Dream State: Teaching in the English Culture War

DREAM STATE: TEACHING IN THE ENGLISH CULTURE WAR

AN HONEST ACCOUNT

 

PAUL SUTTON

INTRODUCTION

Let’s face it, we’re living in a fake reality that is so narcotic, it’s often impossible to remember or imagine much else. Wars and plagues once ended such illusions but now deepen them. Only serious illness forces one into another existence.

Of course, this applies mostly to the middle classes. But to which of their professions, in particular? Teaching is close to the top; the job I left in spring 2023. It’s perfect for commentary because the day-to-day work is unavoidably real, reinforcing the need many teachers have for constant yet ineffectual denial.

Hopefully, none of this is new or original – at least not to sentient adults. For children, the essential thing is to show them they’re being indoctrinated and allow them to realise another way of thinking is possible. In truth, most instinctively sense there’s something wrong with many of their teachers – some of whom are one step (or less) away from idiocy or madness.

It starts where?

In teacher training, which only a masochist would want to describe, so pointless yet demanding is the process. You can no more truly train a teacher than you can a parent. But that’s not the purpose of these courses. They exist in order to exist and provide employment for those who escape teaching. Their intellectual content is zero (possibly negative) based on qualitative ‘evidence-based studies’, pseudo-scientific theories and totalitarian methods, like behaviourism.

An example?

A diversity-awareness course from a subject consultant – a science teacher, who worked for an exam board – on reflecting multiculturalism in the curriculum. The startling news that: ‘Gravity wasn’t invented by Newton but by Africans.’ When the absurdity of this statement was highlighted by yours truly, I was told: ‘It can be difficult for people to move on from their Eurocentric views.’

In mitigation, the lady was a biology teacher who believed that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (published 1859) was written to justify the slave trade in the British Empire (abolished 1833). When this inconvenient chronology was questioned, she angrily replied: ‘You deliberately misunderstand the point I’m making’. I was reprimanded for ‘not appreciating the need for educational diversity’ – i.e. by introducing reality.

Teacher training is an exemplar for what’s wrong with left-liberal fantasy thinking and its attempt to control and reconstruct society. It’s difficult to decide which is more alarming: the overt nonsense being peddled or the stupidity of those peddling it. Even more sinister is the realisation that many know such thinking is ridiculous, but keep shtum.

Anyway, I’ll describe in detail my first year in the job, before I knew anything about how to teach.

SECTION ONE: BEING AN NQT (NEWLY QUALIFIED TEACHER)

I: THE NAME GAME

The best way to start this is allowing memory to select, undirected and unchecked, my experiences. The only selection applied will be in roughly balancing good and bad ones. I’ve many more of the former, despite my negative introduction and the fact I’m naturally drawn to the disastrous in life.

The purpose of an account like this is to be honestly critical, not least because most teachers’ reminiscences are egotistical and worthy – in essence, dishonest. It’s also done to allow humour (the essential element in a teacher and their teaching) to lighten things.

My first memory is of perusing class lists, reading them slowly and thinking about the names. Just imagine a situation where you’re given 200 new ones, all of them important to your immediate future. Anyone remotely creative or inquisitive would start speculating and constructing characters and situations, imagining attitudes and behaviour.

To be more honest, I was looking for Christian names which my PGCE experience said suggested trouble. Teaching is perhaps the most class-conscious profession one can enter. First-names are vital in how that occurs, but in a more subtle way than may be supposed. Still, it’s no exaggeration to say that most teachers operate a watch-list:

a. Obvious dangers: Ryan; Kyle; Shane; Robyn; Paige; Becca (plus annoying variants).

b. Deceptive dangers: Jack; Nathanial; Tobias; Chloe, Charlotte; Emilia (plus annoying variants).

c. Dangerous parents: Daniel; William; Riley; Samantha; Clarissa; Maxine.

d. Probably safe: Matthew; George; Tom; Emily; Susan; Heather.

e. Probably weird: Blue; Judas; Travis; Summer; Savannah; Tabitha.

It’s not true that this divides neatly along working-class and middle-class lines. A significant factor is the showiness of the name, its ‘pushiness’. Truly ethnic names I find difficult to generalise about, though overtly Islamic ones need to be noted for likely difficulties around freedom of speech, on religion in lessons.

Anyone who’s read this far won’t be surprised I make no apology for ‘offence’ caused by a crude analysis. It’s based on subjective experience, unfiltered by concern on stereotyping. Nor do I consider causality from family privilege. My sole purpose is describing with honesty what I’ve seen and done.

Because teachers look very carefully at names, not least when creating their dreaded ‘seating plans’ – and boy did I fuck up in my early attempts.

Group 9a1, Monday afternoon, period 5: my first of many nightmares with them, ending in a riot and evacuation.

II: THE NIGHTMARE GROUP

I learnt more from 9a1 than anything else, either in training or subsequent teaching. If I’m honest, I doubt any of them could say anything as positive about me – and I wouldn’t blame them.

It’s important I accept responsibility for the utter mess created. All of my inexperience and misplaced use of teacher-training ‘behaviour management’ techniques combined, to disastrous effect. Add in how I was allocated five different rooms – spread confusingly over the school-site – and it was a perfect storm.

I still squirm when recalling the catalogue of catastrophes. It’s the only group I ever walked out on.

As so often, it started by mistakenly taking advice; this time from their Year 8 teacher. My antennae should have been up when this gushing individual sought me out, explaining how much she’d loved (and been adored by) this ‘difficult but rewarding’ bunch. Ostensibly a top set, I was told it was packed full of ‘adorable but challenging girls from lower groups.’

That’s one way of putting it. I was given a list of them, with character assessments and even family backgrounds, like some synopsis for a frightful soap opera soon to involve me.

‘Robyn is lovely but comes from a services family – she’s angry and argumentative. Mum is an aggressive Glaswegian who drinks.’

‘Becky is lovely but can’t shut up and often expresses herself physically. She needs to be away from movable objects and everybody else.’

‘Sarah is lovely but manipulative and dishonest. She lives way out in the countryside so school is her only social interaction, particularly English lessons.’

Other names and pathologies followed, with advice on the seating plan in such detail it was like something from my doctoral studies in laser chemistry. If only I’d just gone with my gut-instinct and done random boy/girl desks – something I never again deviated from.

I approached my first lesson buzzing with advice and caffeine. The venue was a claustrophobic end-of-corridor dump – of course a Modern Foreign Languages room – laid out to make my seating plan useless. As usual, it was a five-minute wait in the corridor for the previous group to exit.

Attempts at small-talk seemed pointless. Foolishly, I demanded a silent line-up and found myself impersonating drill-sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket.

Chaos, before we’d even entered FL01.

III: THE HORROR, THE HORROR

All teaching is a performance, although how performative it seems (both to them and you) is the key to its success. When I got better at it, I was acting the whole time – but naturally.

As with anyone on stage, the basic essential is ‘know your audience’. Given my briefing by their former teacher, you might mistakenly think that I did. Nope. You never remotely do until you’ve taught them for at least a month.

Ever seen a stand-up comedian ‘die’ on stage? It’s the most excruciating experience, especially the femtosecond when both they and you realise it’s happening. Echoing, torturing silence descends, truncated by an ominous and growing murmur.

If one’s lucky, the poor sod then exists stage left, knowing the situation is hopeless. If one isn’t, you witness their death-throes; the mounting desperation and anger from a ‘comedian’ as they flail around, hopelessly sinking.

One I saw was reduced to screaming at the crowd: ‘I’m funny! You are not!’ He was led off, a gibbering wreck – Jeff Davies, a humourless regular on the frightful BBC shows Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Have I got News for You. Rest assured, he didn’t seem so smug at Centrica’s annual party in 1997, his arse and nuts served up to him in agonising slow motion.

Any honest teacher will admit they’ve been there, except that no exit is possible unless one takes my drastic action (four months later) of actually walking out. On which, much much more later.

We entered FL01 as a rushing and shoving mob, and my position was already lost. Someone once said the longest walk in the world is that of a new teacher to the front of a class. It never seemed more so; I’d honestly have preferred ascending the scaffold.

What mad impulse led me to stick rigidly to my useless seating plan, revealing in dazzling headlights all of my spoon-fed prejudices about them? I might as well have read out a detailed character assassination of all the trouble-makers.

My starter lasted about fifty of the fifty-five minutes remaining. In truth, it was utter crap. A ‘get to know you’ pair/groupwork exercise, morphing into different story starts, rendered grimly ironic by my certainty I knew all I’d ever want to about this bunch. I was reduced to having them reorganize the desks into pairs and eventually sitting in my doomed seating plan.

The Deputy Head walked in as I was starting a game of ‘heads down, thumbs up’, the despairing teaching equivalent of prisoners picking oakum or running the treadmill. At least they were all smiling.

‘Dr Sutton, I see you’ve met your top-set,’ she snapped and left, to cat-calls and hilarity.

The bell went and I collapsed at the front, staring vacantly at the litter-strewn ‘teaching outcome’ from my first lesson with them.

The door to FL01 opened again.

