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More lies, more indoctrination

Thursday, 27th September 2007

Melanie Phillips highlights an example of the indoctrination which can take place in schools when teachers decide to foist their prejudices on their pupils. This is a questionnaire devised for a 'citizenship' lesson that was distributed to pupils at a large mixed comprehensive school:

You know that Israel’s actions against Palestinian civilians go against international law. Which of the following do you decide?
a) People like us in Britain should stop buying goods made in Israel, to help put pressure on Israel to stop attacking Palestinians (3)
b) This conflict has nothing to do with us and there is nothing we can do (1)
c) Our government should put pressure on Israel to do what international law says, and cut down its occupation of Palestine (2)
d) We need to find out more about the conflict between Israel and Palestine before we say what we do (3)
The numbers in brackets indicate the score a student would receive for their answer - the higher the better. The week before they had a number of photos they had to group together - one was an Israeli tank and a Palestinian boy that was put under ‘Oppression.’

As Melanie writes:

We are now a country where the uninformed are instructed by the bigoted. From the Olympian heights of Britain’s once unsurpassed education system, which produced the fairest, gentlest and most rational society on earth, Britain’s children are now being equipped instead to inhabit Planet Virulence, where ignorance, irrationality and injustice rule.
I warned from the very introduction of these ‘citizenship’ lessons that they would become a vehicle for crude propaganda. So it has proved. The irony is that the government introduced them in the first place because it was so alarmed that British identity and values were being eroded from within in the face of the threat to the nation from without. Now we can see the result. British citizenship includes hatred of Israel by way of the propaganda of one of the Big Lies of history – the very same Big Lie that is fuelling the murderous onslaught on the western world.