Burying Puppies Alive.

How Scottish Schools are embedding a Disaster Model into our children's lives

This post was originally published in the Scottish Union for Education Newsletter 23 March 2023.

I want to talk to you about puppies being buried alive. Before we get to that, I am going to assume that if you are reading this you are interested in what is best for children. While I know there are ‘bad players’ out there, most of us who are invested in children’s lives – be it in education or healthcare – are in it for a ‘good game’, whether as a teacher, parent or policy-maker. What is a good game? And what is best for children? This is where it starts to get tricky.

In the podcast ‘Sold A Story’, journalist Emily Hanford exposes how over 30 years educators embraced and implemented reading strategies in schools that didn’t work. Because of the way that teachers were taught to think about these strategies, they ignored what was before their eyes and made excuses as to why children were not reading – telling parents that their kids ‘just weren’t getting it’ or ‘just needed to work harder’.

George W. Bush intervened, in September 2000, with valid and well-argued concerns around the lack of scientific grounding in the current reading programme and pledged significant investment, but he was systematically undermined on the back of party politics. While adults played moral and political games for over 30 years, hundreds of thousands of children were let down, thousands upon thousands of children did not learn to read. It happens. Experts make mistakes. Solutions and circumstances become politicised. Teachers, especially young teachers, may not have the depth and breadth of life experience to know what is being shown to them is not the only way and may, in fact, be very wrong.

On the other hand, experts sometimes come to conclusions long after common sense has prevailed. I am reminded of a ‘breakthrough study’ that emerged in the late eighties: ‘Sugar Makes Kids Hyper’! Millions of moms and dads across the land shook their heads in disbelief (‘Ya think?’).

Sometimes it’s the experts who need to catch up with the knowledge on the ground. Some might say this is the definition of empirical science. I call it common sense.

While family observation is not a perfect thing, it is families that must live with the implications of school policy while policy-makers or teachers don’t. The latter two groups can implement the most well-meaning part of educational policy or deliver a lesson and walk away. They don’t, because it’s the parents who must pick up the pieces when kids don’t get the reading skills they need to succeed. And so we arrive at puppies being buried alive.

The last thing you expect to hear from your child’s lips on his emergence through the school gate is ‘A special guest came to school today’ and then to hear your child recount a horrific account of puppies being buried alive. You wouldn’t expect your child to recount this story as if he was reading from a grocery list and with no sense of horror or total desensitisation. Such is the state of ‘disaster education’, which is being embedded in our school under the mantle of social justice. I call this schooling disaster education, because it seems to be framed around the idea that the world is in a state of disaster. I believe this approach can only lead to desensitisation of the child and to the development of a kind of generalised PTSD. Much of this has been studied academically in terms of media programming for children – which is why we have age stratification for entertainment at the cinema etc. – and yet this knowledge seems to be by the wayside in the educational context.

The incident described is from my personal experience. The visitor was from the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I have to assume (because we were given no warning) was the person who shared explicit and graphic content of the puppies during my son’s school assembly. I have made various complaints to the school related to this ‘disaster model’. From ‘Covid education’, wherein children were fed a daily dose of fear in the name of safety, to end-of-the-world scenarios with COP26, to end-of-the-world scenarios with the Ukraine conflict, and on it goes. In the first 2 months of lockdown, I heard of local primary schoolchildren having suicide ideation or self-harming, and I even heard that some secondary kids had to be detained under the Mental Health Act.

When my son started primary school, I was enthusiastic for social justice to be included in the curriculum. I am an activist; I want to live in a fair and just world, and of course I want my son’s school environment to reflect that. What I didn’t expect in the course of his schooling is that these lessons would continue to grow in voracity and include content that was explicit, violent and catastrophic.

Again and again, he was told that the world was an inherently broken place, even that the children themselves were broken. And the delivery of these disaster lessons was integrated to make the children feel as though they were responsible. I didn’t expect to see previously free-spirited children become worried and anxious and look like small adults with their signs and posters and campaigns ... all too soon. I didn’t expect to walk through my son’s school and see posters covering the walls with death counts of the Pakistan floods ... made by children. I expected childhood to be preserved and celebrated.