Its usual occupant entered, smiling in that sickly way only teachers do.

‘Hi! Would you mind putting the desks back into their proper layout? That’s how my seating plans work.’

IV: IT’S A LONG GAME

Jeff Davies’ ‘dressing-room’, immediately after his disastrous Centrica stand-up routine.

He sits staring vacantly into the desolate ennui of an open-plan office bedecked in Xmas lights, trying to persuade himself he was funny and his audience were not.

His manager nervously approaches.

‘Cheer up Jeff, that was your first attempt with them – it’ll be better next time.’

‘Next time? Jesus Christ, there’s no way I’m coming back.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve got them eight times every two-week cycle…’

That’s the thing about a core subject like English. However appallingly the lesson goes, you’re teaching them again tomorrow – probably first thing. This horrific realisation kick-started the ‘fuck-it’ attitude mostly dormant in me. In fact, this approach is above all what any teacher needs.

It sounds paradoxical but there’s huge merit in simply turning up, day in day out – in not getting beaten down. Thick-skinned endurance is the most vital requirement for any teacher. I almost felt Churchillian as I recollected his words:

‘Defeat is never fatal. Victory is never final. It’s the courage to continue that counts.’

Fearing this was delusional bullshit, I nervously checked my time-table. The next location was U25, thankfully in two days’ time. The room was absent from any school plan and the knowledge of every teacher I asked. Eventually, the lugubrious head of DT (is there another sort?) revealed this mystery cavern was hidden behind his workshop, almost inaccessible without caving equipment.

I then encountered my first bit of genuine kindness and luck. My Head of Department overheard the gloomy exchange and took me aside, offering to let me use his room for every lessons with 9a1. He’d heard about my nightmare and airily brushed it aside – ‘You did nothing wrong, I’ve heard good reports from some of the pupils.’

Unsure if this was gallows-humour, drugs or drunkenness, I was too relieved to worry.

‘I’ll check your seating plan before the next lesson, if it helps?’

The next survival mechanism for my NQT year miraculously kicked in: Go along with any advice from the management who’ll pass or fail you – even if just in appearance.

‘Well, maybe you could actually redo mine and the lesson-plan?’

He readily agreed.

Meanwhile, I met the group I above all loved teaching and had for the next five years – and the delinquent Year 11b5 GCSE group I’d inherited. Apparently, my loud voice and a height of 6′ 1″ had been sufficient qualification.

Their previous teacher was an Australian who taught art, music, Spanish, French, games, PSHE – and probably surfing. It cheered me immensely that this likable bloke avoided a gushing account and warned me the group housed some of the biggest yobs in perhaps the worst year-group the school had ever seen.

As ever, reality was more welcome than illusion.

V: ASSESSMENT FOR ASSESSMENT’S SAKE

Perhaps the worst feature of contemporary teaching is its obsessive managerialism and unshakable faith in ‘quantitative evidence’.

The assessing and categorizing of pupils dominates everything. These become ends in themselves, not elements in a broader education. That ideal has almost disappeared, regarded as outdated if not conservative (an unforgivable sin).

There’s also little interest in building pupils’ characters and instilling a sense of right and wrong, which would be regarded as a return to the 19th century and British imperialism. Instead, they’re hectored with dogmatic social-justice slogans on diversity, racism, equality, respect, difference, transgenderism…you name it.

Skinnerian behaviourism – treating pupils as machines to be programmed through rewards, shaming and sanctions – replaces the subtle moral framework that used to exist, however imperfectly. Because the very idea that it existed was enough – and that’s gone now. This is hugely damaging to pupils. It’s small-wonder bullying is so ineradicable and behaviour is often unmanageable.

Everything is linked to social issues around creating a fairer society, often at the expense of resolving individual problems. The effects are as bad on teachers, though they’re in the environment through choice. It ensures the very worst types of virtue-signalling box-tickers advance into management and so perpetuate the system.

The horrors of near-constant pupil assessment will be familiar to any parent. What will be less apparent are the effects of categorisation, with constant discussion of the many labels being attached to them – especially in terms of ability and race.

Thankfully, I had one group where I determinedly did my own thing, from Year 8 to Year 11 (and some into the sixth-form). 8b2 were immediately below the supposedly ‘Gifted and Talented’ (GATE) set – an example of absurd labelling based on assessments.

Mine considerably outperformed the higher group in Year 9 SATs and their GCSEs, whatever the categorisation suggested. I won’t claim any great teaching ability, simply continuity and an old-fashioned approach they liked.

In other words, very little group-work, let alone peer or self-assessment.

VI: BOTTOM SET YEAR 11

Taking over a GCSE group in Year 11 is ‘challenging’, to use the education-speak euphemism for horrific.

Especially so for an NQT, and double-especially so for teaching the lowest set actually doing GCSE. Also ‘challenging’ was how they were sitting English Language (the vital one) early, in November, so that if one of them went completely off the rails before the summer of Year 11, they might have this qualification when expelled – as two of them were.

This meant I had barely two months to get them ready, whilst also starting their modern novel for English Literature – Of Mice and Men – which I can now almost recite word for word, but always loved teaching.

To be fair, it was to my advantage that everyone thought this timetabling was nuts; the explanation being that I was male, tall and had a strong voice.

11b5 was – as are most bottom sets – small, at eighteen pupils. But what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. Twelve boys, six of them wannabe football hooligans obsessed with films like Green Street and with their own daft version of its gang – the ‘Sheep Street Elite’ – named for the grotty chain-pub/discount-store area of Bicester. From my experiences at a fairly rough comp in the mid 1970s, I sometimes found this an oddly nostalgic throwback.

The five girls were well-behaved but intimidated (or foolishly impressed) by the louts. Two of them were horribly bullied by the twin-boys who I fought constant battles with – once inadvertently calling them scumbag cowards. This landed me in serious trouble, though their mother eventually relented, and I survived.

I actually enjoyed this group and learned a huge amount. My first lesson was riotous – one of them squared up to me – which only happened twice in my career. A stroke of luck, as Sean had a history of carrying concealed knives on the school-bus and spent every lesson shouting out ‘alphabet soup.’ It put a marker down that couldn’t be denied!

Within two weeks, he was banished to the ‘bungalow’. A building on the school’s periphery serving as a penal colony for those incapable of being in classrooms but not yet qualifying for expulsion – a hurdle requiring crimes of almost unimaginable depravity.

Oddly, I never truly dreaded lessons with this lot. All bets were off and I set myself the simple (in terms of scope) but daunting task of getting through the material and responding to any attempted intimidation.

Every lesson saw at least three pupils ‘on-called’ – removed by the off-duty staff waiting to pick up the impossibly disruptive. With the worst I did this very promptly, often pushing its ‘fairness’. This made me a hate-figure to some but I make no apologies; I was determined to get a GCSE C-grade – a pass – for those desperate to gain this qualification. I’m proud to say that fourteen of them did, a higher pass-rate than the predicted 50%.

Whenever I was observed with this group, I was bombarded with advice by those who’d made damn sure they never had to teach them. Such is the norm. Indeed, my favourite fellow-teacher was a Sudanese chap who was routinely given only bottom sets, where his teaching was constantly undermined.

He taught for years without complaint, before being quietly forced out without a word of thanks (or goodbye) from the school. His treatment was typical of how many left-liberals actually behave. Schools are possibly where this happens the most.

SECTION TWO: TEACHERS

I: THE PROBLEMS

1. Too many go from school to university to school.

2. Too many are women.

3. Too many are left-liberal.

4. Too many are middle-class.

5. Too many are unintelligent.

6. Too many are humourless bores.

Teaching is difficult but hugely rewarding, especially if someone enjoys being creative, thinking quickly on their feet and using humour to cope with the problems hitting them constantly – sometimes literally. Experience in an environment outside education is vital, especially a fast-moving one requiring constant and fraught interactions.

It’s short-changing pupils if their teacher is in effect one of them but with ten years added on, in time spent studying. That’s the situation with a 22-year old graduate. Zero life experience and nothing much of their own to bring to the role. I’d make it impossible to enter the profession unless one’s had a job – ideally not just in the public sector – outside of education. I’d also insist that no one can qualify to teach under the age of twenty-seven. Gap year jaunts and teaching English in Sumatra don’t count.

Teachers should also broadly reflect society. The preponderance of female teachers causes problems, especially for boys. Many have little understanding of teenage lads and compound this with an arrogant assumption that maleness is something inherently wrong which needs treating.

Ditto for being left-liberal and showing obvious bias. The vast majority of teachers are and do: they simply cannot see any value (even sanity) in views that aren’t narrowly ‘progressive’. Many see their role as producing pupils who are the same.

The class bias is also highly damaging. Perhaps this is most evident in how class itself is rarely discussed – replaced by indoctrination in selfish identity politics – as dictated by recent ‘woke’ graduates.

On that, too many teachers are intellectually unimpressive and uninterested, with poor general knowledge, literacy and critical-thinking. They’re easy targets for the latest codswallop educational or social theory. Almost no time is spent critiquing these – their shibboleths being treated as unquestionable holy writ – until dumped in favour of the next one.

