Progressive ideology in the Education System

I want to make an original post about a topic that has been brewing in my mind for ten years now. I’m a student. I’m in my third year at a Russell Group university, and I will be finishing my dissertation very soon. I had my last ever lesson before my Easter term break began on Jesuit interpretations of Confucianism. Now, I have three assignments, including my dissertation, left before I am officially done as a student and must go and fight for a job. That leaves me with a finished chapter in my life, and looking back at it and contemplating its meaning in a Goethean sense, I can see how the education system has had its way with my generation in terms of forming its political awareness.

My political awakening came in 2016 when I was 12 and entered secondary school. It seems a lot of people have, since 2020, had the same journey from moderate to dissident politics, only five years staggered from mine. My awakening was a simple one: seeing how the media represented Trump and Brexit versus how it intuitively appeared to me and, seemingly, the people who voted for it. Maybe now we can look at these two issues with nuance, but back then, it was enough of a knot for me to spend years untangling it to figure out what was going on in politics. Why was it happening? What was the best ideology? Does it even matter? Who runs the show? How do you handle this knowledge when everyone around you was more concerned about healthier things for 11–16-year-olds, like pop music, non-uniform days, and getting good grades? These were a few of the questions I had to handle entirely on my own, except, of course, for the panel of YouTubers who fought for my attention every day.

Because I gained an awareness of political bullshit at such a young age, I was acutely aware of every time a teacher said something highly suspect, or when I felt something was happening that was leaving an ingrained memory in my year group. I knew from Ben Shapiro’s and Milo Yiannopoulos’ talks at Berkeley that the result of all this may very well be hundreds of rioting antifa goons, but I didn’t know how my fellow students might get to that level of extreme. But with a bit of lived experience, I can now safely say that a theory of mine I had when I was 14 turned out to be more or less true about how the education system “indoctrinates” each generation of students.

In Primary school (4–11 for American readers), I remember in year six my whole class was herded into the computer room to hear from a Jamaican lady about her father, a member of the Windrush generation, and his struggles in Britain against daily racism. This wasn’t the first time we learned about racial discrimination. A year prior, we learned about Nelson Mandela and the role he played in ending apartheid in South Africa. I don’t think it really occurred to me or anyone else that there was a racial lens to this yet, so only the word “apartheid” was filed into a list of encoded bad feelings in my brain. But in this lady’s presentation, and the subsequent video we watched, this was where the issue clicked for me. Although I don’t remember much of it, one image that still sticks out in my mind was that of the sign in a house or shop’s window demanding NO IRISH, NO BLACKS, NO DOGS. It seemed calibrated for me, because although I didn’t understand racism, I did have a dog of my own. Why does the person who put up the sign not like Gracie? If they don’t like Gracie, and they’re wrong to do so, would they not also be wrong about Irish and Black people?

There was nothing I think I learned in primary school that wasn’t rehashed in secondary school. Often, something I learned in year six would only be returned to in years ten or eleven, so the purpose of primary school certainly wasn’t to ensure we were intellectually trained beyond having a few reference points. What I remember from Primary school was the moral lessons. Caring, sharing, fairness, obedience to the teachers, and a host of other pre-pubescent, maternal instincts, were ingrained as cultural values. Primary school was about learning to look both ways when crossing the road, learning not to talk to strangers, and staying safe on the internet. School doubled as a solution for overworked mothers and as an introduction to the social contract. But because children don’t exactly think critically at this level, what is key to establish is a range of weighted emotions and values that can be substantialized later on.

This is all natural. I don’t think there was a cabal of teachers scheming to indoctrinate the youth here, and because of the sensitivity of this stage of schooling, it’s reasonable to assume it was benign and in imitation of the surrounding culture at worst. But it did its job.

Secondary school was where our morals were applied and given substance. As part of research for this essay, I went back through my old school work and found some interesting dates. In year seven (2015-2016), our citizenship class taught us about the five British values as per the Ministry of Education. I think now, if “British” and “values” have to be defined and numbered, then it would make more sense that someone with an agenda defined and numbered them. This especially goes for “tolerance”, a term that allowed the year to flow seamlessly into discussions of diversity.

