Why the state wants to clamp down on homeschooling |
The government’s new cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive and resilient United Kingdom’, has attracted attention because of its introduction of an ‘anti Muslim hostility’ code, its erasure of the English as an ethnic identity, and its quite confused and bizarre messaging. What has so far gone unremarked is its Mussolinian energy regarding education.
This goal is clear. A whole raft of new rules will apply to schools. There will be obligatory citizenship classes, including a promise to ‘raise awareness of threats to democracy’. This takes on a rather more sinister tone when you realise that elsewhere the document redefines patriotism to mean agreeing with the government’s policies on diversity and multiculturalism, and being opposed to those who are ‘pining for some imagined past’. The report goes even further, describing the idea that the English are an ethnic group as an idea of ‘the extreme right’, which ‘the vast majority of people reject’.
The Communities Secretary, Steve Reed states in his foreword that those ‘who want to divide us’ are ‘hostile actor[s]’ who the state believes it has to ‘protect our country from’. So we can expect children to be taught that those who repeat the actual history of........