Add together all of the above and my sixth point becomes obvious. The job is impossible to bear unless humour is a constant – if controlled – element. Of course, much the same could be said of life itself.

As always, the first step is to get general acceptance that there’s an issue. The only hope is through free speech, for pupils and teachers. Just be aware this has largely vanished in our schools. Parents are the best way it can be addressed, challenging anything they’re unhappy about – with the school; with their MP; through the media. I’d especially warn those with teenage boys told their lads are ‘sexist’ or ‘offensive’. Check it’s not just puberty being demonised by some fanatical feminist.

All parents should be similarly sceptical over claims of ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’. These terms may well have been taught irresponsibly in lessons – especially for LGBT identity – flagging a weapon for bullies to make false claims with. Those are at epidemic levels for supposed ‘transphobia’ or ‘homophobia’, usually involving pupils not old enough to understand the terms.

This is being driven by activist teachers with their own agendas, willing and able to impose them on pupils. Scarcely a day passes without an accusation, with worrying effects on impressionable young people. Some schools even encourage denunciations of ‘bigotry’, without considering how this will be misused.

I know a boy accused of ‘Islamophobia’, for sniggering during an RS lesson over some crackly recording of a mosque. The school is in an area with a large Muslim population. He was named and shamed, in an assembly.

As a result, gangs attacked him when he was walking home and warned they’d be back the next day, but with knives. The school directly caused this appalling violence by their reckless irresponsibility, yet doubtless basked in their own righteousness.

Incidentally, this is also an area where a major grooming scandal occurred, exclusively perpetrated by Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani background. I’ve heard that the issue – which directly affected girls at the school – attracted no time or warnings, in PSHE lessons. Instead, efforts were directed at spurious claims of ‘Islamophobia’.

In summary, our education system – whilst full of good people – is in a mess. Maybe insiders always feel this but it’s clear that sense is now widespread. It’s being linked to the obvious signs our institutions are failing those they’re supposed to serve – and badly.

One can have no faith whatsoever in OFSTED providing solutions. They’re part of the problem: the worst managerialist nihilists outside of the Chinese Communist Party. They’ve overseen a relentless worsening of standards and culture in schools, whatever false data and tick-box analysis they pump out to say the opposite. Their system of school inspections should be disbanded and the old one, of HMI’s occasional oversight, reintroduced.

But the crucial change needed is in the quality and variety of the teaching body which – to use its own hideous jargon – is institutionally biased against white working-class pupils, especially boys.

Sadly, teachers have often forgotten the wonders that education can provide for pupils from all backgrounds. Instead, the profession is beset by robotic managerialism and pupils are being targeted for indoctrination, by a cadre of activists.

II: ME

I’ve just had my hair cut, by a friendly girl who remembers me covering a half-term of her Year 8 English lessons. She made a pretty good job of the trim, and resisted slicing either ear off.

So I made it through the ‘hated’ teacher category. She also cuts my daughter’s hair and once told her I was a ‘legendary nut-job’, which I’ll take as a compliment. That’s likely her remembering me using comedy sketches from The Two Ronnies; a good resource for teaching creative word-play and punning. But she’s also recalling the forensic dissections pupils perform on every teacher.

Think back to your own school days and how many hours you spent on this. Because…what a comical menagerie the teaching profession comprises! It’s often down-played, so I’ll give a thoroughly subjective analysis with all the glorious and gruesome details required.

I’ll start with myself. I’m aware anyone reading this maybe thinking:

‘Who in the name of arse is this over-opinionated and quarrelsome bloke?’

Some may also have noticed I did science for a degree then doctorate, so be wondering:

‘How in the name of double-arse was he teaching English?’

The latter I sometimes asked myself. Then a year of teaching Year 12 and Year 13 chemistry confirmed I’d made the right subject decision – though possibly the wrong career one.

The truth is my greatest love has always been literature and writing. I allowed myself to get ‘steered into the sciences’, for Oxbridge entry, but I’ve no real regrets. I read and wrote voraciously all the while and still do. Outside of family, friends and beer, it’s my main pleasure in life.

Halfway through my A-levels, I was immersed in Evelyn Waugh’s stunning A Handful of Dust (years later I taught it for A-level Literature) which I finished the evening before my S-level Chemistry. I’m not claiming this breadth was unusual – at least not in those days. I then got sneaked into occasional Oxford university lectures with a friend reading English – especially on favourite writers such as Greene, Waugh, T. S. Eliot and Larkin.

Most of my friends at Jesus were reading arts subjects, so I’d secretly use this to direct my reading. I also started writing poetry ‘seriously’, finally getting poems then books published from about 1998. But I’d been scribbling lyrics and constructing mad monologues since childhood.

My experiences doing a DPhil in physical chemistry confirmed I was utterly unsuited both temperamentally and intellectually for scientific research, especially the tiresome academic environment – though writing up a thesis was useful experience.
What to do then was a mystery. The one requirement was my need for provocative and contrary stimulation, something providing material to channel into my writing and reading. I wanted to avoid anything dominated by Oxbridge-type left-liberals and middle-class managerialists, to experience things completely outside any obvious destination.

By a quirk of nature, I’m one with a knack for jobs in the worst environments (given my background) at exactly the wrong time. I’ve a repeated habit of joining workplaces about to be plunged into turmoil, redundancies, special measures and general catastrophe. A sort of jackdaw or stormy-petrel for the places. Or maybe I’m the cause? Whatever, it’s left fantastic memories of an asylum worth of weirdos, some of whom became friends for life.

Before teaching, I worked for Shell Chemicals then British Gas/Centrica, initially in scientific areas but – somehow – moving into North Sea gas field negotiation of multi-billion pound purchase contracts. I was completely hopeless for a corporate environment but loved the cut and thrust of this ruthless world, especially the subtle skills of negotiation and dispute resolution. I also wrote extensively whilst at work, liberally using the ‘free’ printing and photocopying facilities.

Clearly my time would be limited! Centrica undergoes constant tectonic restructuring, with numerous layers of management regularly plunged into the abyss. Another one was looming so I put myself forward for voluntary redundancy. A goodish lump-sum and share-options allowed me to pay off the mortgage then take some time out to go travelling with my wife in Vietnam and Egypt.

I was writing loads of prose and poetry, with some success in the ‘small-press world’ and then found an American publisher for my second book Brains Scream at Night. But there’s no money in poetry! So I decided to become a teacher and remember the exact moment – I was walking around Figsbury Ring, overlooking Salisbury Plain.

I was forty and had always wanted to teach English, perhaps to compensate for dropping it all those years before. I doubted I’d get onto a PGCE course. So did Brooke’s University, where I applied. But Harry Dodds, the wonderful tutor, thought my enthusiasm and extensive reading/writing were enough.

Was he right? My subject knowledge was fine but my explosive and argumentative nature (I had a Greek mother) meant I only just survived.

Until 2022 and leaving in a dramatic fashion – on that, more later. I’d made an earlier spectacular exit, though not a final one.

III: A SCIENTIFIC TAXONOMY

Since I’ve analysed pupils’ first names, it’s only fair I mention how strangely apt many teachers’ surnames are.

From my own school days, I remember a Mrs Tinston (‘Tin Tits’). This battle-axe was walking under some building scaffolding when it collapsed. Amazingly she survived – perhaps those sturdy boobs shielded her – eventually reappearing in a rigid neck-brace.

The Head announced this in assembly, reducing me to unforgivable but uncontrollable laughter – much to my cost.

And, not a surname but my favourite nickname – ‘Bucket’, for Dr Goodwin:

Q: What’s the difference between Dr Goodwin and a bucket of shit?

A: The bucket.

Lastly, a terrifying (possibly perverted?) American Religious Studies teacher – Mrs Cuntliffe – who insisted her embarrassing name was pronounced with a prominent ‘t’.
But all this is too childish, even for me. So for fellow teachers I’ll break them into scientific groups, in tribute to the eight in the Periodic Table:

Group I: THE ZEALOUS GRADUATE

Group II: THE RAGING PSYCHOPATH

Group III: THE FAILED ROCK STAR

Group IV: THE ANNOYING FOREIGNER

Group V: THE IDIOT PANGLOSSIAN

Group VI: THE CREEPY LIBERAL

Group VII: THE EMBITTERED FEMINIST

Group VIII: THE DEFEATED DEADBEAT

IV: I DO THE UNTHINKABLE

January 2007. Ofsted are due any day, so the school is undergoing a ‘mock-inspection’ by Oxfordshire County Council advisors. The atmosphere is one of silent menace. Any second in any lesson, your classroom door could open and two or three people enter carrying clipboards.

I’m in front of my group from hell, sinking fast, glancing at the door for signs of these inspectors approaching to put a tin hat on things. The lesson is Year 9 SATS preparation: ‘Writing to Argue/Persuade/Advise’. A shit thing to teach at the very best of times, which this isn’t.

Then it happens.

Involuntary, unexpected, almost unprecedented, I hear a voice saying:

‘I can’t do this anymore; I’m out of here.’

