Education, education...

Over the past year, I spent some of my free time working in inner-city schools, running workshops to promote debate and discussion and to get secondary school students to engage with current affairs. While in the process of hopefully opening eyes and broadening horizons in often deprived areas, I had my own eyes opened to an alarming phenomenon. The racism which had for me been confined to news reports and editorial columns was now staring me in the face.

When discussing the day's headlines in class, the pupils assured me that the McDonalds restaurant chain was in the habit of paying the Jews to kill the Arabs. When I attempted to challenge their flippant comments that "America and the Jews try to kill all the Muslims" and ask them why anyone would do such a thing, their reply was "because they're evil". The teachers seemed resigned to these kinds of comments, perhaps they were used to them. One confided in me that she found it impossible to teach curriculum texts in English classes that dealt with the Holocaust, because students would come back to her with comments praising the Nazis and asserting that, "if only Hitler was around today he would sort all the Jews out". Evidently I took it far more seriously than the teacher to whom these comments had been directed. Perhaps constant exposure to this kind of bigotry does toughen one's skin; however, I was left even more astonished by the teacher's reaction.

It is deeply worrying that in some schools in the capital, teachers are just running away from the issue, and we are condemning a generation of young people to follow in their parents' bigoted footsteps. In some cases teachers find themselves in a position where they are unable to teach their pupils right from wrong, where history gets distorted, where Hitler receives praise and where they are often too afraid to challenge the lies that their students are being fed elsewhere. The fight against racism has to be fought both at home and in our schools. An education system that no longer tries, at a very basic level, to combat preconceived prejudices because of not wishing to offend and in the interests of modern political correctness, is not one that is serving the best interests of this country. On the contrary, it is harming the chances of integration and promoting ghettoization.

A great deal of the fault undoubtedly lies with modern political correctness and the concept of individual choice and freedom of ideas, that I never thought I would hear myself say, had gone too far. But we cannot stretch our ideals of each individual being entitled to his own opinions to teenagers expressing admiration for the Nazis. We cannot allow them to promote the racist principles with which they have been indoctrinated and which they probably don't fully understand. Fear of being labelled un-politically correct continues to constrain discussion and the challenging of opinions on these important issues. The responsibility for dealing with prejudice amongst students must rest with the authority figure in the classroom. A teacher's natural desire to avoid conflict in the classroom cannot be an excuse. Far too many of them raise their hands in capitulation to the racist propaganda that they feel unable to tackle.