Vague sentimental garbage is used to sell openness to anything.
I want to share an extract from a school newsletter in the UK. I’ve omitted the name of the school and teacher in question because I want to discuss the issues I have with this kind of material rather than attack the specific school or teacher.
I have been in multiple UK schools and I’m pretty sure that what I’m sharing is now fairly standard. I also think it can be believed and shared by people who sincerely believe they are doing good and promoting great values.
But it’s my belief that this kind of stuff is actually disastrous.
Here it is:
“As part of our ongoing commitment to fostering a welcoming and inclusive school environment, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the incredible diversity within our school community.
Each one of our children at (school name omitted) brings a unique background that enriches the learning experiences of all children and adults. Embracing our differences not only makes us stronger but also teaches our children the important values of respect and understanding. This week in assemblies, I read a great book named “The Suitcase,” a story that brilliantly highlights themes of friendship and kindness. Through this story, we explored the idea that differences should be celebrated, as they contribute to the richness of our lives as well as being kind to others. The story encouraged our children to show compassion and empathy to one another, regardless of their backgrounds.
As we move forward, I encourage you to engage in conversations with your children about diversity and inclusion at home. Share your own experiences and perspectives and inspire them to appreciate the various cultures, languages, and traditions that surround us. If you’re looking for ways to reinforce these lessons at home, one thing to consider would be reading more books that celebrate diversity and kindness and discuss these themes with the children. Moreover, we are always on the lookout for parents who would like to share their own cultural heritage with our school community. If you have stories, traditions or activities that you’d be willing to share, please do get in touch! Thank you for your ongoing support in making our school a nurturing and inclusive space where everyone feels valued.
Together, we can ensure our children learn the importance of celebrating our differences and building a kinder, more understanding world.”
So what we have here is, as I say, fairly standard Diversity fare for the school environment and what is being taught to children.
And it’s a mix of good and bad, that pretends to be wholly good. What it does is a simplified version of the allegedly moral arguments made by the Left and progressive side of politics.
In terms of good, there is very much a language of compassion going on here, some of which is indeed the kind of thing that children should receive. It emphasises that kindness is important, and that friendship is important, and that not bullying people is important. These are obviously decent enough lessons and things nobody would object to their child receiving. Kindness and understanding are indeed nice things, and in a school environment asking kids to be kind to each other (as well as in any other environment) makes sense.
The trouble is that it wraps all of these lessons around something else. If you imagined this messaging as a thing you want kids to want to consume, it would be a sickly sweet stick of candy, with two ingredients entwined and wrapped around each other in luridly bright colours. One of these ingredient is actually nourishing and good. And the other is not. The other might even be poisonous.
That second ingredient, of course, is the modern concept of Diversity. Because the kids (and adults) told to swallow this confection are being told that kindness, friendship, empathy, compassion and a ‘kinder world’ all depend on celebrating differences, and especially depend on being amazed and grateful about every cultural racial, ethnic and identity difference that you can think of.
Kindness, compassion, a kinder world, we are being told, is only about celebrating differences, “embracing our differences”, which “make us stronger”. The general principle of being nice, of not being a horrible kid or a horrible adult, which is a sensible vine likely to bear a positive flower, is tied to another vine, likely to bear a poisonous fruit. There is one message here, Be A Decent Person, linked as if they are the same thing to a very different message, which is Different People Are Better Than You.
Because if diversify is our strength, if coming from elsewhere or having a different background or being from another country automatically makes someone amazing and valuable, if difference enriches us…..that implies that we are less without it, that whatever we are without these additions is inferior to what we are with them.
If we spend all our time celebrating differences….what does that say to the kids who aren’t different, to the kids who are the majority, to the kids who don’t have some exotic culture to share or some intoxicatingly unusual cultural practice to offer? If our presumption is that the majority culture is the only one on Earth we aren’t celebrating, the only one that makes us weaker, and that offers no “richness to our lives”, what is that saying to everyone, both the arrival and the native?
It is saying that every kid who isn’t English in England, is better than every kid who is English in England. And no doubt doing the same with kids who are Scottish in Scotland, or Welsh in Wales, or Irish in Ireland.
Now lovers of Diversity, and no doubt this teacher, would be horrified or dismissive of that thought, and would likely see it as a racist, bigoted or unjust response. But is it?
If you say difference is inherently and always positive, and you mean different cultures, different skin colours, different non traditionally British backgrounds by that, you ARE saying that staying the same as we used to be, or being from those old majorities, is worse than rapid change. You ARE telling kids that the thing that is most valuable about them is how UNLIKE the English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish they are, which means those possessed of dull traditional sameness and familiarity ARE worth less than those with a newer and more exotic origin. Is saying all our children are valuable, really the lesson you end up with when the rest of what follows is very clearly saying that the best thing of all is to be, well, from somewhere else?