I leave the room then repeat this to the gobsmacked Head of Department in the corridor.

‘You can’t! What am I supposed to do?’

Feeling weirdly at peace, I walk to the staffroom – a place I’ve hardly visited. I’m carrying my ever-present thermos of strong coffee and pour myself a generous cup, adding three sugars. The only other occupant is the nicer of our two Deputy Heads.

No teacher should ever abandon a group. It’s a cardinal rule which I think through with surprising clarity. Knowing my own limits, I assume it was done by me because I was about to completely flip then descend into ranting swearing. Something I amazingly never did when teaching. But that’s a poor excuse.

I turn to him and explain it all, every detail.

‘I’ll try and see out the rest of the week then resign.’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t come to that.’

It didn’t – though things got close.

I’ve made many criticisms of teaching so far, but this man’s simple kindness and insight is beyond them. Whether he’d heard about my nightmares or just grasped things immediately, I don’t know.

He applied to be our Head two years later and was absurdly rejected, leaving to take over at a top grammar school in neighbouring Bucks. The loss condemned the school to gruelling Special Measures, under a posturing ‘Super Head’ of comical incompetence.

V: THE SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM (SLT)

Despite being supposedly egalitarian lefties, teachers are usually as hierarchical and status hungry as courtiers were in the royal palaces of medieval England, though in less gilded surroundings. Family and friends who’ve worked in other parts of the public sector report the same.

Many teachers are permanently applying for new jobs. They want to get out of the classroom and ‘into management’, then make another step ‘onto the SLT’. Another motivation is ditching the nightmares and chaos they’ve endured/created, often by moving to another school.

An excruciating process, made worse by the Byzantine complexities of management-speak and woke-speak. But some are very good at it. The problem is that being skilled at this says precisely nothing about how proficient they’ll be in the job, especially for the vital roles of Headteacher and the deputy in charge of behaviour.

It was my school’s misfortune to get one of these permanent-applicant characters as our new ‘Super Head’, in May 2010. So extraordinary was this bloke that it would need another section (if not a library) to do him justice.

To add relish to the shit sandwich, we also got an equally incompetent – but more malevolent – joker, for our new Deputy overseeing ‘attitudes to learning’ – the Newspeak term for behaviour.

What about me? I’ve a phobia about applying for jobs and the idea of ‘management’. In my seventeen years teaching, I never applied for anything. I did have two-term stints as acting Deputy and acting Head of Department, but only as a result of being asked (almost begged) to, when the English Department was in turmoil and I was the only person who could be approached.

But neither of these roles is ‘on SLT’. That accolade is fiercely contested and usually comprises: Head, two Deputies, three Assistant Heads, heads of Sixth Form, Curriculum and Pupil Attainment – then various other titles of increasing unfathomability.

Jostling for position, turf-warfare and job-duplication are guaranteed, since there’s a constant pressure from below to expand the SLT. This is characteristic of environments where ‘management’ holds near-religious significance, so in all but the smallest organisations. Having spent years in industry, it’s far worse in the public sector – both in the daftness of it and the lamentable quality of those who succeed.

By far the most vital roles are those of Head and the Deputy ‘who does behaviour’. Which is why a school that was teetering but just surviving when I joined in 2006 went into full blown failure and Special Measures, in early 2013. We achieved the worst Ofsted report ever seen in Oxfordshire for a school which wasn’t immediately shut-down, failing in every category assessed.

Strangely, the period actually in Special Measures was one of my favourite times from teaching. This may reflect my connoisseurship of workplace catastrophe but is also due to the war-time spirit and comradeship which miraculously emerged in the surviving staff.

It was also heartening that the two maniacs discussed were fired; I played a role in getting the really evil one turfed out. He later resurfaced at another school, the one where I did most of my teacher training. His new job?

Deputy Head – with responsibility for behaviour.

All the Governors in my school were chucked out, having supported the failed regime right up until its collapse. The same berks who’d rejected the Deputy who left for a top grammar school.

Then our luck changed. We got a no-nonsense new Head and Deputy who – finally – got to grips with the school’s allegedly intractable behaviour problems. These had probably existed because they were regarded as inevitable in a ‘rough school’; a snobbish tolerance of disruption which speaks volumes.

These two – along with the chap who should have been Head – were the best SLT I experienced. Their knack was to use common sense and avoid educational bullshit. SLT itself was massively slimmed down until we came out of Special Measures in summer 2014. Sadly, it then expanded.

Things were still better, for a while. Then the atmosphere changed overnight, between the 23rd and the 24th of June 2016. The Brexit vote ‘went the wrong way’, as far as I could tell for all but me and a delightful Sikh maths teacher.

The effects were massive and my days were numbered.

VI: HOW TEACHERS CONTROL CLASSES

This is likely to be what outsiders most wonder about. It certainly was when I occasionally thought about teaching. You’d see mouthy youths on buses or outside McDonald’s and think: ‘Jesus Christ, imagine being stuck in a room with that shower. You couldn’t pay me to!’

It’s not helped by unrealistic impressions from TV dramas like Waterloo Road and documentaries such as Gobshites in the Classroom; oops, I mean Educating Yorkshire/Essex (much as I like both counties).

For non-teachers, I have three questions about their occupation:

1. How many people do you work closely with?

2. What percentage of them do you like?

3. How emotional is your investment in your job?

Teachers work closely with perhaps two-hundred plus, the majority children. Some of them – at least in the school environment – are very annoying, and a few are actively horrible. The work is highly emotional, with every side of the teacher’s character potentially exposed, including those they were unaware of. An often ignored aspect is the way it forces you to subconsciously relive experiences from your own schooldays.

Other jobs share some of these characteristics, but I think the combination of huge numbers with the need for detailed involvement is unusual. There’s a need for simultaneous crowd control and individual focus. For the former, techniques of ‘behaviour management’ – or in Newspeak ‘optimising attitudes towards learning’ – have been developed. But the latter is what brings the joy to those who enjoy teaching. Juggling such demands is tricky.

Most off-the-shelf behaviour management techniques are pretty useless, though inadvertently funny to see rigidly applied with diminishing returns – if they ever worked in the first place. They’re never simply ‘bolt-on’, as an NQT quickly realises.

These are my top six most dodgy techniques for behaviour management, all of which I fell foul of:

1. The seating plan

I’ve discussed my own experiences in detail. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be used; they help with getting names right and showing a group one’s prepared. But as so often, one is flagging up a target for disruption. Many a failing teacher attempts endless rejigs, trumpeting them and using them as threats, in a doomed cycle of increasing futility.

2. Pointless battles to ‘avoid backing down’

This is the pitfall of many, including those with years of experience. It’s especially common over trivial uniform infringements, mobile phones and demands for absolute silence. We’ve all been there. Sometimes because the SLT demands particular stands, other times because we slipped into it.

3. The whole-group bollocking

This alienates the many whilst leaving the intended few unmoved. Too often it feels cathartic for the teacher but ensures sullen dislike from the entire class. Pleading with them: ‘I’m only talking to a few here’ adds to an impression one’s scared to take on the true trouble-makers.

4. Standing in silence and expecting quiet

An absurd idea that’s still recommended! I’ve seen many an NQT waste an entire lesson trying it. On one occasion, the poor sod came to my room in tears having stood there until bombarded with sweets and rolled up graph-paper. I went in and explosively terminated the teacher silence.

5. Overpraise of appallingly behaved pupils when they have a ‘good lesson’. See number 3.

6. ‘Was that a good idea?’

This links to the liberal fantasy that pupils are reflective and willingly ‘take ownership’ of their behaviour, as rational and reasonable individuals. It’s an easy cop-out for some serial-killer of other pupils’ lessons to readily agree and express anguished regret – until the next time.

So what works then?

The vital thing is to feel and seem yourself but maintain enough of an act to achieve emotional distance. This only comes after going through so many disasters, upsets and apparently irretrievable situations that personal immunity develops. There’s an enormous churn of dramatic events in teaching, so a lot just vanishes downstream.

Using humour – if necessary sarcasm – and being able to act (but not actually be) furious are what this brings. The old adage – ‘Be reasonable, but don’t reason’ – is the one bit of advice I’ve found really works. In other words, don’t ever justify what you’re doing but make sure it isn’t unfair.

All easy to say – but just try it, when thirty Year Tens are slipping into mutinous defiance. As said, it’s only possible if one’s been through it before and somehow survived.

SECTION THREE: TEACHING NOW

I. MY FEELINGS

Hopefully I’ve laid the foundations to now give a short report on what the school environment feels like – day in day, day out – when survival isn’t a constant struggle.

Needless to say, what follows is entirely subjective. It’s probably also ‘unfair’ and ‘judgemental’. But there are any number of other teaching memoirs, Panglossian in their dishonesty, which the outraged reader can seek out.

Although I love classroom teaching – warts and all – the rest of the job is mostly horrible.

The first thing to stress is how teachers carry the fear of imminent failure, whatever level or experience they’ve achieved. That’s what makes it a nervous and exhausting job. The sense of foreboding originates (and is actively promoted) within the profession itself. When the pupils became vaguely manageable, I finally realised how the true problems arise from other teachers.

