A few weeks ago, we all watched the same footage. A young man called Henry Nowak, barely out of childhood, handcuffed on the ground, begging the police for help. What followed was the confusion of our commentators as they struggled to explain how young police officers, sworn to protect the public, could behave in such a way. No one seemed to have a convincing answer. But when you spend a lifetime in schools, it’s pretty clear what’s going on.
Those young police officers are not a special case – they’re collateral damage. And the pattern runs further afield than policing. Last September, Charlie Kirk was shot, and within hours young people were celebrating all over the internet, despite the fact that two little children would have to grow up without their father. Many of us looked on in disbelief.
The reason the younger generation see things as they do is because they have been taught to view people in two camps
What has happened to the moral core of our young people? Something has changed – profoundly – in how our young people see the world. Those police officers were not evil. They were not incompetent. They were terrified. Terrified of being seen as racist.
Charlie Kirk held views young people find objectionable, so his death was cause for celebration. Henry Nowak’s attacker was a brown man, so the police’s deepest instinct – to protect the victim – was overridden by their most powerful fear: being accused of racism. The police are not special. They’re what some of our young people have become – so consumed by white guilt that they will do crazy, irrational, and inhumane things rather than risk being seen as racist.
Unless we try to explain this change in the moral core of our young people, and why we are witnessing this culture change across many western countries, we cannot pretend to care about the West. Our profound lack of interest in the moral values surrounding our children has caused our civilisational collapse.
The reason the younger generation see things as they do is because they have been taught to view people in two camps – those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors.
In their eyes, Charlie Kirk was an oppressor – so his death did not warrant grief. The man who killed Henry Nowak belonged to the oppressed class – so the police’s job was to protect him, not the dying man on the ground. This is not cruelty or incompetence. This is white guilt. And we are the ones who have taught this to our children.
We the Boomers, the GenX-ers, the older Millennials – we are responsible for not teaching our children the difference between right and wrong.
We are the ones who immersed our children in a culture of victimhood which is at odds with the culture of personal responsibility we all grew up in – a culture we’ve very stupidly taken for granted.
As little as 40 or 50 years ago, the bedrock of traditional Christian small c conservative values that built the West, were commonplace in our schools and in our general culture.
One of my teachers at my school, always tells me about his grandfather – a man who no matter how ill he was, never missed a single day at work, yet always had time to teach his grandson how to be a better version of himself. No ‘quiet quitting for him’! When he retired after 50 years with the same company, he was so proud of his company letter thanking him for his service that he gave it to his grandson.
Children are the future. And yet we are teaching them to have contempt for their elders
Once upon a time, we all knew that traditional values gave us a chance at living a meaningful life.
All the grandmothers knew it.
All the pastors knew it.
Even the teachers knew it!
So why don’t our young people know it now?
We Boomers, Gen Xers, and older Millennials think school is just about teaching algebra. Your kid’s science teacher not so good? Ah, no big deal, just get the kid a tutor. And sure, they’re on social media, but we had TV – and we assume they’re the same. Parents are busy working and well, your own parents didn’t war-game your upbringing – it just sort of happened somehow – you grew up without too much effort – and you turned out just fine – you know the difference between right and wrong.
So why would you war-game the upbringing of your own children?
Because raising a kid in the 21st Century is a different order of magnitude of task!
We have taken for granted the values from our elders and we have missed the fact that we are the elders now. The only reason the Sex and the City liberalism of the 1990s was fine was because we were anchored by the small c conservatism of our parents and grandparents.
Do you ever wonder why GenZ behave so differently in the workplace? Not all of them sure – but we all know they tend to be more performative than older generations, tend to value feelings more, and don’t really embody the small c conservative values of duty to others or real sacrifice instead of the performative kind.
Instead, young people swim in a culture of instant gratification and ‘live your best life, you do you, be who you wanna be’.
And if you think GenZ is bad…just you wait till you see Gen Alpha!
This culture shift comes from what children learn at school and online. Ask any young person what history they learned at school.
They’ll tell you: Hitler.
Ask them what else.
They’ll tell you: slavery.
Anything else? – American civil rights.
In fact, what little they know of history will be all about black and brown people fighting for equality against the white man, women fighting men for the vote, gay and trans people fighting for various rights. Our young people have been taught that history is simply one long story about various groups struggling under the oppressive dead.. white..man.