I encountered this school message, by the way, on the same day that I saw a Liberal Democrat post on just how wicked and awful the recent Raise the Flag trend is. Liberal Democrats, perhaps even more than Labour Party members, are horrified by the fact that well over 2 million flags have been affixed to lampposts, bridges and prominent locations in a grassroots, public campaign of defiant patriotism. The leftwing UK parties tell us that this movement is Far Right and these actions are designed to exclude and terrorise ethnic minorities.
In response to that post and that position, I asked what Liberal Democrats actually want immigrants to join. If all our national flags are hateful and racist, and if our symbols, culture and history are all things we should be ashamed of, what exactly is the immigrant, refugee or arrival supposed to be finding here? Are we asking people to just join with characteristics that define a stereotype of the Liberal Democrat voter? Are we hoping that arrivals will take up vegetarianism or pipe smoking? What is the country they are joining? The land of patched elbow jackets? The place where one goes to read The Guardian?
Leftists not only conflate all virtue and goodness with their politics, wrapping the first around the second rather like a sweet layer on a poison pill, but they also denude the nation state of any meaning. As another school example I saw once offered, if they come to write a list of British Values, it’s all things which are no more uniquely British than the debating floor of the United Nations. The first one, on several such lists I’ve seen, has always been “we value and respect people of all backgrounds and cultures”.
That’s a value, of course, that says nothing about who you are. It just attests to a kind of suicidal openness, a refusal to be different to or challenge anything else, from anywhere else. By the exercise of such a value, one must respect anything, so long as it doesn’t come from your own time, place and people. Ritual Aztec human sacrifice? How marvellously different. We respect and value that. Marriage between men in their fifties and pre-teen girls? How wonderfully exotic! We respect and value that too.
But what are we?
What are we but a ghost, plaintively drifting around respecting everything….except ourselves. What do you become when everything ELSE demands and gets your respect, no matter how bad it may be? What do you become when you instruct your children that the highest possible value they can possess is to be DIFFERENT, meaning, from another place, and the dullest and least worthy thing they can be, is British?
It seems to me that would have a cruel impact on the kids who are cursed with sameness, a terrible debilitating effect on those unfortunate enough to be English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish.
And what do such lessons, given by both schools to children and political parties to adults, do to the people who arrive here. Some, it’s true, will feel welcomed and accepted. Some, it’s possible, will be kind and decent people who then feel welcomed and valued. But even they will be fixed in their difference. You’ve given them nothing to join, no substance that has substance, no unique British Thing that means anything. So even the best of them will be confirmed in their difference, perpetually, while your country becomes not happier and more united, but unhappier and less united.
Nobody can actually unite around the utterly vague generalities of being nice, or around the reflexive, rote, increasingly absurd celebration of Difference, of ethnic and Culrural complexity, as an end in itself. Even before one considers that an open door to everyone and everything, a celebration of everything from elsewhere, would necessarily value and respect ideas, customs, and even people who definitely should not be welcomed and celebrated.
As soon as you say that everything different is valuable, you’re saying that your culture and people aren’t valuable, and you’re also describing as valuable ideas and customs which may, in certain instances, be hideous.
A fetish for Diversity is not a means of building Unity. It’s the opposite.
So what is the other answer, the better answer than this saccharine garbage being sold to kids and adults as profound insight?
The real answer is surely to know who you are, be unashamed of who you are, and offer if you offer anything the deal that those arriving must wish to fully join a real thing that is already here, whose reality they acknowledge. Kids should be taught to respect the EXISTING culture, identity and history of their nation, and kids and adults arriving should have those things described to them in such a way that they WANT to join.
Rather than an endless quest to accommodate every difference that ends up imparting no core identity at all, we should be teaching that there is a solid bedrock of identity here already that must be joined, must be integrated into, and must be celebrated for IT’S uniqueness. You can’t go chasing 30 different unique backgrounds in every classroom. Give them what makes England unique, and tell them that this is what they can ALL value. Or Scotland, or Wales. That makes others an addition to a viable whole, and not a subtraction from it or a denial of it. That used to be the standard by which every nation grew, and it was called integration.
Ironically, the celebration of Diversity reinforces difference and dissipates any hope of meaningful sharing in a national experience, whereas celebrating the uniqueness of a given nation, teaching that, does the opposite. The quickest way to get different people to be real friends, is to give them something they both love, not to keep telling them to celebrate things they don’t share.
This article (The Lie That is Diversity) was created and published by Jupplandia and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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