A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time and it was during a classroom debate about immigration: he was very much agin, I was for. It struck me, suddenly, that he was very stupid – an astonishing realisation, as I was accustomed to believing teachers to be full of wisdom, a delusion inculcated in me by my parents.
This all took place in a very large comprehensive school in the north-east of England – a good school by and large, but almost entirely white. Of the 1,800 pupils only one was not: a quiet lad of Chinese Malay extraction, I think, who was known to all the pupils and a good few of the teachers as ‘Fu Manchu’. In fact, there was another non-white face in the crowd, but we didn’t know it at the time. It was only 20 years later that I realised my friend Jim was half Indian. He kept that pretty quiet.
Let us raise a glass to these two canny girls who recognised that their teacher was a halfwit
All of this dates me fairly precisely. Such racist attitudes would today be front-page news and there would be government inquiries. Just as dated is my parents’ deference, and the deference shown by society in general, towards teachers. Over the intervening 50 years, society has become more diverse and so necessarily more tolerant and accepting – and, by some sort of strange inversion, teachers have become far more stupid. They had their stupidities then, of course, but not on a par with the sort of stuff we see today. That is one reason why parents are disinclined to show them deference. Another is that deference is pretty much dead meat – gone the way of similarly despised qualities such as discipline, respect, obedience etc.
Should there be any hope, it lies with the children – certainly if the Church of England school, Rye College, in East Sussex, is anything to go by. Two Year 8 pupils (what we used to call second years) recorded a truly cretinous teacher hectoring and bullying them about their views regarding gender. The kids had made the eminently reasonable observation that a fellow pupil who wished to identify as a cat was seriously mentally unwell and should not be indulged in her delusion by the staff. The teacher reacted with fury, heightened when the girls insisted that there were two genders and that you could not be ‘agender’. She shouted: ‘What do you mean you can’t have it? It’s not a law… Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be. You are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the gender of the sexual organ you were born with or you’re weird, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.’ She then said she would be reporting the girls to the assistant head and suggested that if they continued to think in that manner they should find another school.
Obviously, the teacher should be sacked – and the head too, given the school’s refusal to accept that what this teacher did was not merely stupid, but evil. You do not call your pupils ‘despicable’ and tell them to find another school when they are simply telling the truth – a very easily demonstrable truth.
So, let us raise a glass to these two canny schoolgirls who recognised that their teacher was a halfwit dedicated to lying to her charges and had the perspicacity to record her doing so. But maybe there is a general rebellion under way, because after a bit of digging, the Daily Telegraph, which first reported the story, discovered that in schools up and down the country, loads of children are cheerfully identifying as animals. They include one child who identifies as a dinosaur and, best of all, there’s another who identifies as a moon.
I daresay a small number of these kids are genuinely disturbed, but my suspicion is that the majority of them are indulging in that excellent British pastime of taking the piss. They are aware that the whole self-identification thing is a counter-rational absurdity which has been swallowed whole by the idiots who teach them every day and they are determined to have a good laugh at the expense of the staff.
It all made me terribly nostalgic for my schooldays and the fun I might have today at, say, Rye College, if I were a second-year pupil. I can imagine identifying as having handed in my homework, for a start, despite comprehensive evidence to the contrary. I would inform the teaching staff that while I was entirely relaxed about what pronouns should be used when addressing me, I did insist upon the teachers using my preferred adjectives. In future I should be addressed directly, and referred to, as ‘the stupendously brilliant Rod Liddle’. I would also demand the right to run in girls’ sports races and use whatever lavatory I fancied, depending on which of the several hundred imagined genders I was identifying as on that particular day. I would exhort all the children to do likewise – and thus utterly destroy this ludicrous and damaging ideology by exposing its obvious inconsistencies and unrealities, laughing at teacher as they do so.
Teachers regularly complain that their biggest bugbear is the parents – and as I mentioned, it is true that these days parents are more inclined to take the side of their kids in disputes. Back in the 1970s, by contrast, if I was punished for wrongdoing in school, my parents would simply say I deserved it and probably punish me a bit more for good measure.
But one of the reasons this shift has taken place is that, captured by a fatuous ideology to which only a tiny minority of the population adheres, the teachers have encroached upon territory which more properly should lie in the domain of the parents – and they are rightly resented for it. That, and the fact that seemingly many of them are that very worst of combinations: dim and totalitarian.
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