Schools are force-feeding pupils politically correct dogma about sexuality, climate change and British history (stock image)

'When I get married — whether it’s to a man or a woman...’ my 11-year-old niece told her grandpa the other day. But I don’t think she thinks she’s a budding lesbian (would she even know at that age?).

It’s just the way she has been taught to think at her impeccably right-on school in the People’s Republic of Brighton.

It reminded me queasily of another niece’s experiences — this time at an overwhelmingly white, Christian state school in Worcester. Her dad had wanted to know why when she said ‘Mohammed’, she automatically added the phrase ‘Peace Be Upon Him’.

‘Oh, it’s what we’re taught we have to say in RE,’ my niece replied.

Did the schools ever consult us on whether we wanted our children’s heads to be filled with such politically correct bilge?

After 25 years’ ongoing exposure to this nonsense, I suppose I should be used to it by now. My elder son’s headmaster explaining to me airily how it just wasn’t the modern way to punish children for not doing their homework; my daughter coming home with the news that her primary teacher had advised her to ‘go veggie’ for a week; my younger boy being co-opted into some grisly global sustainability club, so that his school could win more eco-star ratings from an EU-sponsored green scheme.

Such indoctrination never fails to irritate. More than that, though, I am genuinely terrified about the kind of havoc these brainwashed mini-revolutionaries may wreak in the future.

Already we’re getting an indication of a new culture across our universities that brooks no dissent against a politically correct view of history, literature and sexuality.

If even the feminist Germaine Greer can get herself banned from a campus for having suggested that many women think ‘male to female transgender people’ do not ‘look like, sound like or behave like women’, what does that tell us about the warped priorities of this generation?

And it seems to be getting worse. Even our new Children’s Laureate is at it, we learned this week. Chris Riddell (who is also a cartoonist for the Observer) has done the illustrations for a sweet-looking new children’s book called My Little Book Of Big Freedoms.

His pictures might be endearingly cute, but the book’s message definitely isn’t. Published by the Left-leaning campaign group Amnesty International, this is pure propaganda, aimed at preventing the Government from fulfilling its election manifesto promise to scrap the Human Rights Act (HRA).

Never mind horror stories like the Somali rapist who couldn’t be deported because immigration judges, citing the HRA, said it would breach his right to a family life. As Riddell reassures his young readers in his introduction, it’s all OK because ‘these freedoms [in the HRA] were created to protect every one of us, for ever’.

There is nothing innocent or accidental about this. Even if Amnesty and Riddell are unfamiliar with the words of St Francis Xavier of the Jesuits — ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’ — they’ll certainly be aware of the principle.

Children are very susceptible to what they’re taught at school — either by trusted authority figures (teachers), or, perhaps even more so, by jolly visiting children’s authors on the signing circuit at schools like my niece’s in Brighton.

Children are very susceptible to what they’re taught at school — either by trusted authority figures (teachers), or, perhaps even more so, by jolly visiting children’s authors (stock image)

Whether it is religion or green policies, this is all part of a very deliberate plan by the ‘progressive’ Left to shape the world of tomorrow by capturing the hearts and minds of children today.

But if it is a conspiracy, it’s hardly a secret one.

Consider the school in Bewdley, Worcestershire, which, just before the election, was accused of having told its children that Labour ‘is the only party that wants us to live’, and of having asked its ten-year-old pupils to write essays on why people should vote for Ed Miliband.

Or the Gendered Intelligence programme, where a speaker called Jay invites children to question their sexual identity by asking them what it means to be ‘girlish’ and ‘boyish’.

Some of them are as young as four: can you imagine what a shock it is for them when he reveals that he is a ‘trans man’ who happened to have been ‘assigned female at birth’?

Then there’s the nursery school in Turnham Green, West London, where three-year-olds too young to read or write are required to sign an agreement in which they promise to ‘be tolerant of others whatever their race, colour, gender, class, ability, physical challenge, faith, sexual orientation or lifestyle and refrain from using racist or homophobic or transphobic language’.

Of course we don’t want children of any age to be racist of homophobic — but isn’t there something insidious about making a child barely older than a toddler put pen to paper to pledge they won’t be?

Nowhere, perhaps, is the march of the Mind Police more evident than in the way virtually the whole curriculum has been hijacked by environmental issues.

A popular revision guide for GCSE English gives this example of a ‘boring’ sentence that may receive ‘zero marks’: ‘Global warming is a bad thing.’ And this as a ‘much better sentence’: ‘Global warming is a very serious and worrying issue.’

Even foreign languages are not immune. A Heinemann textbook for A-level French invited pupils to study an open letter by a French environmentalist warning schoolchildren that on global warming ‘scientists are unanimous’, and ‘never in the history of humanity have the dangers been so great’.

Then there’s the Climate Cops initiative in schools — sponsored by energy supplier npower — in which children were given police officer-style notebooks so that they could ‘book’ themselves, their friends or family members if they saw them wasting energy or performing ‘climate unfriendly’ acts.

These are the actions of proselytising institutions or individuals who are convinced they just know their world view is the only correct way to think.

‘So many of my colleagues were very vocally left of centre,’ says Will Bickford Smith, founder of the conservative-teachers website, recalling his time teaching politics at a London comprehensive.

‘They’d openly talk in classes about Michael Gove [then Education Secretary] being the enemy and David Cameron being an evil so-and-so.’

‘The rot is absolute,’ says another former state school teacher. ‘I studied at Oxford, but such was the inverted snobbery that I never dared mention it.

‘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.

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 (stock image)

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.

Of course we don’t want children of any age to be racist of homophobic — but isn’t there something insidious about making a child barely older than a toddler put pen to paper to pledge they won’t be?

‘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.



