Why are students steered towards duff A-levels?

00:00 07:41

Robert Ades has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘Women are more religious because they are socialised to be obedient and passive.’

‘In Latin America, men often spend 20-40 per cent of the household’s income on alcohol, as well as further spending on tobacco, gambling and prostitutes.’

‘The Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 is an example of state-initiated corporate crime.’

All examples taken verbatim from the most common sociology A-level course book (by Napier Press) used by students for the AQA syllabus, the most commonly used exam board. They lack any qualifying language or citation but are presented as fact.

Social justice warriors in training are taught that science is bad ‘because it has led to pollution’

Sociology as a school subject is a soup of half-baked old-left apologist propaganda, daft pub conspiracy theories, self-defeating second-wave feminist rants and an actively denied undercurrent of western Christian superiority. More terrifying still are the generalisations about science: ‘a scientific fact is simply a social construction or belief that scientists are able to persuade their colleagues to share – not necessarily a real thing out there’. No wonder kids still leave school – not just faith schools – believing evolution is a theory…‘like religion’. Social justice warriors in training are taught that science is bad ‘because it has led to pollution’.

Due to a long-term teacher absence, I have had to take on some teaching responsibility for sociology A-level this year in my north London comp, having never studied it before. My students are mostly young Muslim women who, after two decades of ethnic pigeonholing by monitoring forms, do not describe themselves as ‘British’, but their personalities are unmistakably those of local north Londoners. As a middle-aged white man, I was obligated to teach these thoughtful and funny hijab-wearing teenagers that an academic body of knowledge has determined that their modest clothing culture repressed them, and that standing at the back in mosques was evidence of demeaning patriarchal segregation.