Out with Dickens, Shakespeare, Kipling and Wordsworth! We must DECOLONISE.
History is taught through an oppressor lens.
The triangular slave trade in the Atlantic, where white men held the power.
What about Britain ending the slave trade? More than a quick mention if at all? erm…no. What of the Arab slave trade that lasted three times as long as the triangular slave trade? Erm…no.
GCSE History in Britain is often taught as ‘Migration through time’, so the idea that Britain has always been a land of immigrants is embedded in our children’s heads. Most schools would prefer to concentrate learning on the tiny number of black people who existed in Tudor England over a thorough analysis of England’s break from Rome. Medieval history becomes HERstory and is told through the eyes of Eleanor of Aquitaine, because, after all, she was a woman. Not to mention weeks on King Mansa Musa of Mali, because he was a black Muslim. His bearing on British institutions, laws and faith is non-existent, and the fact that he is said to have been the richest man in history thanks in part to his massive slave-owning society, is a detail that somehow teachers rarely ever teach.
But it isn’t just schools. It’s our general culture too. Take your kids to a museum or art gallery in any western country and you’ll find the same narrative. As an example, when learning about aviation in London’s Science Museum and the extraordinary feat that is man making massive machines move in the sky, a write-up on the wall explains that women and black people were historically barred from aviation schools and the military. Similarly, James Watt – the man who invented the steam engine and is considered the founder of the industrial revolution has a write up on the wall explaining that his early career involved slave trafficking with a bonus analysis of the whole of Britain’s complicity in the slave trade.
They flatten the entire human story and all of its complexities into the narrative of oppressor and oppressed and leave young people unable to see the world in any other terms.
How can children feel that they belong to their country when they are immersed in an educational culture that teaches that their country is merely an evil oppressor?
How can children feel that they belong to their country when they are immersed in an educational culture that teaches that their country is merely an evil oppressor?
Children are the future. And yet we are teaching them to have contempt for their elders whose old oppressive world needs overthrowing by a new world of young arrogant antiracists who know better than we do. We older westerners are cutting off the branches upon which we sit, because of the guilt some of us feel for being white and privileged. We look at Mamdani the Mayor of New York and Zack Polanski, the very popular leader of the Green Party amongst the under 30s in the UK, and wonder what on earth is going on. Why are our young people voting for and cheerleading these Marxist politicians?
Few of us understand how much the online world reinforces this culture of the oppressor versus the oppressed. Victimhood saturates every video, whether it’s about a foreign war, transphobia, or racism, and white guilt lingers everywhere.
It should not come as a surprise that our young people’s moral core does not recognise complexity or nuance. They have been formed by school and the online world to make one judgement only: oppressor or oppressed? Good or bad? And they are desperate not to be seen as racist. We see this most starkly with our young police officers.
Well I’m here to tell you…that’s on us. We don’t care about childhood. We then wonder why our children have imbibed the wrong values.
At my school Michaela, in north west London, developing traditional moral character and defending our inherited tradition is at the centre of what we do. Now being a teacher, I’ve got some homework for you today – I want you to live your lives by the small c conservative values that were instinctive to your grandparents. Be brave and put away your lifestyles of ‘Anything goes’! Saving the West ain’t easy you know!
And then you need to narrate those traditional values openly with your children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, as if you’re going to war. We need to inoculate our children against the seductive ideas of victimhood and hold them to account, so that they can see that they are morally responsible beings with agency, whatever their race, whatever their religion.
So yes, Henry Nowak’s police officers were trained with the wrong priorities – but that training was only fuel on a fire that has been burning their whole entire lives. A young man lay dying on the ground and their most powerful instinct was not to help him, but to manage their own terror of being seen as racist. This is not a policing failure. This is a civilisational failure – and it belongs to us – because of what we have done and are doing to our children.
I talk about all of this and more on my new podcast Strictly Education which you can find on YouTube.
We all need to be brave enough to teach children a sense of duty and service, love of country, gratitude over entitlement, hard work over laziness, forgiveness over vengeance – and our children will reject the oppressor/oppressed narrative instinctively. They will know in their hearts that dignity comes through owning one’s moral agency – through being responsible for one’s actions, and sacrificing for the betterment of the whole.
Schools matter.
Families matter.
Children matter.
Save our children, and we’ll save the West.
Katharine Birbalsingh delivered an edited version of this article in a speech at the ARC Conference
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