Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No167

This is the last SUE newsletter before the summer break, and I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to it so far this year.

Thank you to Cameron Wyllie and Andrew Moulden for their work on Scottish education; to Fotini Hamplová, who has both written for us and had the courage to set up a classical primary school in Edinburgh; and to Gillian Evans for her fantastic work on reading, the end point of which will be our forthcoming pamphlet on Why Reading Matters. You would think it would be obvious that reading matters, but as our expert on libraries Diane Rasmussen has explained, as often as not, indoctrinating ideologies are getting in the way of this most basic part of education.

Thanks also go to regular contributors Linda Murdoch and Jenny Cunningham, who – helped by ScotPAG’s Carolyn Brown – have exposed both the ‘mental health’ madness and the ‘transgender’ ideology that continues to weigh down our schools and the children in them.

A special thank you to Katharine Birbalsingh, who kindly gave up her time for a SUE online conversation, and to Nigel Biggar for his insights into history and the meaning of a civilised liberal education system. And thank you to our copy-editor, to Alex Cameron for his design support and contributions to everything we do, to Simon Knight for the weekly news roundup, and to Graeme Arnott for his thoughtful articles.

There are too many people to mention by name, but hopefully you all know who you are. If you don’t, then perhaps you can do even more for us next term!

Joking aside, I would also like to thank all the parents, grandparents and teachers who have contacted us over the year to let us know about all the good, the bad, and the far too often ugly things that are going on in our schools. This Substack is for you, and hopefully, with your support, we can all help to rebuild an education system that we are proud of and that our children thank us for in the years to come.

I mentioned last week that we have come across some disturbing stories in recent weeks in terms of the way schools work, or don’t work. Some children in Edinburgh, for example, find that their school is unable to teach Higher or Advanced Higher Maths and Physics, meaning that they have to travel around the city to find an appropriate class. These, of course, are children who are in more working-class schools, who find that an hour of their time is wasted on travel, resulting in missing or being late for their other classes.

Worse than this, we have also been informed about schools that celebrate, at least in private, the 60 percent plus additional support needs (ASN) pupils in their care. As the medicalisation of children’s difficulties grows by the year, schools can both potentially get more funding while being able to justify the plummeting exam results. But not to worry, these same schools can and do manage to keep their results looking good by providing an SQA in things like Barista Skills, which, on paper, counts as the equivalent of a National 5 qualification in Maths or Physics.

The old joke about what do you say to a Media Studies graduate – ‘I’ll have a cappuccino and a croissant to go please’ – now takes on a different dimension. Not to denigrate those who work in the service sector but teaching kids how to make coffee and calling this education is about as good an example of the lowering of standards and expectations of children as I can think of. To hide your falling levels of education behind this charade, and for the Scottish government and educational establishment to lay the foundations for it, is unforgivable.

Finally, as we hear about the £200k the SNP government is wasting on ‘anti-racist’ education, I am delighted to introduce Dr Bella d’Abrera, author of a new book that explains in detail how schools in America, Australia and the UK have abandoned traditional knowledge-based education in favour of indoctrination. As ideology replaces openness, history becomes shame, and eco-anxiety replaces any sense of human civilisation and progress, we find that the state is increasingly taking over from the family in the transmission of values.

Everything that SUE supporters and contributors have been reading and writing about since we set up is embodied in this fantastic new book. So, if you want something to read to get you ready for the new term check it out and let’s prepare for another round of education vs indoctrination. At times it may feel like we are banging our heads against a brick wall, but as more and more people expose what is going on it is only a matter of time before this wall comes tumbling down.

Enjoy the summer.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Dr Bella d’Abrera is a historian, author and vocal commentator on education, culture and Western civilisation. After more than a decade at the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia, she and her husband, journalist Fred Pawle, founded Wyborn Press, a new independent publishing house for conservative authors. Her latest book is Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation.

We have arrived at a stage in Western civilisation in which sending our children to school is no longer a guarantee that they will emerge literate, numerate, or with enough knowledge of the world to successfully navigate life. The foundations of education have been deliberately removed from the curriculum and replaced with indoctrination. By the time they finish school in the public education system, your children will not be able to fill out a tax return or recite lines from Shakespeare, but they will certainly be able to lecture you on the patriarchy, systemic racism, the dangers of farting cows, and how to be a transgender ally.