On the 7^th January 2016, we began learning about diversity in Britain and the integrity of multiculturalism as a key aspect of British society. On the 10^th of March, I found a waves of immigration to Britain sheet where I had to date and title each wave of migration to Britain, beginning with the Romans, and ending with Pakistanis and Caribbean people in the 50s. On the 17^th of March, my teacher left some feedback on an essay I didn’t finish about determining British identity. She was disappointed I didn’t finish it and that I didn’t put any keywords in my paragraph. She asked me what the contribution of immigration was to the UK. I bluntly put down “they have impacted life through imployment as more immigrants are taking our jobs than 50 years ago”. Keywords were quite common throughout secondary school because they often determined your marks by showing you knew what the subject taught. These keywords were bothersome for me because I knew that I was simply memorising information to puke onto an exam sheet, only to forget it when I left the hall. The purpose of it was to train your brain on specific signals that you would use as reference points for all the other data. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was, maybe I was just lazy, but in retrospect, perhaps I avoided an added consequence of this style of learning. When you are also having keywords like diversity, multiculturalism, and tolerance bolted into place in your brain, it serves to give a name to some of the moral intuitions you’ve been ingrained with and, in so doing, harden your worldview around them.

This made subsequent years easier to process. The penultimate geography lesson of year eight was on the immigration crisis. By this point, Trump was in office, and I was paying attention to politics properly, so I was able to take note of the atmosphere of the classroom during discussions. They hated him, they missed Obama, and they wanted to help the refugees. I complained about it to a friend after class. They didn’t know who Obama was, but they knew he was better than Trump. Smart kids, right?

Year nine English was where we began to learn about An Inspector Calls. It’s an infamous play at this point because it seems everyone across the country has to learn about it. Leading up to GCSEs every year, I see more and more people talking about Eva Smith and Sheila Birling and Mr Birling’s arrogance over the Titanic not sinking and Germany not wanting war with Britain. It was written by J.B. Priestley, a “lusty” socialist playwright who, despite his presentation of affairs as bad in Inspector, was guilty of multiple himself. A moral man, of course, who produced perfect material to teach to 14-year-olds. Some of the themes in An Inspector Calls included feminism and, of course, socialism, with the poor treatment of women and the lower classes being the main effects upon Eva Smith as she had to suffer from each of the Birling family members in one form or another.

Our English teacher, who indeed got pregnant that year, on multiple opportunities used her own views as a frame of reference for what feminism and socialism were. “Third Wave feminism” was all the rage in the pre-2020 culture war, and she told her top-set English class that she was a feminist because she wanted women to be paid equally to men, and was a socialist because she believed in the sanctity of the NHS. In textiles that year, our teacher told a group of girls next to me that they should vote Labour because they would get to go to university for free, as she did. This is only what I saw, and no doubt the same was taking place in the other groups as well. Whining about it wouldn’t help, but it is illegal to give your political opinions to your students. Then again, even in year nine, the absurdity of enforcing this was clear, especially when the government is issuing literature that implicitly invites teachers to do this exact thing. But they weren’t swaying anyone to their way of thinking; they were simply expanding the possibilities of thought within the paradigm already set out for boys and girls at this age. It was disingenuous, because everyone sells their beliefs with gifts and not asks, but no one was going to hold them accountable.

There was this general fear I had with my own views that being too open about them would get me punished, but in year ten (2018-2019), those fears were generally disarmed.

I wrote an essay in citizenship on whether EU migration was beneficial to the UK. I had to argue both sides, so I paid lip service to declining birthrates and economic demand and then went all in on the Great Replacement and ethnic balkanisation in the second half. My teacher was impressed enough with my analysis that she forwarded it to the Head Teacher, who was also very impressed with it.

Minor fact check: Ajax installed the Shah, who was then overthrown in 1979 to create the independent Islamic Republic.

