Marinate children in lies and victimhood and they will burn down their schools
The Traitors, a BBC reality show about manipulation, murder and lying, is hugely popular among small children. When the last series came out, one primary head teacher in Wales went so far as to create a Traitors “game” to teach his pupils about “communication” and “problem solving”. I don’t mind The Traitors — it’s a bit of camp silliness with a gothic twist. But rewards for deception and killing — isn’t it a bit grown up for nine-year-olds?
I also feel uneasy, by the way, about extreme race, climate change and gender ideas being pushed in primary schools. “There are over a 100, if not more, gender identities now”, is what one thrilled teacher said to a tiny child on the BBC in 2019. It’s not that I think children shouldn’t be aware of some grown-up issues. It’s just I wonder: what is the effect of such complex, frightening topics being forced, daily, on babies?
What happens if you marinate an entire generation in bad political ideas, lies and victimhood? If you hand them an icon in the shape of the unhappy schoolgirl protester Greta Thunberg? If you say everything’s about race, and that “truth” is subjective, that you will die if you don’t recycle? If you remove all guidance, boundaries, protections and borders?
What if you also teach them the highest state of being is to be oppressed and signal that oppression? If you also promise them a world in which they can do whatever they want? What if you tout this fake individualistic paradise, while simultaneously stripping away all sense of community, connection and humanity, by directing their entire lives through phones — what happens then?
The French school riots are awful. When a fire engine turned up, the children set the vehicle ablaze
I will tell you what happens: you get furious children rioting and burning down schools.
The rioting in France is awful — for days now, hundreds of teachers and police have been attacked on the streets. In Marseille, one head teacher was doused in petrol. When a fire engine turned up to put out two school blazes, the children — I cannot believe I am writing the word “children” — set the vehicle on fire. Everything is on video: a woman being flamed in the face with an aerosol. A female teacher, in white trousers, throwing wild punches, surrounded by young teens. The mayor of St Denis, an impoverished area of Paris similar to Tower Hamlets, dancing with the children as bins outside their school burnt. The scale is vast: 900 protests across the country and 500 schools closed. Two thousand were arrested on Thursday alone.
The official reason is that the children, who are mostly of north African descent, are fed up with staff shortages, poor teaching and rat-infested schools. But you don’t cover a head teacher in petrol if you’re angry at a missed maths lesson.
It is what you do if you feel detached and reckless, if you’ve been brought up in a neglected banlieue, if you don’t, as many of the protesters kept shouting, feel engaged, wanted, or even French. It is what happens if you have been lied to on the grandest scale in human history, if your head has been filled with bankrupt political bollocks, if your parents are so overworked, underpaid, depressed and marginalised, they don’t care about winding you in. This weekend, Emmanuel Macron’s entire world — his entire thought system — is on the brink of collapse. Worryingly, who isn’t here for it?
The president seems surprised at the rage, the strength of feeling. So far this week, he has said he understands the “anxiety and anger” felt by the children. But that is because he has no clue what is happening to him or how to stop it, and has no idea of the scale of the problem that is coming down the line. None of us do.
It is impossible to live for 60 years in an extended fiscal daydream without pandemonium when it comes to an end. Like us, France is drowning in debt. Like us, it has tried to patch up this problem with immigration. Like us, it has sold a lie that relaxed borders will work. Also like us, if you object to any of this — the crime, the violence, the insidious social engineering — the problem isn’t the people or the policies. It’s you, because you’re racist.
Along with Italy, Germany, Spain and us, France has Europe’s highest immigration levels (just under half a million a year). Waved in on an ideological high, these people have been lionised by politicians like Macron — equivocating, vain, self-obsessed manipulators: Traitors, if you like — who are so swept up in the image of it all they are unable to set boundaries or project authority, and are willing to tear down anything to make their happy-clappy project work.
In 2018 he supported removing the word “race” from the French constitution: it’s said to win black votes. In 2022 he made a professor who specialised in African-American studies the education minister. Pap Ndiaye lasted just over a year. Then there was Gabriel Attal, then Amélie Oudéa Castéra, then another, then another: the full centrist circus. France has now had seven education ministers in under five years. Why are you laughing? We have had seven in that time as well.
So far, there’s little evidence that our education secretary, Lucy Powell, or even Andy Burnham, will stray far from the convulsive Maoist urge to radical change. On Monday Burnham told us that he would be tearing up the current “comprehensive system” in an effort to bring “parity between academic and technical education”. To be clear: I’m all for raising children up. But why did Labour spend ten years pushing for everyone to go to university if they believe there is parity between these two streams? Why can’t you just put more money into technical? Why do you have to tear down the successful to raise up the unsuccessful (Powell called it “snobbery”)? An overeducated generation of unemployed children who think they need to be plumbers — is that what we’re valorising now? And they think Margaret Thatcher was the problem.
To these people, the only thing that matters is the project. So goals will be changed, standards will be quietly lowered, boundaries will be flipped around. Almost no approach is too radical; there is no limit on self-harm. As I write this, I am reminded of the writer for The New York Times who recently revealed she had deliberately chosen to send her daughter to a failing school. Nikole Hannah-Jones was a good person, with a great career — wouldn’t her presence as a parent automatically raise standards? In fact, the school was so broken the staff didn’t just have low standards, they had none at all. They didn’t even bother to mark the daughter’s work: the daughter ended up believing she was good at maths simply because no one had told her she wasn’t.
And when you reveal the truth to these children — when you unmask the lies, the treachery, the fact that to you, this is all a game — what happens then? Are they fine with it? Spoiler alert: they are not. Her daughter was “boiling”. As, indeed, are all children of Generation Alpha. The only question now is who will recruit them faster: the far right or the radical left?
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