What They're Teaching Our Kids
A damning new report throws light on what's happening in Britain's schools
Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 56,600 subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, fortnightly Live with Matt discussions, join the debate, get discounts, notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.
Here’s another shocking story you might have missed this week.
The Church of England —that’s right, the Church of England— has instructed teachers to tell children they benefit from “white privilege” and the “systematic oppression of People of Colour through racist policies and practices”.
Remarkably, this even includes teaching children the “pyramid of white supremacy” —a bizarre device drawn from critical race theory (CRT) which tells white children that feeling indifferent or apolitical about issues of race could soon pave the way for neo-Nazism, lynching minorities, committing hate crimes, and even genocide.
This is because white children, so the advocates of CRT tell us, are inherently racist, shaped by the “institutionally racist” societies they are living in. In the new moral hierarchy, they belong to the morally inferior white majority group of “oppressors” who are holding the morally superior racial, sexual, and gender minorities back.
Their only path to salvation is to acknowledge their “white privilege” and “white guilt”, accept they are not “racially innocent”, and transform into an active “anti-racist” —whereby they are encouraged to see everything and everybody in society through the crude, narrow, reductive, and divisive framework of race.
What on earth is going on? Why are our children being taught the only interesting thing about them is not their character but their race? And why are children in Britain’s schools even being separated and divided on the basis of their race?
I’ll tell you what’s going on. As the cultural revolution continues to sweep through Britain, as the institutions continue to import radical ideologies like critical race theory and gender identity theory from America, the people who dominate these institutions are increasingly racialising, politicising, and sexualising our children.
We’re exposing them —often through external companies that are not regulated and led by ideological zealots— to radical and highly contentious ideas which often have no serious basis in science or evidence and should have no place in the classroom.
And now a devastating new study reveals just how widespread these ideas are becoming in Britain’s schools —and why, together, we all need to be pushing back against them. So, here are the main findings and then a few suggestions from me about what we could and should be doing to push back against this madness.
If you talk to the new elite about this, the liberal progressives who dominate the institutions, they’ll tell you it’s not happening. They’ll say it’s a myth. They’ll say it’s a right-wing plot to “stoke the culture wars”. And when examples of what is happening in Britain’s schools do come to light they’ll tell you it’s a few bad apples and is not indicative of a wider trend.
But —as I’ve written before— they’re gaslighting the rest of us.
They’re ignoring a rapidly growing pile of evidence —drawn from Freedom of Information requests and meticulous studies by independent groups— which shows, clearly, how CRT is already entrenched in many of Britain’s schools.
Just look next time you’re in your local school for the CRT buzzwords —white privilege, white guilt, unconscious bias, affirming identity, active anti-racist, microaggressions, racial trauma, racial literacy, racial equity, allyship, bystander, marginalised voices, lived experience, social justice, whiteness, decolonisation, and institutional or structural racism.
These are all signs your children are being indoctrinated by CRT, are essentially being taught they are racist, their society is racist, their ancestors were racist, and that every disparity that exists in modern Britain can be explained by … racism.
And now, this week, the extent to which CRT is embedded in our schools has been further underlined by a remarkable new report by the independent group Don’t Divide Us —an organisation which rightly supports colour-blind efforts to tackle racism but pushes back against CRT’s simplistic, reductive, and divisive tropes.
What did it find?
It found many of these ideas are being actively pushed in Britain’s schools by external “third-party providers” which are unaccountable to parents, are not regulated in any serious way by authorities, are often led by ideological zealots who are fully invested in promoting CRT, and are directly in breach of the formal duty of schools to provide neutral and impartial teaching.
After surveying almost fifty of these third-party providers, which are routinely brought in by schools to teach children about race, they found 48 of them were promoting highly contested ideas from CRT “as if they were verified knowledge”. Furthermore, they were often also having a far more profound impact on schools and the surrounding educational culture, as Don’t Divide Us note:
“These 3POs (third party providers) are not educational bodies; they are primarily political in purpose; and the materials and resources they provide to schools are not based on academically derived knowledge but a combination of everyday social knowledge, cultural and political beliefs. Many … benefit from significant funding. Almost 3 in 10 have budgets of over £1 million … The reach of their influence is further than the selection of curriculum content alone; many provide teacher training, professional development, mentoring, reading lists, staff directories, and organise support groups and conferences. In this way, the profession, as well as the curriculum, is being re-racialised”.
They go even further, describing some of these providers as “a clear and present danger in terms of democratic accountability and educational standards”, as shadowy entities which are conducting a “revolution by stealth”.
Examples include organisations teaching children in years 6-8 that racism is “all-encompassing”, existing within their individual psychology and institutions, and encouraging them to get involved in “racial justice activism” and “allyship”, in other words pushing them down the pathway to embracing a CRT view of the world.
Others have gone all-in on the dubious concept of “unconscious bias”, instructing children that both they and their teachers suffer from it while ignoring evidence that unconscious or implicit racism are very unreliable measures (while “diversity training” more generally has been showed to be deeply flawed).
Many also make sweeping generalisations about racism and disparities in Britain, for example telling children their counterparts from minority ethnic backgrounds are being routinely penalised and falling behind in the education system. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Children from minority backgrounds are now routinely outperforming their white counterparts at every level of the education system.
And while casual charges of Britain being “institutionally” or “structurally” racist routinely dominate the material of these groups, few appear to explain to children that levels of racial prejudice in Britain have never been as low as they are today and are among the lowest in the developed world. Instead, providers were found to draw very crude and simplistic comparisons with America, using moments like the death of George Floyd to imply Britain’s history, culture, identity, and relationship with race are identical to America’s when, in fact, they are completely different.
Such findings not only undermine …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Matt Goodwin to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.