Cast your mind back to last summer. It is 24 June 2016, the day after the vote on the EU referendum. As I squeeze into the overcrowded train carriage with the rest of the commuters, I contemplate how I should approach my colleagues at school. They’re all remainers. How can I possibly tell them that I voted out and now we’re leaving the EU because of me? I’ll be lynched.
I decide to keep schtum and, if challenged by a blood-thirsty remainer looking to exact revenge, I’ll tell a big fat porky. I’m going to be an indignant remainer myself from now on, whingeing with the rest of them about the racist little-Englanders who have finally got their way.
Walking into our faculty office, I see a young colleague crying. She is distraught and inconsolable about the result. She’s been a fully signed-up member of Project Fear from the beginning of the campaign, forever railing against evil Brexiteers and their fascistic Daily Mail-reading supporters who inhabit the darker corners of our society. She has spent the past few months publicising her beliefs to anyone who’ll listen, including, of course, her most attentive and easily manipulated listeners: our pupils. I ask if she’s OK before slinking off to my classroom.
‘Pupils feel certain that deportations will follow Brexit’
My first lesson is interesting and worrying in equal measure. The kids can’t stop talking about Brexit and, being mostly first- and second-generation immigrants of Asian extraction, they feel certain that pogroms and deportations are to follow. I do my best to reassure them - without, of course, exposing my own preference for leaving the European Union.
Their misapprehension doesn’t altogether surprise me, though. Many of my colleagues have spent the past few months openly claiming that the EU is the only thing standing between immigrants and the baying, xenophobic British hordes. As an appendage to Project Fear, it’s clearly done the trick. In a school referendum organised to replicate the real thing, more than 70 per cent of our pupils voted to remain inside the European Union.
I later hear about another colleague who has burst into tears, this time in front of her class. There are reports of pupils doing the same. It is pandemonium. They think it’s the end of the world.
At lunchtime, curiosity gets the better of me so I decide to eat in the faculty office. The fury of my colleagues is palpable. I agree with everything they say. It is easier that way. I remember only too well from past experience how alternative views are received in my school; they are neither welcomed nor permitted.
‘The pressure to conform is exhausting’
The irony of all this is that many people voted for Brexit precisely because of this suffocating, unrelenting, need-to-conform-lest-you-upset-the-thought-police bullying that is so prevalent, not just in our schools, but across the whole country.
Keeping up politically correct appearances has indeed become exhausting, stressful and all-consuming. I really don’t know what I can and can’t say.
This, I think, is compounded by the age of my colleagues. As older teachers have left the profession, exhausted and demoralised by the overwhelming workload and woeful pupil behaviour condoned by inept headteachers, NQTs in their early twenties have replaced them. This is “generation snowflake” - the ruthless no-platformers with an aversion to free speech and representative democracy; these are the cry-babies devastated by the referendum result, the people spreading misapprehension and fear among our pupils.
The children think they’re going to be deported - something that I don’t believe is true - because that’s what their teachers have been telling them. How can it be that one set of views is considered acceptable for brainwashing our pupils with, while another, equally valid standpoint is so deplored that those teachers who hold it cannot admit to it openly?
The writer is a teacher in London. He tweets as @joethebaron
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