Whatever you might think about Roger Waters descent into madness regarding the issue of Israel and the Jewish people and my view is that it is right to separate art and artist, it’s difficult to deny that his composition ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ from the album ‘The Wall’ is both powerful and prescient. It’s powerful because on a personal level Roger Waters is writing about his own experience of schooling of an authoritarian, unyielding and rigid type.
The song is also prescient in that it warned us about what happens when schools become indoctrination centres rather than places where a child gets the basic information that they need in order to participate in society. Unfortunately Roger Waters’s words in this song ‘We don’t need no thought control’ whilst it may well have represented to him the education that he grew up with, but worryingly it also reflects what is going on in British schools today. It seems that thought control, especially when it comes to the subject of ‘trans’, is very much the order of the day in some British schools.
A school in East Sussex, Rye College, has been caught out by pupils at the school of engaging in the thought control that Roger Waters told us about in ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. Pupils, I believe it was from Year Nine aka 13 to 14 year olds, at the school made an audio recording of a teacher pushing gender woo on her class in response to an incident when one of the pupils allegedly identified as a cat. In the audio recording, which was passed on to or acquired by the Turning Point UK campaign group, you can hear the teacher, identified by Wikipedia as Ms Donna Starkey, telling her pupils that there are three sexes, male, female and intersex, which is something that is completely untrue as intersex is not a third sex but an aberration in the development of normal sexual organs. This audio recording, a copy of which can be found below, has gone viral.
The rapid spread of this video has highlighted just how deeply the cult of trans and its science-light ideology has penetrated into British schools. Wikipedia, on its article on Rye College, mentions this gender woo furore and stated that:
In June 2023, a secret recording made by a student at Rye College went viral on Twitter and other social media platforms, in which a teacher could be heard aggressively reprimanding them for questioning the gender identity of another student.
The recording, which was initially uploaded to Twitter by Turning Point UK, showed the teacher shouting at two students and threatening to have them disciplined for their opinion, and suggesting that they leave the school. It drew considerable backlash and Rye College later released a comment acknowledging that the teacher had handled the incident inappropriately.
The teacher was later identified as Donna Starkey, who is the KS4 Learning Director at Rye College.
I agree with the college in that this teacher has indeed handled this issue inappropriately. However in my view it’s not just inappropriate because of the shouting at and the haranguing of her pupils, but the fact that she was trying to pass off fact-free, anti-biology nonsense on stilts as fact to those she was teaching.
This case leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. This is because there are a number of things wrong with this whole incident.
The first is that the teacher should not have been promoting an ideology which it seems to me she was. Secondly she was not acting as an ‘honest impartial broker’ in a debate in a lesson, she was actively pushing the ideology of gender identity. It was clear to discern that she had a view and she was promoting it .
Thirdly there is the knowledge that this school where this pro-trans indoctrination has taken place, is a school that is linked with the Church of England and Britons should at least expect the Church to hold the line about the fact that there are only two sexes, but it seems they don’t. Fourthly there was the manner in which she spoke to her pupils. It was a bit aggressive for a teacher these days.
Finally there is the part I find particularly disgusting and that is the inference given by the teacher that the pupils will need ‘educating’ about these trans issues and that they will have to write a ‘statement’ about them. I suspect that what we might have here is a situation where kids are being coerced into writing apologetic statements when discovered to be a ‘wrong thinker’ and if that is the case then we should be becoming very worried about what is going on in our schools.
We should not be having ‘re-education’ or coerced apology ‘statements’ in our schools as these are the sort of practises that it is quite easy and correct to associate with some of the great and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. These practises, the haranguing, the ideology pushing and the identification, isolation and public humiliation of dissidents are the hallmarks of societies where the education system is geared not to teaching its citizens to think, but what to think.
What happened at this school was utterly disgusting. We don’t need this sort of ‘education’ and we certainly don’t need or want this ‘thought control’ to continue to be aimed at the nation’s children.
To me it sounds like Communism or Nazism being pushed as they is only one view on the matter
& that is ours, any other opinion will not be tolerated. ( We know better )
“…Britons should at least expect the Church to hold the line about the fact that there are only two sexes, but it seems they don’t.”
I actually laughed when I read that. Not that you are wrong, they SHOULD indeed. But the CoE has been captured, no, leapt onboard, every passing bandwagon to show how “relevant”, “progressive” etc. it is for decades; thereby proving the opposite of course as well as abandoning its raison d’etre.
It is a Church in utter disarray. As one Catholic put it “How can the CoE hope for intercommunion when it isn’t even in communion with itself?”
Worse, most of the more Biblical Christian clergy have now fled the CoE to other Churches (were the rot isn’t so great), leaving the field to the Leftist-with-theological-leanings types that typify the Clerisy today.
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I too am appalled, yet unsurprised by this. Starkey is entirely out-of-order, at one point threatening the pupil(s) who disagree with her gender-woo with expulsion (presumably for “hate speech”), something that would follow them for the rest of their lives.
This is a text-book example (pun intended) of how NOT to handle such a debate.
I greatly admire the pupils who stood up to the idiot and refused to bow down before her threats.
As ever we see the fact that the gender “argument” cannot be sustained, Starkey has to resort to silencing the critics with threats – something that we see to much of from the gender-benders.
In a sane world Starkey would be promptly sacked for that behaviour. It is gross professional misconduct to indoctrinate pupils in that manner, but that is as unlikely as me seeing squadrons of flying pigs overhead.
I next expect Starkey, in classic cry-bully style, to make statements about how “upsetting” it is to have to teach such (quote) “despicable” pupils and how she has been “traumatised” by the experience etc.
What is despicable is that we have teachers like her – and FTR I am a science teacher turned Tutor.
Joanna Williams as spiked (ttps://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/19/how-parents-are-kept-in-the-dark-about-sex-education/) has an excellent article on this as well.
I’m with you on the CoE being captured by the trans cult just as some non-Orthodox Jewish groups have been so captured (especially the youth groups). I’m an antidisestablishmentarianist as I believe that it’s better to have a moderate religious force at the centre of society rather than a free for all where the loudest voices get heard, but the CoE has gone beyond being moderate into being so open minded that their brains have fallen out.
I agree with you about Starkey she did handle this very very badly and kudos to the young people for standing up for biological reality. Be interesting to see how this all plays out especially now as Kemi Badenoch has got involved.