Schools across the West have been transformed from centres of instruction into purveyors of dogma. Teachers are preying on the natural iconoclasm of children to instil in them a range of deranged theories about sex, gender, race and history. These ideas have been de rigueur among university academics for decades and are now the unquestionable orthodoxy on campuses in the West. Our universities are no longer in the business of imparting knowledge.

This is where the rot begins. Almost all future schoolteachers attend university faculties that have comprehensively embraced the new ideology with religious fervour. Critical race theory, queer theory, gender theory, post-colonial theory, critical disability theory, intersectionality, identity politics, decolonisation and ecocentrism now form the basis of the global education system which has been rolled out across the Anglosphere. If you had to design an educational system to wreak maximum damage on generations of people, this would be it, because it is founded on the toxic idea that all of life is defined by an oppressor/oppressed binary.

The new educational establishment has naturally deemed any criticism of this as a ‘far-right’ conspiracy designed to induce moral panic into the UK. The numbers tell us otherwise. In England, 72 per cent of schools are teaching that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex, 25 per cent are teaching that some people or children ‘may be born in the wrong body’, and 30 per cent are teaching pupils that ‘a person who self identifies as a man or a woman should be treated as a man or woman in all circumstances, even if this does not match their biological sex’.

But it’s not just the raw numbers that reveal the endemic levels of indoctrination in Western schools, it is the type of individual who is emerging into society having had their brains rewired with antiscientific, antirational magical thinking. The system is producing the sort of individual who will hire an angle grinder, don a balaclava, and venture out under the cover of darkness to saw through the ankles of Captain Cook’s bronze likeness in a park in Australia to punish him for being a ‘racist coloniser’. It is producing the type of delusional person who believes that tossing the statue of a Bristol merchant who died 300 years ago into a harbour will put an end to ‘systemic racism’ in the United States.

It is creating legions of young people such as 20-year-old university student Anna Holland, who threw a tin of Heinz soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the understanding that her actions would somehow stop a climate apocalypse. It is a system which produces individuals such as the aptly named Saga, a 19-year-old self-described ‘Black supremacist’, who stood up at her white father’s funeral and accused him of being a ‘racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving, cis, straight white man’. It clearly did not occur to Saga that she is the living embodiment of a man who was so utterly devoid of bigotry that he fathered a child with a woman of colour.

This is not how most parents would like their children to turn out. They anticipate that their beloved offspring will eulogise about how big-hearted, rather than bigoted, they were. They do not envisage that their child will grow up to be ignorantly and proudly dismissive of history and all those who have lived before us.

Unfortunately, it is at this juncture that the general public and the education system part ways. Classrooms have been transformed from places of learning into fertile training grounds for future generations of political revolutionaries who are ready to rise up and tear down Western civilisation to make way for the new, improved socialist utopia.

This politicisation is taking place at the hands of a particularly militant set of teachers who believe that their primary duty to society is to be agents of change in a world that they understand to be a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers such as race, sex, gender, disability and cultural background.

When exactly did the Western education system cease being about education? For centuries, the curriculum was classical liberal; this tradition could be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, which established the foundation of grammar, rhetoric and logic. In the Middle Ages, these ideas were coalesced into the seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). The later emergence of cathedral schools and early universities led to the creation and adoption of the structured curriculum which has defined Western education for centuries.

In this classical model, the teacher’s role was to transmit knowledge and to form children as virtuous citizens capable of sustaining and renewing society. In substance, an Australian schoolboy in 1960s, Perth still encountered an education recognisably descended from that of a grammar-school boy in nineteenth-century Britain, with its grounding in literature, history and intellectual discipline.

Yet by the 1960s and ’70s, progressive educators increasingly saw this continuity as a problem. To them, reproducing the cultural inheritance of the West was not a virtue but an obstacle. Over the following decades, they dismantled the old curriculum piece by piece. Today, although schools may look architecturally unchanged, what goes on inside is profoundly different. Behind the familiar façades lies a system redesigned to serve ideology rather than knowledge.

The sooner that society wakes up to the fact that the system is no longer what it was, the better. Home schooling is an increasingly popular alternative, but it still represents only a tiny fraction of the system. The establishment is now aggressively promoting its destructive goals. Florida preschool teacher DeDe Duffy, for example, boasts that ‘the only thing these kids r learning from me is (to) be gay’. Her advice to kids whose parents object to this is: ‘fuck your mom’. The system does not take kindly to public criticism and is highly protective of itself. In 2022, mothers and fathers who attempted to discuss the education of their children by speaking out against critical race theory and radical gender theory at board meetings were labelled domestic terrorists by the Biden administration. Herein lies a question central to this book: To whom do children belong? The parent or the system? Naturally, most parents still think that the children they brought into the world are theirs. The system thinks not. As a 2021 Washington Post op ed bluntly argued, ‘Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.’

