In the past few years, education has become one of the key fronts in the so-called ‘culture wars’. It’s a development that is likely to prove extremely damaging for teachers and students.

A couple of months ago in London, a high profile ‘National Conservatism’ conference was electrified by a stirring keynote address from the UK’s leading culture warrior in the field of education, Katharine Birbalsingh. I’ve written about Birbalsingh before on this blog. She relishes her self-description as ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher’, and is a particular favourite of ministers like the elusive Schools Secretary Nick Gibb. She briefly served as head of the government’s Social Mobility Commission in 2022, resigning when she was forced to admit (or perhaps was told) that her ‘outspoken views’ were proving incompatible with the role.

Birbalsingh’s address was essentially a call to arms, urging fellow conservatives to fight back against the dominance of ‘woke’ ideas in education. Such people, she argued, needed to stand up and be counted, rather than blindly following the liberal orthodoxy: ‘love of country’ required them to withdraw their children from ‘woke’ schools. While some observers claimed to be moved to tears by her performance (see the YouTube comments), others expressed fears about her mental health.

While Birbalsingh and her associates sometimes claim that their arguments are non-political, her attendance at the conference very clearly demonstrates the connections between traditionalist views on education and wider tendencies in far-right politics – connections that have been extensively traced in recent research (see here and here). The ‘war on woke’ has now become very much part of the mainstream of educational thinking in Britain.

A small example: earlier this year, a friend of mine went for an interview for a position as an inspector with Ofsted, the education regulator. (I can’t quite imagine why he wanted to do this, but he does have considerable expertise in the particular area the job was to cover.) He was asked the routine question about his likely priorities in the job; and when he was given the opportunity to question the panel, he asked them the same thing. The chair, a lead inspector, asserted that his main priority was challenging the ‘woke nonsense’ that currently prevails in schools. His main priority. Ofsted, it should be emphasised, also claims to be a ‘non-political’ body.

The educational war on woke is a predictable hobby horse for Conservative politicians. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, for example, has argued that teachers should not teach about white privilege ‘as a fact’; MP Miriam Cates alleges that children are being subjected to sex education that is ‘extreme, sexualising and inaccurate’ (including being taught that there are ’72 genders’); while Science and Technology Secretary (and former HE minister) Michelle Donelan has fulminated against what she calls ‘intolerant woke bullies’ in universities. These arguments have fed into numerous pieces of legislation and government guidance in the past couple of years, albeit in some rather confusing ways. There have been remarkable inconsistencies in ministers’ proclamations on so-called ‘freedom of speech’ in higher education (which seems to apply in some cases but not in others); while the government currently (Summer 2023) seems mired in internal dispute about its policy on transgender students.

In the United States, these conflicts have been at fever pitch for several years. The banning of books in school libraries has massively escalated; and politicians like the Republican contender Ron DeSantis have made great capital from their attempts to ban the teaching of what they imagine to be ‘critical race theory’. This is frequently accompanied by an attempt to rewrite history, for example in approved school textbooks. Teaching about sexuality and gender has been a further focus of such concerns, although much of the attention currently is on transsexuality – with some states seeking to remove existing protections for transgender students.

There is long history here, which is worth revisiting. Andrew Hartman’s book A War for the Soul of America traces the culture wars in the US back to the early 1960s. While the apparent advances of sixties’ social movements (second wave feminism, the civil rights movement) are often celebrated by the boomer generation, Hartman makes clear that conservative resistance to those movements was present from the very start. Conservative intellectuals lined up to attack the New Left, as both a symptom and a cause of the decline of Western civilization. The Left, they argued, represented a ‘new class’ – or what today would be termed a ‘liberal elite’: they were anti-American, and opposed to discipline of any kind, including academic discipline.