On the whole, they’re an unsettling bunch – rarely the types anyone feels at ease with. For parents, think through the parents’ evenings you’ve attended and the background impression that was created, your underlying feelings about the profession in general.

Anxiety, lingering unease and childish neediness are toxins teachers get basted in which become ineradicable. No wonder so many are divorced, become drunkards, have breakdowns and end up on Crimewatch (ok, a slight exaggeration).

It’s quite the norm for members of SLT to have delinquent offspring, wives addicted to dogging, and highly dubious personal habits of their own, frequenting bizarre dating sites for similar bourgeois burnouts. Perhaps this simply reflects how sociopathic and nihilistic our middle classes have become, with teaching distilling it down to a heady liquor. I’ve already listed specific issues about the teaching body, but the overall environment is extraordinary – at least for someone who’s worked in others.

I think it’s the sickly dishonest mix of ‘kindness’ with robotic adherence to ideological and managerial dogma. Of course, they’re traits which are incompatible with creativity and a love of literature for its own sake, the freedom of expression and need to engage with reality not utopian fantasy. That’s why English teachers in particular are such a dispiriting bunch, seemingly uninterested in the glories of our literature and sharing them with pupils.

But teachers in general are now leaders in that wider phenomenon threatening our freedoms and culture: the constant monitoring, reporting on and restricting of what’s being said. Many give the impression of being teachers’ pets themselves, eager to seek favour and suck up to the implacable forces of ‘wokedom’.

It’s time to discuss the massive cultural changes occurring whilst I was teaching.

II. TEACHER HUMOUR IS NO LAUGHING MATTER

To paraphrase the great Spike Milligan.

In our current climate of licensed rather than free speech, it’s not surprising most teachers are terrified of making jokes. Given how funny the environment is – and how useful humour can be – that’s terrible.

I loved using awful puns in teaching, occasionally getting summoned to ‘meetings without coffee’ for a daft reprimand. My favourite involved a newspaper story, about some chap who’d been prosecuted for having ‘an intensely physical affair’, with his horse. The enthusiastic rider explained in his defence how he intended to marry it.

I shared the extract with a Year 10 group, under a title…drumroll…expert timing…

‘Was it a stable relationship?’

Teaching that same group, lessons were often disturbed by a noisy irritant – appropriately, one Jessica Bull – violently booting at my door as she passed in the corridor. One day she unwisely shoved her head in.

‘What do you think this is, a china shop?’ I shouted.

The outraged door-kicker burst into tears and departed, to jeers from my class. Her parents complained that I’d ‘bullied her’. I’m afraid I answered the complaint e-mail from her Head of Year:

‘It’s bull.’

Fury ensued: I’d behaved ‘unprofessionally’. As ever in teaching, it blew over when I threatened to resign if action were taken against me. But the door-kicking stopped. A few months later, she was moved down to this group and did very well; it helped that we’d had this earlier bust-up.

On a gentler note, I loved telling that class (when teaching An Inspector Calls) how I’d survived the sinking of the Titanic, expertly swallow-diving into icy water as she slid beneath. One mother at parents’ evening politely asked if I’d been on board.

She then demanded:

‘And did you tell her sister in Year 8 that unicorns aren’t real? That’s for parents to break gently.’

I apologised, unwisely adding: ‘Good job I wasn’t discussing Father Christmas!’

III: SCHOOL ABSENCES AND COVID

Roughly a fifth of all secondary pupils in England are now persistently absent; that’s more than double the pre-Lockdown level.

I remember saying to colleagues in March 2020 that we shouldn’t be shutting schools, since the appalling consequences would take years to recover from. Mine was an unpopular and reviled opinion. The most support I ever got was one person saying it was an unwelcome but vital step. Most teachers felt we shut down too late and went back too early. A fair few were fanatical pedants for every ludicrous aspect, showing absolutely no common sense or even basic humanity.

I’ve heard boys screamed at for picking up footballs, with claims they were endangering lives. My own daughter was told by a teacher that she was to blame, for this idiot not being allowed to see her aging mother. This to a little girl whose own grandmother was sliding into irreversible Alzheimer’s, imprisoned in a care home – someone she saw only twice more before her death.

What struck me about pupils post lockdown was their lost trust in teachers, as adults. Understandably, I saw this in my 14-year old. They witnessed too many teachers behaving in a panicky and irrational way, clearly more concerned about their own safety than in the long-term effects on their pupils. They saw teachers as selfish and cowardly, since many were.

I recall my parents saying how little – if anything – was made by teachers on the outbreak of war in 1939. It was business as usual, with no sense of panic or silliness. I use that word deliberately. One buffoon science teacher at my school walked around in a hazmat suit, clearly enjoying himself, without a thought for how terrifying and stupid he looked.

Pupils are incredibly good at sniffing out bullshit. They knew that school shutdowns weren’t done with their interests in mind. It’s small wonder that many now see bunking off school as normalised. Doubtless some see the ‘working from home’ fraud first-hand, and draw their own conclusions.

None of the above will feature in any ‘discussions’ teachers have, about this catastrophe. Instead, they’ll demand more money, ‘support’ and understanding for their difficult role. For a profession which drones on about ‘reflective learning’, there will be zero analysis of how they behaved and the message it sent.

Sadly, many have lost the respect of that most vital group – their own pupils.

I remember saying – in March 2020 – to the last class I saw before lockdown (another difficult Year 11 group who I adored but never saw again):

‘Don’t worry – this country has been through so much – and always got through it. Don’t be scared.’

Maybe this was more phony Churchill stuff, but too many had seen adults behaving in a panicked way.

I’m a natural sceptic. I’ve always been angered how little teachers understand what being sceptical really means. About ten years ago, I noticed many of my colleagues started to claim their opinions were ‘evidence-based facts’, dismissing those who disagreed with them as holders of wildly emotional prejudices. It was odd, since most had no experience of any activity involving empirical evidence, let alone scientific research.

After the 2016 Brexit referendum, this bogus stance increased massively. One chap loftily proclaimed that only people with ‘academic expertise’ should have had the vote. Instead of arguing with this antidemocratic view, I asked him what his qualifications were – and why he assumed they’d place him in the voting booth. They weren’t impressive, in an era when getting an English degree from some places is easier than obtaining a GP’s appointment.

I cheerfully informed him that I’d get the vote under his scheme and he wouldn’t – on the hard evidence of his qualifications. If he found my undoubted conceit ‘offensive’, then better not to make such a foolish demand.

And then Covid struck…

Anyone who read the Guardian and ‘knew the evidence’ hogged the limelight, led in the media by Robert Peston. At school, the aforementioned democracy-hater switched his expertise to medicine. It was impossible to discuss the issue without lectures from someone instantly elevated to professorships in Virology, Epidemiology, Acute Medicine, Pathology, Immunology… you name it. Coming from a medical family, it was a delight to continue my second-hand medical education.

To be fair, this wasn’t restricted to teaching. A poet friend of mine, in email discussion, pasted articles from the BMJ, The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature. I have no medical training, so I asked him to explain what he was bombarding me with. Incredibly, this lecture in Creative Writing seemed unable to.

During lockdown, I struggled through Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. This is an exemplar ‘novel of ideas’, set in 1913 Austria. The central character is a rich wastrel womaniser who’s also a distinguished mathematician and polymath.

He gets involved in interminable committee discussions on how to commemorate the 70th jubilee of the Austro-Hungarian emperor. But the main focus of the novel is analysing how scientific thinking (Musil himself was trained in science) contrasts with social and artistic ideas, progress and social advancement.

In short, Musil is concerned with exactly the central issue that Covid seems to flag. Namely, how – if at all – can technocracy fit with democratic accountability and, ultimately, validity? How can we avoid a tyranny of declared experts, some of whom will crush (often using ‘useful idiots’) those who know that science works by being unsettled, that it has never been a process of shouting ‘the science is settled’, of shutting down debate?

This applies to many issues: climate change; Brexit; the wars in Ukraine and Ghaza; gender identity; race; and so on. Most of our governing elite, like my teacher colleagues, pretend to be scrupulously evidence-based, to have banished emotion and prejudice. Simultaneously, they are filled – often to a fanatical extent – with just such things.

The only hope lies in restoring genuine rational and sceptical debate. It’s vital that pupils learn this. Sadly, the entire approach taken on Covid – imposing extreme measures, pumping out propaganda, silencing opposition and crushing dissent – taught them the exact opposite.

IV: IMMIGRATION

I cannot recall a time when immigration wasn’t a huge influence, on my own life and this country’s. My family background, with two Greek immigrant grandparents, will have contributed. Yet the issue is now quite simple: the very continuation, in a meaningful sense, of this country’s existence as something other than a retail park or international airport.

When it’s become normal for some fourth-rate actress to remark, with horrified disdain, that our Royal Family are terribly white, my point becomes obvious. I’m not even saying this is good or bad – simply that it needs discussing.