My English Language teacher that summer was also equally impressed with a speech I gave about Trump not doing anything for MAGA while egging for war with Iran. Although the teachers had very clear opinions, unless you were literally throwing up nazi salutes (a separate incident in year nine), you weren’t going to be punished for what you believed. There was simply the implication of punishment through social judgment.

In year eleven, though, the effects were already visible on certain students. I would see on my Instagram certain girls I knew sharing infographics on their stories about the oppression of women and climate activism. There was a girl in my English and citizenship class, we’ll call her Samantha, who had an episode where she was asking all the female teachers if they found the term “miss” demeaning since male teachers were called “sir”. At the time, I saw this as a stage of shitlib experimentation. My new male citizenship teacher nurtured her impulses, but my female English teacher didn’t particularly care what she was called. I remember in this year fearing the future a bit. Given my views and the perceived trajectory of everyone else’s, I was likely to lose a few people in the not-so-distant future should they weigh my politics against the person they’ve known me to be. While that wouldn’t happen until a while later, secondary school was the last time I felt politics didn’t matter to my peers.

This all came to a head in June of 2020. The year ended March 20th with a week’s notice, and the quarantine confined everyone to the internet while mayhem ensued outside. All those white girls concerned with feminism switched overnight to black squares and BLM infographics instead. On June 2^nd, I put up my own post on Instagram. I dared to be the only person I knew who would actually declare myself in open opposition to it, not having to go in the next day and suffer the fallout. I had spent the last two years concerning myself with race issues, including race and crime, and I figured I couldn’t be more prepared for any flak.

There was a second part in the comments, along with 22 replies, but it looks like they’ve been deleted somehow, and I cannot access them.

All those same girls sharing their support for the protests liked my post. Presumably without reading a word of it. It must have been so thoroughly assumed that what I said after the READ MORE button would have been a confirmation of their views, such that the extra effort of reading it was unnecessary for them. A few close friends read it, but they already knew what I was like, so it wasn’t a challenge. It would only be a whole month later that someone in my year took the time to read it, and all within 24 hours, about 22 comments were sent back and forth between four very upset black girls in my year and me. For most teenagers, especially the girls, their politics is a bandwagon, a way of signalling social integration without any critical self-reflection about where these beliefs come from or what their effect is. This was previously demonstrated in Greta Thunberg’s school strike, which associated the desire to rebel in school with a good cause and incited many students into marches across the West. In a previous age, these opinions might have been oriented towards affirming some form of social order against chaos, but in ours, they meant cheering on and defending anarchy.

The next year, I went to college. I was in a tutor group with Samantha and another one of our peers, whom we’ll call Michael. Michael was a friend of Samantha’s and basically agreed with her on everything, making him, in my secondary school assessment of him, a left-leaning liberal. Our tutor, a woman named Gemma, was an ex-lawyer who taught law and ran the debate club, both of which I was in. A week or two into the year, every tutor group had a mandatory presentation on Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests. Gemma skimmed the presentation, closed it, and suggested that instead we have an “open” discussion about it. Three of the guys, Michael among them, began arguing with Gemma about the issue, except they were coming at it from the tolerated opposition of “All Lives Matter”. Gemma was a much more skilled debater than any of them and very quickly humiliated them all. I tried myself to make a case, but I was flawed at how well she was able to twist my words against me such that even if I were to win the argument with raw data, I would come across as professionally racist in front of the class instead of simply racist, and I wasn’t interested in being her punching bag for the rest of the year. Curiously, the girls, Samantha included, waited patiently until the argument had settled before they opened their mouths and declared their own positions on Gemma’s side of the issue. As for Michael, for the rest of that year, Gemma often reminded him of his failure to argue against her, asking him, “Remember when you were being racist in our tutorial?” She even asked this in our law class, where people who didn’t see what happened were then involved in it. Gemma appealed to my account of what happened in that class, and I pitifully defended him as taking up a blank-slate position on individuals, only to be met with a scoffing “Ah, well you were being racist too anyway”. Michael tried defending his position again on one such occasion, where Samantha turned to him and openly declared, “We obviously think all lives matter, but we just think Black lives haven’t been prioritised as much as they should have been”.

