How can education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels survive the onslaught of extreme political correctness? While it is right to question everything, surely it is obvious that some questions are stupid and some of the answers at which we arrive by applying stupid questions are simply ridiculous. For example, the following are ideas which, unless we are vigilant, will become truths universally known. These include the statements that: mathematics is sexist; history is racist; and biology is transphobic. Even punctuation is under threat since, apparently to our ‘snowflake generation’, full stops are aggressive.
It is tempting to dismiss these ideas as transitory; if we only ignore them, they will go away. But some of these ideas have traction. For example, the idea that biology is transphobic is promoted—and defended—by the Royal Society of Biology*. This once proud institution, born out of the merger of the former Institute of Biology and the Biosciences Federation, has gradually moved in recent years from genuinely being a voice for biology and biologists to becoming a regally chartered arm of the Extinction Rebellion movement. At the end of 2020 it accused people on Twitter of being transphobic who claimed that biological sex was determined at birth and was biologically immutable. Few right-thinking people would deny the right of others to identify themselves under a gender other than their biological sex. But for the Royal Society of Biology to deny the reality of biological sex is a clear case of the sociological tail wagging the biological dog.
The damaging consequence of making wild and inaccurate claims about major educational subjects is that they turn off curiosity and lead to dismissal of whole areas of study. If these erroneous ideas are peddled at schools, then pupils will decide they are not worth studying. Ultimately these important subjects will die at university level, at least in liberal western counties. And the cruellest irony is that those responsible are the same people who have climbed to the top of their disciplinary trees and, subsequently, kicked the ladders over behind them.
How can we counter the nonsense? One way is to welcome the questions, re-word them to include ‘to what extent is, e.g., mathematics sexist?’ and then use mathematics to demonstrate that, in fact, mathematics is not sexist. The spread of ability in any subject is wider in men at both ends of the ability spectrum. A great many men have greater ability than women and a great many men have a lower mathematical ability than women. Historical texts can and have been racist, if written to support odious ideas such as racial superiority. Then how can we do better research to demonstrate that such ideas are, indeed, odious and have led to great suffering and injustice? To counter the argument that full stops—or other aspects of punctuation—are aggressive, then demonstrate the importance of punctuation in clarifying meaning. Try this sentence: ‘I love eating, dogs, and cats’ and then imagine it without commas.
*the author resigned his Fellowship of the Royal Society of Biology in 2020.
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