retail park or international airport.
When it’s become normal for some fourth-rate actress to remark, with horrified disdain, that our Royal Family are terribly white, my point becomes obvious. I’m not even saying this is good or bad – simply that it needs discussing.
The problem is that there’s never been a proper discussion, one with free expression, without the worry of being attacked as ‘racist’ and constant self-censoring. We’ve heard very few honest opinions. It’s become a taboo, especially for individuals to make personal points based on their own experiences.
And so to education.
I first realised how massively everything had changed when my daughter was about to enter Reception. We attended a meeting for parents and found that of the thirty couples, we were one of the five who were British. This was in 2014.
The teachers went into overdrive, enthusing on how ‘diverse’ the group was - yet it wasn’t. Most people were foreign, with perhaps little understanding of this country and its schools, other than from their immediate perspective.
Why would they have, when the teachers pretended England didn’t exist? There wasn’t a single mention of how education worked in this country, of how it might differ from Poland or Pakistan or Zimbabwe. I can imagine some left-liberal exploding now: ‘Why would that be discussed?’ But then, why wouldn’t it be?
The fact is, immigrants are different and their children have considerably affected schools and the education system. I’ve taught ever increasing numbers of children from such families. And whilst making them welcome was - rightly - a priority, the effects on English pupils were never discussed. I suspect any attempt to do so would have triggered disciplinary action.
I can also comment on my own beloved late mother, from immigrant parents, her intense drive and occasionally aggressive behaviour. I’m not interested in whether this was ‘justified’, simply in saying it happens and has effects.
It’s quite natural for children of immigrants to harbour the conflicting desire to both fit in, yet be ‘celebrated’ as different. Too many schools belabour this and effectively label such kids as morally superior. A similar situation to that lady who attended Buckingham Palace dressed as a tribal African, then objected to someone noticing it.
It’s sadly true that immigrant children can get bullied; there should be no tolerance for this. But it’s also true that immigrant children can be bullies (as can immigrants). Both types of bullying are encouraged by the gushing of left-liberals, over the mere presence of immigrants.
Because it’s frankly ridiculous to make such a virtue of high immigration, to subtly imply that there’s something morally wrong with the indigenous English, necessitating diversity as a cure. Many teachers do this instinctively. And schools often don’t accept such bullying happens, let alone admit the reason: the incompatible, incoherent pieties of multiculturalism.
I’m fully aware how angry such plain speaking makes people! They should ignore their desire to ‘think the right thing’ and focus on what I say, based on first-hand experience.
V. FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT - THE LOST CURRICULUM
We all know Animal Farm is an allegory of Stalinism and its betrayal of the Russian Revolution? Well, not quite all. It’s sometimes taught as based on any tyranny, even on Hitler’s rise to power and the ‘danger from the far right’, with Squealer modelled on Goebbels. There seems a marked reluctance in some teachers to explain it as a parody of Communism – and even more reluctance to identify that as the ‘danger from the far left’.
This is shared not to get laughs, nor to bring the teaching profession into disrepute. Either teachers are confident in the views I reveal and happy to see them shared – as some do with pupils – or they’re not, and glad to see them exposed.
More recently, I observed a lesson on An Inspector Calls and was surprised to find that society can be divided into the selfish (capitalists) and the unselfish (socialists). A bus driver refusing to allow an unfortunate woman to board without a fare – and the assault she then suffered – demonstrates this neat dichotomy. So does the lack of infinite funding for the public sector.
I also know of Macbeth being taught as a play written to expose the evils of inherited power, privilege, position. A bizarre interpretation, since not a line in the play can be linked to this. And doubly odd, given that most teachers claim what they say is always ‘evidence-based’.
Then there’s Brexit. I was amused to be asked, in conversation with a science teacher (loftily describing himself as ‘used to actual evidence’) how it felt to be in the minority which voted for Brexit? I informed him of the 2016 result.
‘You know what I mean – the minority of . . .’
‘Teachers; the middle class; decent people?’
Despite my frequent criticisms, I’m proud to have been a teacher and pay tribute to the decent and diligent colleagues I’ve often worked with. Many of them wouldn’t dream of such indoctrination.
Unfortunately, this fairness has been damaged by a recent influx of graduates with no apparent belief in basic freedoms of thought and speech. Some also think they’re fighting much of the population, that it’s their responsibility to re-educate children of Brexit voters, countering their parents’ ‘bigotry’. To a hammer, everything is a nail.
In my time teaching, I can’t recall another teacher explaining to pupils their fundamental rights to freedom of thought and speech. In my discussions with pupils, almost all showed that these didn’t mean a thing to them. For most, the vital principle was one of 'not causing offence’. Small wonder, when most teachers spend so long discussing and policing this, but no time explaining those first essential freedoms.
I’m sure many parents reading this will have received phone calls claiming their child has caused ‘offence’. I wonder how many queried exactly what happened, making sure that their child didn’t simply question the teacher’s opinions, then get branded ‘offensive’? There’s a tendency for teachers to claim pupils in general have been ‘offended’ as a way of censoring debate and protecting their own opinions.
Teaching is so overwhelmingly a left-liberal monoculture that any discussion of cultural and political issues takes place in an echo chamber. The few dissenting voices are all too easily silenced or simply self-censor. There are implicit left-liberal political and social beliefs and the assumption that all pupils and teachers must share them. That, depressingly, is the position in our state schools.
Until they - and our universities - actively teach and encourage diversity of opinion and freedom of expression, nothing will change. It's vital that English teachers do this and aren't narrowly ideological in how they view our literary heritage. Pupils have a birth-right to experience our great literature, without woke censorship.
Sadly, the exact opposite is now happening.
He also has a substack Against Monolithic 'Diversity' : “Paul Sutton's satirical/lyrical pieces on freedom of speech haters.”