As Hartman shows, the school curriculum has always been one of the key front lines in the US culture wars. There have been two distinct, though sometimes overlapping, tendencies here. On the one hand, the evangelical Christian Right has been primarily concerned with what it calls ‘secular humanism’: among other things, it calls for the banning of sex education (seen as inimical to ‘family values’); the reinstitution of (Christian) religious worship in schools; and the replacement of evolutionary science by creationism. On the other hand, the culture war has also entailed moves towards ‘outcomes-based’ education and getting ‘back to basics’, as promoted by powerful neoconservative education reformers like Reagan’s Education Secretary, William Bennett. The rhetoric here tends to focus on ‘standards’ and ‘excellence’, and more recently on ‘knowledge’, which (it is alleged) has been abandoned in favour of a purely relativist approach. While the evangelicals have historically tended to operate at a local, grassroots level through school boards, the neoconservatives have focused on state and federal policy.

Perhaps surprisingly, the first edition of Hartman’s book (in 2015) claimed that the culture wars were over, and the second edition (in 2019) maintains this position, even in the wake of Trump and Black Lives Matter, and the advent of social media (which goes curiously unmentioned). Hartman argues that the utilitarian, capitalistic drift in education will ultimately be more damaging than the culture wars – and when we consider the British government’s recent proposals to shut down ‘low value’ university courses, and the more general attack on humanities and social sciences, there may well be some truth in this. However, it’s hard to deny that the culture wars have greatly intensified over the past decade or so.

To my knowledge, there isn’t a British equivalent of Hartman’s history of the US culture wars, although it is something we sorely need. In the UK, the war might appear a little more sedate, although if you listen to people like Birbalsingh, the difference is fairly marginal. The longer history here is different in several key respects: most notably, in the UK, social class is probably more important than identity politics. However, what is striking in both countries is how well-organised and how aggressive the conservative culture warriors have been.

Of course, one could say that there has always been a culture war around education in Britain. For the Victorian poet (and Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools) Matthew Arnold, education about high culture was a key line of defence against what he saw as the dangerous consequences of democratisation. Raymond Williams’s books Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, published in 1958 and 1961, trace a history in which changing ideas of culture have been part of the wider struggle between social classes. Yet these are, perhaps, older ideas of ‘culture’, and they never quite amounted to a war. Today, we have a ‘war on woke’, whose targets are much broader and more inclusive, and whose tone is much more polarised and confrontational.

The conservative backlash against what can loosely be called ‘counter-cultural’ ideas has long been apparent in the UK too. The Christian Right, for example in the form of Mary Whitehouse, were beginning their campaigns in the 1960s at the same time as ‘permissiveness’ seemed to be on the rise. Racist arguments and policies gained ground at same time as Britain was withdrawing from empire and becoming more multicultural. The celebrated beginnings of youth culture also saw the increasing tendency to stigmatise youth as a social problem. And there is a long and continuing history of the media, and especially the popular press, trivialising, misrepresenting and attacking ‘left’ ideas.

As compared with the US, it is harder to think of many serious public intellectuals who have taken up the war on woke, especially in relation to education. Roger Scruton, Chris Woodhead or Peter Hitchens are not quite in the same league as the neoconservative US thinkers that Hartman discusses, like Allan Bloom, Charles Murray or Dinesh D’Souza. Our current crop of right-wing commentators – like Toby Young, Tom Bennett and Birbalsingh herself – are hardly the sharpest knives in the drawer. Although Margaret Thatcher’s first Education Minister Michael Joseph might be an exception, it’s not until we get to Michael Gove that British politics saw a powerful neoconservative policy-maker in education equivalent to Lynne Cheney or William Bennett. Until recent years, perhaps the closest Britain has come to a truly right-wing ideology of education was in the Black Papers of the 1970s – a set of publications to which I hope to return in a future post.

As Hartman argues, the backlash against progressive ideas in education in the US has its demographic base in the Christian Right, whose ‘family values’ conservatism often bleeds across into jingoistic nationalism, homophobia, racism and so on. However, it is the sharper neoconservative thinkers who have taken the fight to the enemy, by engaging much more directly with the ideas of New Left, and pushing at some their weaker points. Inevitably, there are simplistic versions of such arguments (notably on social media), but there are also more sophisticated ones, and it’s vital to understand why they have gained the currency and purchase they undoubtedly have.