The problem is that there’s never been a proper discussion, one with free expression, without the worry of being attacked as ‘racist’ and constant self-censoring. We’ve heard very few honest opinions. It’s become a taboo, especially for individuals to make personal points based on their own experiences.

And so to education.

I first realised how massively everything had changed when my daughter was about to enter Reception. We attended a meeting for parents and found that of the thirty couples, we were one of the five who were British. This was in 2014.

The teachers went into overdrive, enthusing on how ‘diverse’ the group was – yet it wasn’t. Most people were foreign, with perhaps little understanding of this country and its schools, other than from their immediate perspective.

Why would they have, when the teachers pretended England didn’t exist? There wasn’t a single mention of how education worked in this country, of how it might differ from Poland or Pakistan or Zimbabwe.

I can imagine some left-liberal exploding now: ‘Why would that be discussed?’ But then, why wouldn’t it be?

The fact is, immigrants are different and their children have considerably affected schools and the education system. I’ve taught ever increasing numbers of children from such families. And whilst making them welcome was – rightly – a priority, the effects on English pupils were never discussed. I suspect any attempt to do so would have triggered disciplinary action.

I can also comment on my own beloved late mother, from immigrant parents, her intense drive and occasionally aggressive behaviour. I’m not interested in whether this was ‘justified’, simply in saying it happens and has effects.

It’s quite natural for children of immigrants to harbour the conflicting desire to both fit in, yet be ‘celebrated’ as different. Too many schools belabour this and effectively label such kids as morally superior. A similar situation to that lady who attended Buckingham Palace dressed as a tribal African, then objected to someone noticing it.

It’s sadly true that immigrant children can get bullied; there should be no tolerance for this. But it’s also true that immigrant children can be bullies (as can immigrants). Both types of bullying are encouraged by the gushing of left-liberals, over the mere presence of immigrants.

Because it’s frankly ridiculous to make such a virtue of high immigration, to subtly imply that there’s something morally wrong with the indigenous English, necessitating diversity as a cure. Many teachers do this instinctively. And schools often don’t accept such bullying happens, let alone admit the reason: the incompatible, incoherent pieties of multiculturalism.

I’m fully aware how angry such plain speaking makes people! They should ignore their desire to ‘think the right thing’ and focus on what I say, based on first-hand experience.

V. GENDER THEORY AND TRANS-IDEOLOGY

I’m more and more convinced we’re drowning in a wave of madness, akin to the witchcraft lunacy which terrorised European and American societies for centuries. The biggest victims are the young, with schools playing a shameful role. Trans-ideology is being taught uncritically, promoted by activists and effectively smuggled in by ignoring the safeguarding issues.

How and where did this lunacy start? It was a mistake to pay any attention to the ‘Gender Theory’ argument (actually a command), that sex is biological but gender is fluid. The two terms were – until the madness broke – synonymous. One was regularly asked ‘Sex?’ on forms, to which some wags replied ‘Yes, please’.

Apologies for restating the basics: your sex is fixed at birth; its social and cultural manifestation is often called gender. You can superficially alter the latter – in terms of presentation – but the former is immutable. A tiny number of individuals (about 0.02%) are born neither XX (female) nor XY (male). This doesn’t constitute a third sex.

Because of connotations around the word ‘sex’, the term ‘gender’ became more widely used, but this in no way corresponded with any conceptual shift or changed understanding in society. The controversial ideas behind ‘Gender Theory’ in fact originated in scientific fraud, particularly in the well-documented and undisputed activities of one man.

Enter New Zealand sexologist – or ‘fuckologist’ as he insisted – Professor John Money. He sounded (and behaved) like a Martin Amis character, but unfortunately existed and wrecked many children’s lives. This founder of the John Hopkins’ Gender Identity Clinic was the true originator of the transgender movement. His ideas are mainstream in British schools, which have inadvertently entered his dangerous world.

This is taken verbatim from his entry on Wikipedia. Note, no one has flagged any of the content as contentious. Given how incredible are these details – and how obsessively the trans-movement patrols this debate – that says everything:

‘Money pioneered drug treatment for sex offenders in order to extinguish their sex drives. He began testing anti-androgen medications on offenders as early as 1966, which yielded successful results.

Starting in the 1990s, the work and research conducted by Money has been subjected to significant academic and public scrutiny. A 1997 academic study criticised Money’s work in many respects, particularly in regard to the involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer, and Money’s sexual abuse of Reimer and his brother when they were children. Some of Money’s sessions involved Money forcing the two children to perform sexual activities with each other, which Money then photographed. David Reimer lived a troubled life, eventually committing suicide at 38; his brother died of an overdose at age 36.

Starting when Reimer and his twin Brian were six years old, Money showed the brothers pornography and forced the two to rehearse sexual acts. Money would order David to get down on all fours and Brian was forced to “come up behind [him] and place his crotch against [his] buttocks”. Money also forced Reimer, in another sexual position, to have his “legs spread” with Brian on top. On “at least one occasion” Money took a photograph of the two children performing these acts.

When either child resisted Money, Money would get angry. Both Reimer and Brian recall that Money was mild-mannered around their parents, but ill-tempered when alone with them. Money also forced the two children to strip for “genital inspections”; when they resisted inspecting each other’s genitals, Money got very aggressive. Reimer says, “He told me to take my clothes off, and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed, ‘Now!’ Louder than that. I thought he was going to give me a whipping. So I took my clothes off and stood there shaking.”

Money’s rationale for his treatment of the children was his belief that “childhood ‘sexual rehearsal play'” “at thrusting movements and copulation” was important for a “healthy adult gender identity”.

Both Reimer and Brian were traumatized by the “therapy”, with Brian speaking about it “only with the greatest emotional turmoil”, and David unwilling to speak about the details publicly. At 14 years old and in extreme psychological agony, David Reimer was finally told the truth by his parents. He chose to begin calling himself David, and he underwent surgical procedures to revert the female bodily modifications.

Despite the pain and turmoil of the brothers, for decades, Money reported on Reimer’s progress as the “John/Joan case”, describing apparently successful female gender development and using this case to support the feasibility of sex reassignment and surgical reconstruction even in non-intersex cases.

By the time this deception was discovered, the idea of a purely socially constructed gender identity and infant Intersex medical interventions had become the accepted medical and sociological standard.’

Incredibly, this appalling abuse lies behind the transgender ideological madness seen in our schools and wider society. This disgraced figure originated the nonsense which led to two 13-year olds in Sussex being bullied by their teacher, for bravely refusing to accept that a fellow pupil could identify as a cat.

If there was any doubt of the horror lurking behind ‘Gender Theory’, Money had this to say on paedophilia:

‘If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.’

This is a scandal which will run and run. There are so many pupils who’ve been actively encouraged to ‘transition’, without anything like enough professional concern about the damage they and their families will suffer, now and in the future.

At a vulnerable and uncertain age, confusion and anxiety have been relentlessly sown in all our young people, to satisfy a few fanatics. Teachers raising doubts have been bullied, insulted, defamed, ostracised – even fired. Pupils have been bombarded with an insane ideology, but denied the right to question it through their free speech.

This has caused widespread bullying and classroom turmoil. Unsurprisingly, random allegations of ‘transphobia’ are rampant, amongst kids barely old enough to understand the term. Indeed some teachers – notably the one in Sussex – equate questioning of trans-ideology with homophobia.

In summary, this is a safeguarding failure active inside schools, through a shocking mix of negligence, wilful ignorance, complacency and cowardliness. I doubt many teachers are aware where this dangerous nonsense originated, or bothered to investigate.

I’d say any professionally competent teacher should have, when the huge upturn in pupils transitioning became obvious. Muted surprise was expressed by many teachers, but most preferred to keep quiet and look the other way. A depressing number collaborated in the madness, to curry favour and to be seen ‘on the right side of history’. A few actively promoted the scandal.

To add a final note of absurdity, many of these ‘Gender Theorists’ have now done a complete about-turn. Biological sex is now trivialised as merely ‘assigned at birth’ but gender is supposedly an inner truth, manifested under the term ‘biological destiny’.

In other words, the scientific observation of XX and XY is your sex being ‘assigned’, to imply an arbitrary process of minor bureaucratic box-ticking. Whereas gender (the important one) is inner destiny, brought out by some Wittgenstein-level teacher in Sussex.

As before, the over-reliance on terminology – their hope that controlling the language controls the reality – doesn’t work. These people simply aren’t bright enough, whatever silly semantics they attempt.

The word ‘assigned’ doesn’t prove something is trivial. In this case, there’s a basic scientific truth behind it. We assign the word ‘gravity’ to the force which pulls us down to earth. It could be assigned the words ‘Brainwashed Sussex Teacher’ or ‘Raving Sexologist Pervert’.

Go to the top of the Shard and jump off, to see how that affects its underlying reality.

VI. FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT – THE LOST CURRICULUM

We all know Animal Farm is an allegory of Stalinism and its betrayal of the Russian Revolution? Well, not quite all. It’s sometimes taught as based on any tyranny, even on Hitler’s rise to power and the ‘danger from the far right’, with Squealer modelled on Goebbels. There seems a marked reluctance in some teachers to explain it as a parody of Communism – and even more reluctance to identify that as the ‘danger from the far left’.

