I WENT to my son’s primary school open day in Glasgow in 2004. One of the things I remember most about this meeting was being told that my five-year-old son would be taught “Race Awareness 1, and Race Awareness 2”.

As someone who had been an active anti-racist for many years and thought about racism and the challenge of it as a political thing, I asked the teacher why she thought it was the job of a school to talk to my son about racism.

Today, I would like to pose the same question to the Scottish Government, and Education Scotland, who have announced that they will be “Embedding race equality in school”.

Will children, I wonder, be exploring critics of modern anti-racism like Marxist writer Kenan Malik, who illustrates how radicals adopted their own “progressive” form of racial thinking with their celebration of “different cultures”? Or the conservative Douglas Murray who argues that the promotion of “diversity” helps to separate groups, including children, into their own identity boxes?

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Perhaps schools will be engaging with the American Christopher Lasch who believes that modern anti-racism has become an elitist expression of Western self-loathing. Or perhaps they will read the book by Lasch’s daughter, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn entitled Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.

If this education of anti-racism was in fact education, I wouldn’t mind, but what we are looking at is a new form of indoctrination, a form of indoctrination that has adopted many of the tenets of the highly contested critical race theory.

When the government says, “A new package of support materials…. will embed anti-racism and race equality into all aspects of school life”, they really do mean “all aspects”, with talk, for example of, “As the child grows, they can see diversity” in all subjects, including, “mathematics”.

Efforts will be made to “decolonise” the school curriculum and to challenge the presumed biases and omissions in the education of children. In the early years this, we are informed, can be assisted with correct, “dolls and figures, dressing up clothes, picture books and wall displays (that are) all ways to normalise diversity”.

This idea that we need to decolonise the curriculum is based on a massive presumption that we white educators, often subconsciously, fill our lessons with loads of white stuff, white people, white thinkers, white bias and so on.

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Ironically, from my experience, what we often find is a bunch of educators, all of whom are against racism, falling over themselves to manufacture ways of teaching even more critical stuff about history or to invent anti-racist maths, science and computing lessons. The result at times is hysterical, in both meanings of the term.

There is also talk, and full acceptance, of the much-contested idea of “white privilege”, a self-loathing label that ridiculously sees privilege in even the poorest of white people, as well as helping to elevate the idea that whites and blacks are fundamentally different, and that racism is everywhere.

Of course, while this misanthropic perspective and this so called anti-racist education programme labels all white people, it also helps to divide society into the “aware” and the stupid, the enlightened educators and the backward, ill-educated parents.

This is the real essence of the elitist anti-racist indoctrination being launched in our schools – a perspective that sees a need to “get them early” to get them away from their racist parents and to challenge the presumed “systemic racism" in society.

Here we find the biggest tragedy and irony of all. Just as colonial and imperial racism was a prejudice most virulently promoted by the middle and upper classes. Today’s bigotry and belittling of people comes in the form of the new elites’ obsession with the imagined racist masses.

If education is ever going to recover in Scotland, we need to refocus on education itself. A first, useful step, would be to start a campaign to Depoliticise the Curriculum.

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