In parallel to the copious amounts of investment for these activist-driven curriculums, investment in child-centred opportunities has virtually disappeared. In my community of Pollokshields, three community centres have closed, leaving us with a single community room (one room for 10,000+ people), which is closed more often than not (listen to the Radio 4 programme I made on this subject, My Name is Kate).

While children are taught about the UN’s ‘Rights of the Child’, including the ‘right to play’, our local small play park has been broken for years, despite many parents campaigning at local and national government level to get it fixed. Despite a large investment in a beautiful new sports pitch attached to the local school, it is locked to the local community except in cases where we can raise extortionate fees for its hire; we have no other playing field. So parents of means drive great distances (and at great expense) for sports and arts activities while poor kids are left behind with nothing.

I have made a formal complaint regarding all of this to Glasgow Education. I have been told that the aim of the curriculum is to make our children into ‘global citizens’. I have been told that all safeguarding protocols are followed. I am challenging all of this. I do not need my son to be made into an activist, although he may choose to be one when he is older and has the social and intellectual capacity to do so.

In the meantime, most parents are unaware of the major ideological shift in our children’s education. This current model of education being embedded across every state school is a radical shift from those of the past. I call it ‘activist education’ (or disaster education), and it’s rooted in postmodern theory, in particular the work of Paolo Freire. Freire’s theory is that systems of oppression exist in every aspect of life and therefore must be exposed. Freire’s approach is criticised by James Lindsay of New Discourses. He illustrates his argument with the following scenario:

‘Your seven year old is given a basic maths formula as follows: Jimmy and Sally are going with their parents to a roller coaster park. They have driven 50 miles; the park is 100 miles from their home. How much further do they have to go? Seems basic enough. No. In the Paolo Freire model the educator (the word teacher is expunged) might be instructed to ask the following sorts of questions:

‘Who here has been to an amusement park and why/why not? Children might answer – No – too expensive (get into conversation around class) or No – don’t have a car (get into a conversation around class or climate change related to fuel and global resources). Or Yes – Who did you go with? Only your Mum (get into conversation around family structure, queer theory, this might lead to discussions around race leading to Critical Race Theory).’

Lindsay’s story goes on...

‘As you can see, the lesson has gotten the kids all jigged up and thinking about race, class, the environment, gender etc. ... but has failed to get the kids talking about ... maths. This is the new educational system at its most bare. This model moves away from the former educational system of Jean Piaget which relied on copious amounts of research and evidence related to child development. ... Piaget noted that “abstract and decontextualised reasoning” is not appropriate till a child is “at the earliest” 11 years old, and more realistically well into their teens.’

Freire’s theory lacks any sense of responsibility, for example, to ensure that a child is not exposed to explicit content or that some subjects are not appropriate from a child development perspective. From my research, there is no long-term evidence of its academic or even social or psychological efficacy. One might even wonder if our current youth mental health crisis is the fallout from Friere-inspired approaches.

It also devotes vast amounts of time to everything but the subject area.

Speaking to parents, we are worried. Many, like myself, have seen a sharp downturn in educational standards; our children are being failed in the basic tenets of education. While children have expensive days out to receive ‘anti-Racism’ training, they do not have basic writing or reading skills. Many are surprised when I voice my concern; they say ‘I thought I was the only one’, but they are not. The more I speak to parents, the more I see this is an endemic problem – and it’s getting worse.

Most parents are tolerant and want our children to have a well-rounded education; however, we are concerned that our children will not be given the *basic* skills to survive and thrive in the world because they have been loaded with too much, too soon. Our instinct is that ‘something is wrong’. And yet policy-makers pat us on the hand: ‘There, there dear, we know, it’s just your child is not right’. And so, I reiterate, is this it? Is that true? Or, as with the thousands of children who were failed by a disastrous reading programme, will we look back 30 years from now and say, ‘We should have listened to the mothers, the fathers, the common folk – we failed children.’  I ask you, is this disaster model of education the right thing? Is it necessary? Is this what we want? I know I certainly don’t.

‘… Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.’

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Maggie Smith, ‘Good Bones’ from Waxwing. Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith. Visit the Poetry Foundation website for the full poem.