What’s BBC Bitesize really teaching our kids?
by Richard Norrie, CapX:
The BBC is its own worst enemy. The head asks for one thing while the arms and legs behave as they please. It has tacitly admitted it has a problem with bias, specifically in that it fails to represent and understand the views of people more often than not drawn from working-class backgrounds. Its bias is usually described in such terms, which can be decoded to mean those of us who voted to leave the European Union and are not all aboard the liberal train to Social Justice. Yet despite director general Tim Davie’s attempt to steer the BBC back to its statutory responsibility of impartiality, things just keep on slipping through.
Take, for example, the BBC’s educational materials provided via the Bitesize and Teach websites, which students may be thanking or cursing this week depending on how they did in their GCSEs. Until recently, articles were hosted promoting unchallenged activists who wished to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. Another activist who encouraged museums to ‘display it like you stole it’ was given free reign. Puff pieces were published on Greta Thunberg, presented as though she were just a regular kid who happened to be a political activist, and not the controversial radical she truly is. Questionable material from a campaigning organisation was presented without question to damn the media, and right-wing media in particular, as hostile to Muslims.
Accounts of American history offer a sanitised view of the Black Panthers, omitting their Maoism and criminality and presenting them as part of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, and not a rupture from it. An article on ‘social justice’ endorsed affirmative action policies as a means to bring about group-level equality of outcomes. Another on sexuality and ‘gender identity’ linked to an organisation that offered advice on how to use a chest binder safely as well as group and ‘chem sex’. For those not in the know, the latter is sex while under the influence of drugs, often crystal meth. This can also be done safely, apparently.
Indeed, if there was one common theme to all the examples uncovered in my recent report for Civitas, it was a belief in the activist.
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