UK: A Clash of Educations, Part II

Jun 27, 2019 by

by Denis MacEoin, Gatestone Institute:

Recent protests about supposed LGBT lessons in a school in Birmingham, England, have drawn attention from the media, politicians, the High Court, and the National Secular Society. While the protests may well spread to other cities, for the moment they are contained. When these lessons, which are based on the “No Outsiders” curriculum within the international system of “Diversity Education,” become legally compulsory for almost all schools in 2020, either the protests will die out or become more clamorous in a struggle to rescind the law — an act to which the government might well not agree.

The question of demands placed on Western governments to alter national laws in order to accommodate religious rulings remains an issue that is divisive, notably between secular states and citizens who might not want a secular state but a religious one instead.

In the instance of Birmingham, the current controversy calls to mind another that took place in the city’s educational system several years earlier. This was the so-called “Trojan Horse” affair, in which it was alleged that some school governors and teachers had plotted to undermine the teaching of secular values by placing extremists within staff and management positions. The claims about Operation Trojan Horse started in March 2014 with publication of a letter supposedly written by an Islamist in Birmingham and sent to a contact in Bradford. The letter had apparently been sent to Birmingham City Council some months earlier, in late November 2013.

By March 11, the London Times had declared the letter to be “a crude forgery”, and by June 8, two newspapers, the Independent and the Guardian, had also declared it a hoax and the investigation that had started into it “a witch hunt”. Nevertheless, by July, Birmingham’s Education Commissioner, Sir Mike Tomlinson, stated that it was no hoax but was happening — “without a shadow of doubt”.

In the end, it did not matter greatly whether or not the letter itself was a forgery, or who the agitators had been. As time passed and investigations were carried out into schools in Birmingham and elsewhere, it became clear that something unprecedented had occurred and that there were reasons to look into it.

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