According to Hartman, there are several recurring characteristics here. At its root, the neoconservative backlash is motivated by a sense of threat – a fear that one’s hold on power is being challenged or undermined by hitherto marginalised social groups. It entails a rejection of what is regarded as cultural and epistemological relativism, which is seen to represent an abandonment of objectively valid standards and values. It is supported by a ‘declension narrative’ – in other words, by stories of cultural decline and nostalgic assertions about ‘the way we were’. Politically, it adopts populist rhetoric, contesting the ‘liberal elite’ of self-professed experts who apparently ignore ‘common sense’ – although of course these arguments only apply to the wrong experts.

It’s possible to trace these characteristics in contemporary debates about education in the UK. Culture warriors like Birbalsingh and Young frequently make highly questionable assertions about what went on when ‘woke’ ideas allegedly held sway, in the classrooms of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Apparently, it was at this time that teachers all wilfully abandoned established forms of knowledge, along with classroom discipline, in favour of an unstructured free-for-all. Any remaining vestiges of these progressive approaches – in terms of both curriculum content and pedagogy – are caricatured and mocked. It isn’t always clear why such apparent nonsense should still be influencing teachers, but much of the blame for this is placed on university education courses (which in Britain at least are now being steadily undermined in favour of commercial providers).

At stake in these debates are some profound, and perhaps incommensurable, philosophical issues, which absolutely should be taken seriously. How do we balance the need for unity and equality against the need to acknowledge difference and diversity? How do we assess claims for absolute truth and the necessity of logic against the argument that what counts as truth is socially and historically constructed? How can we balance the necessity of ‘free speech’ against the dangers of provoking offence and inciting violence? And how do we understand the relationships between individual learning and the wider social context in which it occurs?

These are still vital, complex debates in education, but they are not made easier by false dichotomies, spurious accusations and a reliance on anecdotal evidence. Yet these tendencies are very much apparent on social media – not least on what remains of ‘eduTwitter’. Here, there has been a continuing shouting match between those who call themselves ‘trads’ and ‘progs’ – although it is the former who almost entirely dominate the terms of that debate. For much of the time, it appears that ‘woke’ is simply a term of abuse applied to anything that self-professed conservatives have decided to dislike. And, like Birbalsingh, they seem increasingly inclined to take up rhetorical arms, caricaturing, ridiculing and abusing those whom they oppose rather than engaging in any semblance of rational debate.

Ultimately, this may well be the aim of the culture warriors: to use education simply as a kind of political weapon. Yet these attacks on schools come at a time when the British education system is on its knees. There are many indicators of this, but perhaps the most chilling are to do with student attendance and teacher retention. On any given day, 10% of students following GCSE examination courses will be absent from school. One in five are categorised as ‘persistently absent’. These figures are almost double those before the pandemic; and they apply particularly to students from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with learning difficulties.

Meanwhile, almost 10% of teachers left the profession last year. Roughly half do so within five years of completing training. Teacher vacancies and temporarily filled posts are at record high levels. According to a union survey, almost three quarters of teachers have seriously considered leaving their jobs in the past year, and two thirds have seriously considered leaving the profession altogether. Most disturbingly, only 14% said they would recommend teaching as a career. Again, these figures have increased significantly since the pandemic: this is not a ‘Covid effect’. While there are multiple factors at stake here, Conservatives have been in charge of education for thirteen years: to say the least, there is little sign that their ‘war on woke’ is improving the situation either for teachers or for students.

As this so-called ‘debate’ about education becomes ever more shrill and polarised – and frankly, more ignorant – it is signally failing to advance our understanding of teaching and learning. I suspect (and hope) that most teachers are now well and truly bored with this tiresome culture war: it can only be to the detriment of education itself.