Mary I don’t agree, though I’m coy to do so with your undoubted insight (until now). ” Gathering initially on Mumsnet, first in bafflement, then outrage and finally political mobilisation against extreme gender ideology, the result has been a grassroots political mobilisation that has chalked up a number of victories.” Or whether, if you find yourself suddenly on the other side of the battle from a significant subset of previously apolitical provincial mums, it might be time to ask yourself, like the often-memed Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Hans, are we the baddies?” Ultra-progressive educators may regret taking on the most dogged, well-organised and self-sacrificing demographic there is.Īnd school radicals might also ask themselves if they should try and win this one. And at ground level, in ordinary life, it’s almost always mums who show up and form committees to make life better in small ways, in small places. After all, if your aim is to roll out radical social changes without anyone noticing, your chances of winning are premised on the masses not caring enough to mobilise in opposition. Thus it’s unsurprising to find “moms” increasingly making an appearance on the ever-lengthening list of Things Which Are Now Far-Right.īut those now picking a fight with PTA mums, and traducing pushback as extremist, should consider whether this is a fight they can win. Of course non-progressive control of school boards would effectively mean, in time, ending the principal pipeline for manufacturing new progressives. The primary focus of the campaign is simple but Gramscian in ambition: taking control of school boards, and thus of lesson content and schools policy. It’s been greeted with enthusiasm by conservative elites: Florida governor Ron DeSantis was a keynote speaker at the group’s July summit. From its beginnings in early 2021 as a campaign against school closures, the grassroots, mum-powered campaigning network Moms for Liberty has grown to 100,000 members with chapters across the US. So in the time-honoured manner of PTA mums the world over, they mobilised. Even maths textbooks are not immune.īut when they pushed back, parents found teaching bodies as indifferent to their wishes on lesson content as they were to the misery of remote-schooled children.
Often influenced by “ critical pedagogy”, a progressive doctrine whose aim is to subordinate all school teaching to the formation of new progressive activists, curricula may now see even the most innocuous subjects racialised or otherwise politicised.
And this revealed a curriculum radically altered from even a generation ago. And seeing their lonely kids spiral into mental illness and learning loss under school closures spurred numerous grassroots - and often cross-party - school reopening campaigns, by often previously apolitical mums.īut there was a secondary effect, too: Zoom schooling afforded mums a window into the content of their offspring’s lessons. At the time, though, objections were slapped down, often accompanied by overheated rhetoric about death, danger and white privilege. The Stolen Year, a recent book by a broadcaster on the progressive-leaning state-funded US radio station NPR, Anya Kamenetz, documents the the disastrous effect closures had on children’s mental health, and disproportionate impact of learning loss on the poorest children.