We only ever import American vices

Considering that US productivity is growing at 10 times the rate of Britain’s, there is a lot we could learn from the Americans.

So we do – but only the wrong things. One such is the critical race theory, according to which our whole history has been about racism, slavery, colonialism and little else.

Now, if you’ll forgive a personal note, one of the things that struck me when I moved from the US to Britain 35 years ago was how little racial rancour was noticeable. Blacks and whites were colour-blind the way they seldom were even in New York, to say nothing of Texas, the two places I knew well.

That was to be expected, considering how different the histories of the two countries were in that respect. Yet our ‘educators’ refuse to recognise this.

British children as young as five are taught about police brutality in the US as if Britain were an American state. Teachers are instructed that: “Police brutality and incidents like the death of George Floyd might not seem age appropriate for primary school pupils, but children of all ages are likely to have heard about these issues in the news or discussed them at home.”

I’m not sure how many British families discuss the George Floyd case (which The Times describes as “murder”) with their little tots. I suspect the number is small, and the frequency of such discussions smaller still.

I doubt this subject figures prominently in American families either, not three years after the fact. However, even supposing that some parents do choose that topic at beddy-bye time in preference to, say, a bunny rabbit going hop-hop, at least it has some marginal relevance there.

Yet an average British child doesn’t hear many stories of murderous police brutality, has never heard of Minneapolis, and wouldn’t know George Floyd from Pink Floyd.

Nevertheless, teachers are supposed to indoctrinate British five-year-olds on strictly American material (which is mostly false even in that context, but that’s a separate subject).

The same document directs teachers to a US infographic showing that white five-year-olds are more “strongly biased in favour of whiteness” compared with their black and “Latinx” (Latino) classmates.

Latino classmates? What, like Puerto Rican or Mexican? In Britain? Whenever I see a bevy of schoolchildren in London, they are mostly white, with a smattering of blacks, Indians and Muslims. There is never a Mexican or Puerto Rican anywhere in sight, to parade his lack of bias in favour of his race.

Another guidance tells teachers how to tackle the issue of “white privilege”, especially when talking to council estate urchins who don’t feel particularly privileged.

Our educators are expected to state in no uncertain terms that the original sin of whiteness isn’t redeemed by belonging to any other “disadvantaged” group, such as women, homosexuals or the poor. That, children should know, “doesn’t erase their white identity”.

Children are also taught to spurn “white saviour narratives” focused on white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. Presumably it was Martin Luther King who freed the slaves in England.

Quite apart from the subversive and unsound nature of the critical theory in general, equating the race situation in Britain and America is pernicious demagoguery at its most soaring. And it’s ignorant demagoguery to boot.

Slavery was practically nonexistent in metropolitan England, though it was important to the economies of her colonies, including the American ones. Even in Elizabethan times slavery was already seen as abhorrent – three centuries before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… it was resolved that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.”

Though Britain officially banned the slave trade only in 1807, unofficially the Royal Navy had been harassing slave traffic for decades. And you know what? The ranks of those Elizabethan jurists and Georgian sailors showed no multi-culti diversity whatsoever. Fancy that.

Those ‘educators’ who corrupt children’s minds with the critical race theory indirectly prove all that by dragging in strictly American material. They wouldn’t have to do so if they could illustrate their hateful drivel with enough examples from British history.

Children, exposed to a deluge of American TV and Internet, are already confused anyway. When my friend scolded his son for something or other, the lad replied in his Essex accent: “Okay, don’t make a federal case out of it.” Another child, who refused to own up to some transgression, told his mother he’d like to “take the Fifth”.

That boy was 15, not five, and he still hadn’t been taught that the right to silence had been enshrined in the English Common Law for over a century before American colonists used it to formulate the Fifth Amendment to their Constitution.

That knowledge is clearly deemed superfluous. Children don’t have to know anything about their country other than its history of racism and colonialism. Such education ideally prepares them for a lifetime of deracinated ignorance, possibly laced with subversive activities.

Now it’s time for the Church of England to follow suit, if it hasn’t already. It could take its cue from the Haitian slaves who rose against the French in 1789-1793. Widespread violence against the French colonial administrators proceeded under the slogan “The whites killed Christ. Let’s kill all whites!”

That may be a little extreme for our Anglican schools. Perhaps “let’s condemn all whites” would be more moderate.