Status Anxiety: Here endeth the lesson

7 January 2012

One of the most depressing things about being a journalist is that 99 per cent of your work goes unnoticed. You pour your heart and soul into a piece, congratulate yourself on having produced something rather good for once, then wait for the plaudits to start rolling in. Six months later, you’re still waiting. It’s like dropping a stone into a well and not even having the satisfaction of hearing it go plop. Except it’s not a stone — it’s your whole career.

Occasionally, though, something you write attracts attention, and it’s often completely random. For instance, I wrote a column for this magazine last year that is still the subject of intense debate ten months later. Headlined ‘A lesson in satire’, it was a response to a blogpost on an anti-free schools website about LGBT week at Stoke Newington School. (For those of you who don’t know, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered.) The author, Henry Stewart, is a co-founder of the site in question as well as being the school’s chair of governors and his piece was a misty-eyed account of how proud he was that the whole of Year 8 had spent a day making banners and posters and marching up and down Stoke Newington High Street displaying them.

The conceit of my column was that this blogpost was a brilliant piece of satire and its real author was not ‘Henry Stewart’ — clearly an invented persona — but Michael Gove. My point was that taking a group of 12- to 13-year-olds out of lessons for a day and getting them to create materials promoting LGBT week seemed a good illustration of what had gone wrong with state education under New Labour. I was not condemning Stoke Newington School for trying to inculcate one particular set of political values rather than another. Rather, I was questioning whether taxpayer-funded schools should be in the business of transmitting political values at all. Shouldn’t schools confine themselves to teaching children how to think critically and independently about a range of subjects and let them make up their own minds about the issues of the day? The danger of press-ganging children into promoting LGBT week — or teaching them about the dangers of global warming — is that they end up blindly following whatever political dogma happens to be in fashion rather than thinking for themselves. In my view, the aim of a good education should be to foster independent-mindedness, not to encourage children to toe the line.

Needless to say, such subtleties were lost on the opponents of free schools. They immediately leapt on this column as ‘evidence’ that I was a ‘homophobe’ and therefore ‘unfit’ to be the governor of a taxpayer-funded school. A letter-writing campaign began, with one official in the Department for Education being deluged with complaints about me. Nearly all of them argued that because the West London Free School wasn’t intending to celebrate LGBT week it should have its funding agreement revoked. This poor official had to write back to all of them, patiently explaining that, in spite of New Labour having enjoyed 13 years in office, it wasn’t against the law for a school to neglect to teach children about the pivotal figures in the gay rights movement.

One particularly rabid opponent — another governor of Stoke Newington School — accused me of writing the column with the specific intention of discouraging parents of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered children from applying to the West London Free School. I have tried to assure him that that isn’t the case. If there are any transgendered 11-year-olds among the 1,074 children who have applied for our next 120 places, I can honestly say that they won’t be discriminated against in the admissions process.

Much though I enjoy the novelty of writing an article that has some sort of afterlife, it’s time to draw a line under this. Let me say for the record that the West London Free School welcomes applications from all sections of the local community and has a policy of zero tolerance towards any form of bullying, particularly homophobic bullying. And, yes, that includes the use of words like ‘gay’ and ‘poof’ as terms of disapprobation. While we won’t be devoting any curriculum time to LGBT week, the children will have ample opportunity to learn about the contributions made by lesbians, gays, etc, to the history of mankind in the course of studying English, drama, music, science and, of course, classical civilisation. Can the letter-writing now stop, please?

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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