This is shared not to get laughs, nor to bring the teaching profession into disrepute. Either teachers are confident in the views I reveal and happy to see them shared – as some do with pupils – or they’re not, and glad to see them exposed.

More recently, I observed a lesson on An Inspector Calls and was surprised to find that society can be divided into the selfish (capitalists) and the unselfish (socialists). A bus driver refusing to allow an unfortunate woman to board without a fare – and the assault she then suffered – demonstrates this neat dichotomy. So does the lack of infinite funding for the public sector.

I also know of Macbeth being taught as a play written to expose the evils of inherited power, privilege, position. A bizarre interpretation, since not a line in the play can be linked to this. And doubly odd, given that most teachers claim what they say is always ‘evidence-based’.

Then there’s Brexit. I was amused to be asked, in conversation with a science teacher (loftily describing himself as ‘used to actual evidence’) how it felt to be in the minority which voted for Brexit? I informed him of the 2016 result.

‘You know what I mean – the minority of . . .’

‘Teachers; the middle class; decent people?’

Despite my frequent criticisms, I’m proud to have been a teacher and pay tribute to the decent and diligent colleagues I’ve often worked with. Many of them wouldn’t dream of such indoctrination.

Unfortunately, this fairness has been damaged by a recent influx of graduates with no apparent belief in basic freedoms of thought and speech. Some also think they’re fighting much of the population, that it’s their responsibility to re-educate children of Brexit voters, countering their parents’ ‘bigotry’. To a hammer, everything is a nail.

In my time teaching, I can’t recall another teacher explaining to pupils their fundamental rights to freedom of thought and speech. In my discussions with pupils, almost all showed that these didn’t mean a thing to them. For most, the vital principle was one of ‘not causing offence’. Small wonder, when most teachers spend so long discussing and policing this, but no time explaining those first essential freedoms.

I’m sure many parents reading this will have received phone calls claiming their child has caused ‘offence’. I wonder how many queried exactly what happened, making sure that their child didn’t simply question the teacher’s opinions, then get branded ‘offensive’? There’s a tendency for teachers to claim pupils in general have been ‘offended’ as a way of censoring debate and protecting their own opinions.

Teaching is so overwhelmingly a left-liberal monoculture that any discussion of cultural and political issues takes place in an echo chamber. The few dissenting voices are all too easily silenced or simply self-censor. There are implicit left-liberal political and social beliefs and the assumption that all pupils and teachers must share them. That, depressingly, is the position in our state schools.

Until they – and our universities – actively teach and encourage diversity of opinion and freedom of expression, nothing will change. It’s vital that English teachers do this and aren’t narrowly ideological in how they view our literary heritage. Pupils have a birth-right to experience our great literature, without woke censorship.

Sadly, the exact opposite is now happening.

SECTION FOUR: TEACHING ENGLISH

‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’

C.S. Lewis

‘Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.’

Charles Bukowski

Let’s talk about fake reality again. We live in an age when supposed literary types censor the writer who (in my experience) most delights and captures younger readers: Roald Dahl. Arrogantly done so that he’s ‘less problematic’ to these vandals’ pearl-clutching sensibilities.

The philistines neither like nor understand literature and good writers – their uniqueness of vision, the worlds they create, which maintain individuality but work broadly and across time. Instead, they want a fake version which fits them and their narrow, time-limited obsessions.

If they find the real Dahl ‘offensive’, there’s no one stopping them writing their own stories and seeing if anyone likes them. But I’ve taught such garbage – the tedious Rooftoppers is an example – and it puts pupils to sleep.

All this is true of how too many English teachers approach literature, especially recent graduates. They view it as a grim but necessary dietary supplement, needed to rid the world of ‘Tories’, ‘Climate change deniers’, ‘Racists’ ‘Transphobes’, take your pick. Texts are promoted because of their woke propagandising.

The effect is to make reading seem a chore and a bore. Pupils are being massively short-changed, especially boys. The almost limitless delights of our great writers are being denied to them by a narrow cadre of ideologues, themselves often badly read.

I was asked to produce an English Department reading suggestions list. That’s when I realised the poor level of literary interest amongst my colleagues. Great literature was regarded as The Kite Runner, The Book Thief – perhaps, at a stretch, To Kill a Mockingbird. No one had read a thing by: Graham Greene; Eric Ambler; Ian Fleming; C. S. Lewis; Patricia Highsmith; Wilkie Collins; Ernest Hemingway; Rudyard Kipling…I could go on.

In a meeting on teaching Doyle’s The Sign of Four, the only thing discussed was countering its supposed ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’. Nothing on the literary value of this wonderful text, on why it’s still read with great joy by so many. Not a word on plot, prose – even character. This for a novel containing the best known fictional character ever created!

All the teachers except me in my department had degrees in English, but I never heard any enthusing about writing as an art or express aesthetic joy in it. The most one got was how a hackneyed ‘issue’ was ‘tackled’ by this or that trendy modern writer.

Given my contrary nature, this was a huge incentive to do the opposite. It may seem egotistical but I felt on a mission, to use as large a range of good writing as I could. What one person can achieve is limited, but it has to start somewhere.

So I taught as widely and freely as I liked, whilst covering the syllabus. Especially at A-level, where I delighted in using ‘dangerous’ texts such as American Psycho, Hemingway’s short stories – and even Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s controversial Journey to the End of the Night. To be honest, I wanted to see the reaction of my colleagues. In fact, most said they didn’t know a thing about any of these texts – itself revealing.

For lower years, I enthusiastically promoted any and all reading, especially ‘low brow’ stuff – including true crime, detective fiction and graphic novels. I positively discouraged pupils from class-reader texts such as the above Rooftoppers – the dull books lauded by dull English teachers.

Needless to say, I promoted Dahl’s creepy short-stories, always using Man from the South as an exemplar to be read and enjoyed in lessons. Another classroom hit was Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. I also enthused about Agatha Christie’s masterpiece And Then There Were None. I’m so proud to have been told at parents’ evenings how this got pupils reading who’d never shown an interest.

If literature is going to survive, we have to confront its supposed educational guardians, who are now destroying it.

SECTION FIVE: WHY AND HOW I LEFT

I left teaching (I always knew I would) abruptly. Not due to anything scandalous but from health issues, triggered by a refusal to back down on the obvious fact that men and women are biologically distinct. I’d been seriously ill and was anyway only teaching part time, such was my frailty.

The trigger was an alarming discussion with other English teachers. As usual, me on one side, the entire department on the other. Apparently, it was biological determinism (a major crime) to claim that the England men’s football team would soundly beat the women’s team.

My prediction was ‘not evidence-based’; even if the men did win, it wouldn’t be due to them being better at football. If that happened, it was due to society, funding, a ‘culture of low expectations’, prejudice – take your pick from the issues teachers spend hours on.

I pleaded guilty, to believing that men and women are different biologically and that in a physical sport, the best men would always beat the best women. If they disliked this, it made no difference to its veracity. And if they argued that winning in sport didn’t mean you were better at it, they were asserting nonsense and knew it.

Quite why my position seemed remarkable and disturbing to them was itself remarkable and disturbing. Even more so was their zeal, competing to attack my position, as if anxiously aware that the angrier their denials of reality, the more safely ‘progressive’ it made them all.

One of them assured me: ‘I don’t think you’re sexist – I won’t be cancelling you.’ I thanked her for this wonderful news, asking how it fitted with her insistence that culture wars are an invention of the privileged few?

Alarmed by this flat-earth dogmatism, I published a disguised account of the conversation. Not disguised enough! I was threatened with disciplinary action for bringing ‘the school and profession into disrepute’.

I replied that it was only what I exposed which could do so. Were they saying their views were disreputable? I agreed – so why not change them? Or were they angry that what they espoused in the classroom had been made public? Well, those who paid their wages had every right to know what was being taught to their offspring.

Somewhat concerned, I contacted the excellent Free Speech Union and Toby Young. They were most helpful, so I joined – which I’d suggest everyone does. In fact, I wrote a number of articles (initially under Eric Blair, then my own name) for The Daily Sceptic, exploring my row and the wider educational/cultural issues involved.

It goes without saying that I didn’t bother with my teaching union. They’re now completely corrupted by wokedom and would have taken the other side, as they always do on free-speech issues. The only reason I’d ever joined was to get the classroom insurance cover – effectively a way of forcing most teachers to be in one of the unions.

I ended up leaving in 2023 on health grounds, much helped by the school’s lovely HR lady.

SECTION SIX: LOOKING BACK

I wrote this memoir to give my honest experiences and views, in the hope they’d be of interest to others. Also as a warning to parents, to be vigilant of how biased and politicised schools have become. And as a way of encapsulating my conflicting feelings and ideas, on what was the most enjoyable thing I ever did for a living.

Because of the new environment, I’m relieved to no longer work in a school although I miss being in the classroom. I loved the teaching and wasn’t bad at it – results were good. My irascible temper made me explosive at times, and I certainly trod a fine line in terms of using humour. But it’s the best and most important job I ever had and I’m grateful to have done it.