We have established that there are many forces working to make children anxious in the classroom. In fact, if one were inclined to err on the side of conspiracy, it could almost seem as though the system were deliberately designed to destabilise and weaken. Certainly, there are no metrics suggesting an improvement in skills, a strengthening of mental health, or a firm grasp of enduring principles. Added to all this is the rising tide of mental distress caused by smartphones, which is a troubling development documented by Jonathan Haidt in his aptly titled The Anxious Generation. The data is alarming; the harm being done to young people is beyond imagining. It is not within the remit of this book to explore the full psychological consequences of smartphone and social media use, but in light of this evidence, it is astonishing that some schools still allow personal devices at all, let alone on top of the ideological confusion already overwhelming the classroom.

Education is central to the continuation of Western civilisation because it transmits the collective wisdom, skills and values that allow societies to flourish, innovate, and sustain themselves across generations. However, it may just be that after thousands of years, ours may become the first civilisation which is brought down by what is being taught in schools and universities. A combination of the erosion of critical thinking, abandonment of the pursuit of knowledge, obsession with political activism, high rates of illiteracy and numeracy, and the prioritisation of feelings over fact might well prove fatal for our institutions.

The irony is that the educationalists who have put us on this path claim that it is all in the name of progress. Instead, they are discarding all the technological progress made during the past three centuries, and all the intellectual progress we have made in the past two thousand years. For what? They haven’t fully explained, although I will do so in devastating detail later in this book. The education system is driving our culture towards superstition, division and failure. We cannot let this happen.

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A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/25/why-anti-racist-training-should-have-no-place-in-our-schools/https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/25/why-anti-racist-training-should-have-no-place-in-our-schools/ Bella D’Abrera, Why ‘anti-racist’ training should have no place in our schools. Identity politics is making race the defining feature of young people’s lives. 25/06/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/cash-strapped-snp-government-spend-37331786 David Walker, Cash-strapped SNP Government spend £200k on ‘anti-racism education’ in schools. SNP Education Secretary Mairi McAllan welcomed the substantial spend on hiring 30 educators to ‘conduct anti-racist professional learning’ in schools. 25/06/26

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/single-largest-update-to-curriculum-in-a-decade-to-be-taught-from-august-2028 PA Media, ‘Single largest update’ to curriculum in a decade to be taught from August 2028. Education secretary Màiri McAllan said the changes will ‘drive excellence’ in Scotland’s schools 25/06/26

https://www.scotsman.com/education/watchdog-issues-scathing-critique-of-scottish-governments-pledges-for-post-school-education-8759996 Catriona Stewart, Watchdog issues scathing critique of Scottish government’s pledges for post-school education. 25/06/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/24/the-brighton-clinic-that-defied-the-puberty-blockers-ban/ Adrian Hart, The Brighton clinic that defied the puberty-blockers ban. Trans activists are still doing irreversible damage to children. 24/06/26

https://archive.ph/DKUC0 Helen Puttick, NHS withdraws cartoon of child being given puberty blockers. Campaigners criticised the NHS Lothian funded cartoon, which appeared in a resource for people with learning disabilities. 26/06/26

https://archive.ph/DzVsU Josephine Bartosch, Labour’s conversion therapy bill is not fit for purpose. 25/06/26

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/baroness-cass-is-wrong-about-the-puberty-blocker-trial/ Sex Matters, Baroness Cass is wrong about the puberty-blocker trial. 24/06/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/john-swinney-humiliated-snp-edinburgh-37353610 David Walker, John Swinney humiliated as SNP Edinburgh councillors defy him and vote to allow men in female toilets. Edinburgh City Council will write to the UK Government to demand that new EHRC guidance which ensures men are banned from women-only spaces is scrapped. 26/06/26

https://archive.ph/2026.06.28-042745/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/media/article/bbc-apology-trans-story-darren-rigby-llq3kdqfn Nick Wallis, What the curious case of Darren Rigby says handout BBC trans coverage. After years of dismissing concerns about its reporting of transgender issues, the corporation has apologised for a story it got badly wrong. 27/06/26

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