If the unions won’t defend academic freedom, then who will?
Education unions consistently fail to protect their members from intimidation, argues Education Forum member Alka Sehgal Cuthbert in CapX…
Last year, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary entitled The School That Tried to End Racism, in which pupils were segregated by skin colour to ‘do the race work’ required of them by so-called ‘race experts’. It won a Bafta, rather than the public condemnation it deserved.
The lack of public or official criticism served as a green light for educator-activists already working within schools to up the ante and push for an actively anti-racist agenda. Being non-racist, the traditional default position, was no longer an option because it denied positions of structural power into which we are, allegedly, all born. To impose a belief without interrogation isn’t education, it’s indoctrination, and it should have no place in our schools and universities. Yet the attack on Kathleen Stock by the University and College Union for her views on transgender issues is the latest reminder of how organisations that are supposed to represent educators consistently fail to protect their members.
Read the full article on CapX.