I think my contribution was mostly positive. I worked at the same school for seventeen years, as said with stints as Second in Department and Head of Department. The latter role was stressful yet coincided with being a new father.

I never received any thanks from the school. Such is the price for taking on the pitiless ideology of wokedom! But it’s one I’d pay again, without hesitating.

Still – if I can be forgiven for writing my own leaving do – here’s an ex-pupil who somehow heard of my experiences and messaged me out of the blue:

‘Hello Sir. You taught me for 7 years at ***: 2007-2014.

I’m not sure if you’ll remember me, but I really hope they’re for GOOD reasons if you do!

I just felt the need to reach out and thank you. You may or may not know that English was my best A level result, the one which got me to university to continue studying English Language.

There are 2 reasons for this; I had an interest and affinity with English, but I also had a lot of respect for my teacher… the one who stuck around.

I’ve seen that you no longer teach, and I think that’s a loss. I also gather it was, at least in part, because of a disagreement, and I firmly assume they were wrong.

Not that I strictly use it in my line of work, but I graduated from *** University in 2017 with 1st Class Hons in English Language. But I’m also set to marry a girl I met there, who also happened to be studying English. An early bonding moment was lending her a book on Shakespeare which I bought for your class (I’d be amazed if you recall, but the preowned one with someone’s notes in the margins).

Anyway, I hope you’re well, and apologies if I’m bothering you. I don’t know if you wanted to see any of this, but I felt I needed to say it.

Thanks again Sir!’

Which means more than anything that could have been said at some phoney leaving do…

CONCLUSION: THE BITTER FRUITS OF CRITICAL ‘THEORY’

I’ve always been someone who forcefully pursued free speech. So the disagreements explored here didn’t scare me, however annoying and exhausting they were. I’m not claiming to be brave; I didn’t feel unnerved by the disputes and cold-shouldering. Depressed, occasionally – which is another reason the Free Speech Union is so important: to give isolated free-speech advocates a sense of companionship.

What does scare me is the realisation this isn’t enough. Free speech is vital but it’s not sufficient, to win the social, political and intellectual conflict now raging. The outcome of this conflict will decide whether this country stays a mainly peaceful place – where the ideal of debate and democracy is the accepted way for dealing with disagreement – or if we’ll get political violence and civil war.

No doubt many will find that a daft piece of hyperbole. I’ll try to explain the reasoning behind my fear.

It’s hardly original, to say that the most terrifying aspect of trans-gender ideology is what should have prevented it achieving anything: a rejection of objective reality, replaced by personal ‘truths’ (by definition relative) and self-validation. Self-worship has triumphed – at least for the moment – over the building blocks of our culture and society: religion; philosophy; political plurality; artistic expression; science.

We need to understand how a ‘be kind’ quasi-religion has become the unchallengeable ideological power of today, running our institutions and public life. We especially need to grasp that it took hold through rule by a ‘progressive’ elite, evangelically committed to enlightening a fictional population of uneducated peasants and right-wing hate preachers. This delusional self-flattery fits perfectly into the fake but beguiling intellectual background behind wokedom.

The key thing is to look closely and distinctly, at those originating, promoting and following this ideology – especially the first. Their previously obscure academic nonsense has now spawned confusion and suffering.

The originators comprise an unimpressive yet relentless group, located in university humanities and social ‘science’ departments. These were greatly empowered by their vast expansion under Tony Blair, with the opportunity to brainwash almost limitless students. Their forerunners are the sociologists and philosophers in the Frankfurt School who invented and promoted ‘critical theory’. This is often abbreviated to ‘theory’, as if it offered some universal explanation of everything – something its disciples claim to believe.

As a piece of creative thinking applied to literature and the discussion of artistic interpretations, critical theory can be interesting and mainly harmless. No objective truths are involved, since any literary text can and should offer a multitude of meanings.

The problems arise when semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism – and especially the meaningless ‘deconstruction’ – claim that objective scientific truths don’t exist, outside the language we use for them – even suggesting that reality is created by language. Everything becomes relative. This absurd idea is behind the mess we’re in, since it makes language the unarguable reality. A perfect position for envious non-science academics, suffering from fears of inferiority and irrelevance.

At a stroke, this grants semantics unlimited authority. That’s why ‘progressives’ are obsessive in controlling language and demanding conformity to their rules for its use. It’s how they’ve grabbed and maintained power. Just look at the scores of genders conjured out of thin air – an obvious absurdity, yet one which sees our cities and public buildings bedecked in worshipful rainbow flags.

In essence, ‘theory’ is incoherent nonsense, proclaiming the non-existence of all truths except its own – especially scientific ones. In doing so, it’s in fact telling us to ignore what it says. Unfortunately it hasn’t been ignored and the reason is obvious: it’s promoted by shameless conmen, with enough people fooled, making it impossible for them to admit this has happened. It’s a cult, akin to Scientology or the Reverend Jim Jones’ ‘People’s Temple’; ever vigilant and ever needful of heretics for its survival and promotion.

Time and again this pattern recurs in human history, from business to religion to politics to academia. If sufficient numbers are involved – as perpetrators or dupes – then the incentive gap is too large for widescale disavowal. There are too many people with too much to lose. They dominate our universities (including Oxbridge), our media, our politics, our Civil Service, our intelligentsia, our arts, our public sector, and our top industries and businesses. In short, all our public life.

The situation is equivalent to the Soviet Union and its block; just look how long that lasted and the horrors perpetrated! There are increasing numbers of dissidents against wokedom, but vastly outweighed by those who see nothing to gain from challenging this orthodoxy. Aside from those with an unshakable belief in objective truth, many don’t have much to gain. The point is that belief in objective truth is essential in our society.

The most dangerous aspect has been how many ‘top academics’ are quiescent, if not active in promoting this ideology, even amongst scientists. Very few – if any – believe in it, at least not when they speak privately. But the rewards for collaborating are huge.

Now to the second group. The promoters of this rubbish in our wider society are the managerialists, uncritically applying the ‘ideas’ of the first group. Managerialists have no beliefs, no values of their own; they just want to manage. It’s an activity which they see as an end in itself, even though today it largely involves the pretence of working. They’re happy under all ideologies, especially those which crush independent thought. They find individuality baffling and dangerous. The same sort of people were happy as 19th-century colonial administrators, although they then had real work to occupy them.

Because the fact is, many ‘managers’ today have virtually nothing to do, especially in the top-heavy public sector. The woke ideology – likewise based on nothing – is an absolute gift, to fill their time in an ever-expanding way.

The final group are the followers. This is where real hope lies. Virtually no one believes in or follows woke ideology, other than under painful duress. It’s a stunningly horrible and annoying system, and there are many signs that the young are openly rebelling against it. They do have a strong sense of what’s objectively true and detest those who deny it – at least, until indoctrinated in our schools.

Fighting that indoctrination is what’s needed. It requires free speech but also an understanding of how we got here, with a robust defence of the Enlightenment values of objective truth and empirical reasoning. We need teachers – new and different ones – to do this.

The alternative is too horrible to imagine. If objective reality continues to be rejected in favour of conflicting ‘personal truths’, our society won’t survive.

AFTERMATH

The experiences and ideas I’ve discussed need exploring creatively, through savage and possibly vulgar and offensive attacks. Acceptably safe satire simply isn’t up to the task. It just reinforces the cultural and social ownership which progressives assert and exert. But in a climate of censorship, fear and cancellation, publishing such necessary savagery is almost impossible. Contemporary literature – particularly poetry – sits in the same progressive echo-chamber as education, the public sector and all the arts.

The same refusal to face reality – and fear of causing offence – is evident. It’s extraordinary that writers aren’t chronicling the horror unfolding in front of us; most creative work conspicuously ignores this.

In its place we get ideologically approved writing, preaching diversity but practising narrow conformity. The perspective is left-liberal and the tone that of a tiresome virtue-signaller. Whatever political upheavals occur, the self-satisfied literary world asserts its moral superiority and celebrates writing which rivals that produced under Soviet censorship, for conformity to a rigid ideology.

Such orthodoxy has always been a spur to my writing. This increases the difficulty in getting published and noticed, as almost all publishers are ‘progressives’, although two of my collections – Falling Down (2016) and Jack the Stripper (2021) – were selected as Poetry Book Society Recommended Reading.

Some of my satirical pieces explore the awful grooming and trans-gender safeguarding scandals, effects of which I saw first-hand. Presents from My Boyfriends is especially risky, as it also deals with the dangerous issue of Islam and the tendency for members of grooming gangs to be Muslims. Making such a clear linkage is an absolute taboo in the literary world, which prefers to act as an establishment mouthpiece – at least for the time being. Maybe it will switch sides, as the tide is now turning.

If that happens then – rest assured – its current blindness will quickly be rewritten with lies on how it bravely confronted this ongoing horror.

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This article (DREAM STATE: TEACHING IN THE ENGLISH CULTURE WAR) was created and published by Paul Sutton and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: Getty Images

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