By this point, it seemed that any plausible deniability that teachers had to hide behind was simply not a problem anymore. A teacher could viciously argue and bully their own students to shame not just them but anyone in the room who might think like them. If primary school taught you your vague sense of morality and correct conduct, and secondary school shaped this unconsciously into political views, college was where any doubt was extinguished by the iterators, teachers who were trained to enforce their worldview over their students. What was poignant about all this was that in the actual politics classrooms, there was very little of this. My politics (and history) teacher seemed to be ill-educated on what any of the political ideologies actually stood for, which was made apparent when our first lesson explored the political compass and she concluded, “Communism is when everyone is equal, Liberalism is when you do what you like, and Fascism is when it’s every man for himself.” I believe Nietzsche was mentioned in relation to the last one.

After that year, I dropped out of A Level History, Politics, and Law to pursue BTEC Computing with my friends. Politics is not really received intellectually in the education system, because what 17-year-old actually knows who Marx, Locke, or Gentile is? Politics is received emotionally and is slowly crystallized into political views from faith positions held since such a young age that most people have forgotten where that faith comes from.

Just before Christmas in 2021, I started this blog. Around the same time, I met a person in computing who we will call David. David became a very good and close, arguably my best, friend from a very unlikely source: an argument about politics. He was transparently left-wing, his girlfriend apparently more so than he, and he took an interest in my beliefs because he had never encountered someone who thought like me before. I wasn’t just right-wing; I was smart and educated, too (not to glaze myself), and my thoughts about history and politics weren’t simply gammon country instinct but were crafted after about six years of various adjacent studies in science, philosophy, crime data, and so on. We discussed our fundamental beliefs and found that, if not for social values, we had very similar views about the elites and populism. After about a year of friendship, David even told me he thought initially I was stupid, but was coming around to respect my positions and even come towards me politically. Besides the politics, most of our friendship was mainly founded on mutual personalities and habits, humour, and video games, meaning there was far more to enjoy about each other than simple politics.

But then I went to university on the other side of the country, while he stayed in his hometown to do computing with the rest of my friends. He met other people, I met other people, and we kept in touch mainly over Discord, coming together to play Destiny or Nightreign now and then.

University itself, I think, gets an unjustified bad rep. It’s also the only focus of ideological indoctrination when people talk about it. They see Berkeley students rioting when Ben Shapiro gives a talk there, or students protesting Jordan Peterson when he won’t call students their preferred pronouns, or they see before and after images of a handful of students who go from innocent little beans to Mad Max background casts over their time at uni, and then we blame the institution itself. The reality is that universities are usually very far removed from anything of the sort. A headline may show a scandal here and there involving some staff, but for the students themselves, it does not affect their learning. Where students get the worst of their ideas is from other students, mainly. At least at my university, students entirely run socials and societies, and the vast majority of students here have, on average, a vaguely liberal sentiment about things, but are too busy with life to articulate it into anything absurd.

University does, however, give more intellectual rigour to ideas that have only been understood vaguely up to this point. A good university will give you access to teachers and lecturers who have actually read about the topics you have to learn about. In a history module, there may be a few lectures on women or slavery or race and nationality, but it is well within the boundaries of the lecture title, which is also well within the boundaries of the module you yourself chose, which is also within the subject you are paying for. You don’t sit in the same room for six hours a day as in previous stages of your education, which means the lecturers are on tight time schedules to talk to you about everything you need to know within a 50 minute timeframe and pretty much never waste time on arbitrary things like personal politics.

Essentially, by the time a student reaches university, he is simply provided the tools to freely expand his knowledge on his chosen interests. A lot of students who become the face of the crazies just arrive with very left-leaning priors, and the university facilitates that with socials and library literature. Frequently, I have discussed Spengler in my assignments, and I’ve never felt punished for it. If I were, then I’d certainly not be producing a dissertation on him. More often, I was graded based on the quality of my analysis and the efficiency of my communication than I was for the particular point I wanted to argue, and a grader will be more impressed that you made a good case for something they disagree with than a good case for something they already heard from other students before.

