I AM SURE that many teachers have been asked, as I have many times this week, what is happening in Ukraine. Young people are, for obvious reasons, scared by the situation. Especially as the media and right-wing MPs try to whip up a war frenzy. Add to this the disinformation and misinformation circulating on social media — what role can and should teachers play in helping children understand this crisis?

The most important thing is, in the first instance, to reassure pupils that the likelihood of World War III is highly unlikely, but just as importantly, to teach them the skill of critical thinking.

The question of what and how we should be teaching could of course also be broadened out to cover the whole curriculum — to ask what role teachers can and should play in helping them to understand the world at large. In a world where fake news is rife, politicians can’t be trusted and the mainstream media is owned by millionaires, the role of teachers is more important than ever.

Once again the Tories are finding solutions to problems that don’t actually exist with the publication of their document giving guidance on political impartiality in schools. There are already laws covering this and teachers have a duty to be politically impartial already. This, of course, is only right isn’t it? The role of a teacher is not to indoctrinate, evangelise or polemicise. It is to well…teach. This being said a teacher should be able to teach without fear of political interference and be able to challenge the status quo.
 
The Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that there should be a “requirement for teachers to make a balanced presentation of opposing views on political issues, so that the complexity of many of these important questions is understood” — this should of course be welcomed shouldn’t it? So, what should teachers be teaching? The first thing should be the horrors of war — how every war has been a tragedy for the working classes of all nations and about who profits from these wars. This of course should not only focus on European wars of the 20th century but also those currently being waged across the world in places such as Palestine and Yemen.

If we are to provide a balanced account of opposing views, then for example during the current crisis pupils should be told about Russian chauvinism but also the role played by Nato expansion, something which is enough these days to get you expelled from the Labour Party.

The Establishment has shown its hand this week with an all-out war on dissent, Labour MPs taking a principled anti-war standpoint by signing the Stop the War Coalition petition have been threatened with removal of the whip and Young Labour have been censored by Labour HQ for daring to criticise Nato. Anyone who deviates from the line of “Nato good, Russia bad” is branded a stooge in the pocket of Putin, or worse. If we can’t discuss this in our CLPs can we discuss it in our classrooms?

When discussing the role of democracy in society pupils should also be taught about the role of capitalist nations in the corruption of democracy in other countries, about the coups and assassinations in the name of freedom and how electing a socialist government is usually enough to have your country paid a visit by the CIA.

When the news shows the arrests in Russia of brave anti-war protesters we should also discuss the new Policing Bill and how this will lead to similar scenes in the squares and streets of Britain. If teachers are to provide a balance of views would it not be appropriate to show the positives of existing or previously existing communist states and the horrors of capitalism? Can we please also stop teaching George Orwell?

What they want of course, is not impartiality but an education sector which defends the status quo and hides the opportunities that alternative social systems may offer. This latest attack on teachers is, of course, nothing to do with fears of indoctrination, but is about their fears of an increasingly-politicised youth — which is why the only organisation mentioned in the guidance by name is Black Lives Matter, a movement strongly supported by younger people in Britain.

With the saturation of social media, young people are more able than ever to find out the information they need to know and left-wing political consciousness is on the rise overall — organisations such as Young Labour and the Young Communist League have surged in recent years.

The current education system has become fixated on what Paulo Friere called the banking model of education, where teachers deposit their knowledge in the minds of their pupils. The current trend, led by a band of hard-line Twitterati rather than any educational research, is not called the banking model but a “knowledge-rich curriculum.” This is nothing new, as all teachers know trends in teaching come back time and again, like trends in fashion.

When I started teaching I was told to be “the guide on the side not the sage on the stage.” Now we are told the opposite is in fact the correct way of teaching. Why then the current fixation with pushing the accumulation of knowledge? Of course the answer lies in asking who decides on the content of that knowledge: the national curriculum sets out the programmes of study and Ofsted enforces this. Both are inherently political organisations.

There is a secondary purpose to this pedagogical method. In Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed he states that “the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.”

This model of course is perfect for the current government who, again in Freire’s words “care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.” In face of rising inequality, threat of nuclear war and the looming climate crisis a world transformed is exactly what we need.