[Divemaster]

‘Geography was about saving rainforests, recycling and instilling guilt about how humans are ruining the Earth. In literacy, there was very little focus on grammar or spelling. For history, we’d use a textbook with made-up quotes from historical figures, telling us how bad the British Empire was.’

The former teacher is referring to a book, aimed at 11 to-14-year-olds and still widely in use, called Minds And Machines, where dead white European men such as British colonialist Cecil Rhodes and the Duke of Wellington are reviled.

Incredibly, Wellington is credited with being partly to blame for the Peterloo massacre — when several people died in Manchester in 1819 after cavalry troops charged crowds calling for government reform — but not with his victory at Waterloo, which saved Europe from Napoleon’s brutal military hegemony.

A teacher who writes an internet blog under the name Joe Baron has written how widespread the problem is. ‘Just last week, I overheard three colleagues discussing the evils of the British Empire.

‘“I despise it,” one snarled. “Me too! Look at Amritsar [where British troops fired on a crowd in India in 1919], what we did to the Native American Indians and our involvement in the Middle East,” another opined, shaking his head. “I really can’t think of anything positive to say about it,” the third lamented.’

Mr Baron says he teaches at an academy school where 80 per cent of the children are Muslim. He argues that his colleagues’ rejection of ‘historical accuracy’ in favour of ‘banal sentimentalism’ and ‘post-colonial guilt’ plays into the hands of extremists like Islamic State by encouraging pupils to loathe Britain’s past.

‘That is not to say,’ he writes, ‘that we shouldn’t make our pupils aware of the misdeeds committed by “Perfidious Albion” in its quest for world domination.

‘But we should also be encouraging the children to explore the benign gifts bestowed upon the world by Britain’s 200-year hegemony. The spread of capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law; the propagation of ideas, literature, technological and medical advances; the abolition of the slave trade and its global enforcement by British naval power during the period known as Pax Britannica; and, finally, its assault upon the forces of fascism and militarism during World War II.

‘Now how can my colleagues not think of any positive consequences of Britain’s imperial domination? They are either grossly ignorant, blinded by their own bias, or being deliberately deceitful.’

He concludes despairingly: ‘How on earth can these individuals ... be allowed to teach our children?’

The driving force behind the Mind Police, of course, is what Michael Gove, when he was Education Secretary, called The Blob.

This was his unaffectionate nickname for the Left-wing Educational Establishment: the teacher training courses, the militant trades unions, the professors of education with trendy progressive theories like ‘child-centred learning’ (where teacher involvement is limited), and, of course, the teachers themselves — most of them instinctively Left-wing.

Who knows whether The Blob can ever be defeated: at present they are winning an ideological war that has been raging for years between two violently opposed camps.
One side believes in discipline, uniforms, intellectual rigour, competitiveness and old-fashioned subjects like Latin — and, most importantly, freedom of expression that eschews political correctness.

The other side sees all this tradition as the enemy of a future where everyone is equal, all shall have prizes and, more cynically, everyone should embrace the glorious new order of the enlightened, progressive Left. If the latter sounds like a form of cultural Marxism, that’s effectively what it is.

Some people might think I am overstating the case. But there is a deadly serious point to all this, and I passionately believe that the way our children are being inculcated should give us all pause for thought.

If every child leaves school believing that Britain’s imperial history is evil, that open-ended human rights must be extended to everyone, including the wicked and the criminal, and that the world is getting catastrophically hotter, then eventually everyone in Britain will hold those views.

And, crucially, anyone who dares to challenge them will be a social outcast. If that happens, with every passing year a country with a long and proud history of liberalism will, ironically enough, become a bastion of intolerance.