A lot of what goes for potential material to make you more left-wing also shouldn’t really be taken as such. This year, I learned that there are methodological problems in discussing Aztec philosophy and theology, because when Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec empire, much of its knowledge was destroyed. This wasn’t deliberate, mind you, but because the Spanish didn’t recognise the Aztec pictorial style of writing (essentially hieroglyphs) as being anything more than crude artwork. So, our most authentic sources for Aztec thought come from documents like the Florentine Codex, which is a production of Europeans who took an interest in documenting it, and not from the now extinct Aztec culture itself. This is neutral, factual information, but depending on what your moral convictions are, it can be very quickly misinterpreted as a grand crime on the part of Western civilisation, even though England, Germany, and France had no clue about what was happening in the New World by this point. The damage to the new world was done by men of the West, but far removed from the official, educated decisions of Western states; the conquistadores were largely composed of classless opportunists. You can do this with a lot of things in higher education, and you are encouraged to form new opinions and defend them.

This isn’t to say university is a benign, apolitical place either, with zero activism to speak of. In my first year, there was a summer term pro-Palestine encampment out on the field in the middle of the city. It was right outside the debate chamber for our union society. In the same term, there was to be a debate titled “This House believes that Palestine is the greatest barrier to peace”. These debates are structured such that there are three or four proponents of the title and three or four opponents of the title, but the title was enough for an enormous protest to shut down the event violently the night it was to take place, prompting the police to show up and protect the students who were trapped inside the building. The same almost happened when Richard Tice delivered a speech in the same building the following term, but after some screaming to drown out Tice’s speech, the protesters got cold and left. There are certainly active people at my university, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to see them as products of the university alone. Their psychologies are primarily the creation of the first three institutions, and the fourth only provides them the tools to articulate their worldview independently and pursue it with compatriots.

And what of David? He didn’t go to a big boy university like me; instead, he attended a local one. In the three years since I last attended classes with him, he reverted to his base assumptions. This culminated in another argument about my fundamental beliefs as of a few weeks ago, whereby he accused my views of being stagnant or unchanging, regressive, and fragile; personally, I think the term he was looking for was consistent. After a bizarre tangential argument where he denied the Rotherham grooming scandal “because if it were as bad as you say it is, then the elite media would be talking about it nonstop”, suggested if I was more active in politics he’d straight up call me a fascist, strongly implying violence, and avoiding some fundamental critiques of the Left, he boldly declared we can’t be friends anymore because my views are too hateful for him or his friends to tolerate and then proceeded to scrape my entire existence from his social media. Given our friendship of five years, in spite of the differences, this came out of left field for me. But the more I contemplated it, the more I had to accept it as a function of things that had long since been set in stone for him.

I said in Narrative Collapse and Caesarism that nationalists essentially embody that fear of the State of Nature for the liberal world order and its constituents. That the ultimate weapon of this world order was information, and education was one of its sub-categories. Educational propaganda doesn’t work as it does in the movies; the beauty of the left-wing manufacturing line is that it appears to be devised individually and spontaneously because of its subtlety and unconsciousness. They have believed, since early childhood, less refined versions of what they do now, so anything outside of this paradigm carries connotations of evil and chaos. What is even less appreciated about this whole trajectory is that after secondary school, those who do not wish to pursue higher education flake off into unimportant roles and jobs in society, while the smartest are rewarded with continuing to achieve higher and higher status within the educational world. These men and women are usually the most apt to follow their own morality to its logical conclusions in the form of political solutions, coherent worldviews, and action, meaning the elite of the elite are highly likely to possess some variation of the 17-year process I have documented here. And for those who aren’t elite of the elite, they are free to become teachers and repeat the cycle on the next generation.

I could end this on a Spenglerian spin, after all, Spengler did mention that mass education is an extension of the media estate, but it’s completely unnecessary, as it speaks for itself. I cannot attest whether this is a universal phenomenon; more personal accounts of the education system are needed, but this process has been there and observable for as long as I’ve had a political conscience. Now that I’m leaving university, I figured it was time you knew as well.