Diary - 8 June 2017 | The Spectator

Hundreds of terrorists and suspected terrorists have gone through the British educational system. Yet amid all the pre-election talk about extremism, I have not heard a single mention of the role that schools could play in countering future radicalisation. Do teachers, for example, ever look at online Islamist propaganda together with their Muslim pupils and analyse its distortions? When teaching history or politics, do they actively encourage an appreciation of British institutions and values? I doubt it. Most teachers in the state system are, on all available evidence, left-leaning and so are likely to teach from a largely anti-western perspective. Primary schools are just as important as secondaries. But in primaries, teachers have, for decades, clung to the wrong-headed theory that instilling factual knowledge in young children is incompatible with their self-development. So even though this is just the age at which children are most eager to learn and enjoy structured lessons, they leave primary schools with very little sense of history.