AS LOCKDOWN starts to ease up — for everywhere other than my home town of Bolton that is — the Tories have decided that there is one group of people who need locking up. Children. 

The Department for Education is spending £10 million on new “behaviour hubs,” having a crackdown on mobile phones and threatening to keep kids in school from 8am till 6pm. 

It is unsurprising that this creeping authoritarianism comes from an education secretary who keeps a whip on his desk.

This may seem to be yet another all-out war on schools, but this should be seen as what it is — part of the ongoing culture war. 

Being tough on children is seen as the benchmark of a good government. Inventing imagined problems, scaring Daily Mail readers and then coming up with tough solutions is a sure vote-winner in the Home Counties.  

Another sure-fire way to scare the Tory voter base is to hint at a decline in good old Christian values. 

A Tory MP last month brought up an archaic law which states that daily collective worship should take place in schools. 

He was duly reassured by the Secretary of State for Education that anyone failing to do so could be investigated. 

This is despite the fact that no-one has actually done this in most schools for the best part of two decades and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has written to the government asking it to repeal regulations on collective worship in schools. 

It requested to know what was being done to “repeal legal provisions for compulsory attendance at collective worship in publicly funded schools and ensure that children can independently exercise the right to withdraw from religious observance at school.”

This all distracts from the myriad other real issues young people are facing in education today. 

Thousands of children are missing out on vital mental healthcare, with nearly 40 per cent having to wait over four months for treatment to even begin. 

Even before the pandemic, mental health problems among young people were on the rise. Perhaps the £10 million could have been spent there instead? 

The National Education Union, in its campaign No Child Left Behind, states that in the UK today, 31 per cent of our children — 4.3 million — are trapped in poverty. 

We saw, despite the hardships faced by many during the pandemic, the government fighting tooth and nail against things so basic as providing food for hungry young people in the holidays. 

Despite it being the obvious, and moral, thing to do, it took a campaign by a footballer to force ministers to back down. 

Maybe they would like to see some of that £10 million spent on projects to help them rather than stigmatise them?

The head teacher of Pimlico Academy in London seems to have placed himself front and centre in this culture war. 

Apparently, the head teacher cancelled Black History Month, oversaw a uniform policy that some said was racist, flew the Union Flag outside the school and kept a picture of Margaret Thatcher in his office.  

This follows the previous diktat stating that schools should not use material from anti-capitalists in schools and builds upon the government’s “cultural capital” and “British values” push not so long ago which is, of course, more about pushing the notion that certain bourgeois forms of capital are superior to others. 
 
Add to this the current educational trend of focusing on a “knowledge-rich curriculum.” 

Now, on the face of it, this doesn’t sound all that bad — surely teaching knowledge has always been the purpose of education? 

But of course what this really means is rote learning with no critical thinking allowed. 

The current terrible events in Gaza could perhaps have been a good teaching moment for schools, but a clip surfaced this week of a child being shouted at by a teacher for expressing their opinion on the issue and being accused of being brainwashed. 

Be good drones, children, it’s what your boss will want. 

What this all boils down to is hegemonic control. “The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery,” Antonio Gramsci is quoted as saying, “is that of freeing the mind.” 

This is exactly what the education system seeks to suppress. 

 As Richard Shaull stated in his foreword to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom’.”

Which do you think the current government prefers?