It was on the 24th of September that GOV.UK  published Guidance on teaching the curriculum, this hitting the headlines on the 27th – in The Guardian/TES at least – and the newspaper reportage focused on the announcement there was a ban on the teaching of any anti-capitalism ideas. I didn’t respond then as this didn’t seem any more obnoxious and outrageous than anything else this government says or does.

It is a little surprising that the announcement, and there are many in the document, comes from guidance titled Plan your relationships, sex and health curriculum. Having sex with anti-capitalism resources? Perhaps I am being too literal. I trust there is no ban on being metaphoric [though on reflection that has been whittled away over years with the demise of creative subjects and The Rise of the Knowledge Curriculum].

Here is the first ludicrous statement that caused the most ‘liberal’ outrage, correctly so:

I have highlighted the pertinent statement and it is quite clear. It is also clear how ‘undemocratic’ the statement is itself. Why isn’t the word ‘socialism’ included? It is personally sad that we haven’t had that many socialist governments in power of late, but there have been [well, I understand the debating points here…]. But to even analyse to this cursory level is ridiculous. It is quite simply a biased, strident and dictatorial viewpoint.

But it has also just occurred to me that no one will now be able to use my poetry collection in any classroom teaching, for example, the use of found poetry and other innovative approaches to convey a viewpoint poetically:

I did find one other section of those I read in the Guidance an interesting one:

I shouldn’t need to explain why this is ‘interesting’…