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September rolls around again, and as it does so, the children here in England return back to school to learn all about reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to hate their own country.

As a former English teacher in a U.K. high school myself, this time of year often has me reflecting upon how, after a decade and a half away from the blackboard, I would now be completely unemployable in such a role.

Gove and Take
You’d think the subject of English literature would consist solely of teaching works of English literature to children; but, of course, the word “English” there simply means “written using the English language,” not necessarily literature from England, by English people. When I was still teaching, many of the set texts were in fact written in the U.S., most commonly standard left-wing fare like Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird.

“With old-fashioned attitudes like these, I suspect I may now find myself in a minority as a schoolteacher in England.”

As a result, in 2014, the U.K.’s then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, strongly advised exam boards should widen their syllabus to allow more domestic books to be studied. Several boards dropped American texts as advised, paving the way for more authentically English texts to be taught instead…authentically “English” texts like Anita and Me, by the second-generation Indian immigrant and comedy sketch show star Meera Syal.

A fictionalized semi-autobiography about her life in racist 1970s Britain, the book’s plot is summarized thus:

Meena and her parents are the only Indian family in Tollington, a village in the West Midlands…. Meena becomes friends with an older [white] girl called Anita, whom Meena’s parents disapprove of [Aren’t they the racists here, then?]…. Meena’s grandmother, Nanima, arrives from India to help the family. Meena learns more about Indian culture from her grandmother and becomes proud of her heritage…. Meena decides to focus on studying for the eleven-plus exam which would allow her to go to the local grammar school…. Meena passes the eleven-plus exam and her family moves away from Tollington.

Teaching that load of shit to the children, I wouldn’t have been able to resist adding the final sentence “And go back to live in India WHERE THEY BELONG.”

And that would be classroom sacking No. 1 for me.

Brown Study
The incredibly obvious true purpose of studying Syal’s alleged novel is not to lend children any genuine appreciation of literature, but to indoctrinate them into left-wing race politics, and to learn how to ritually denounce their entire nation as being racist—the white ones learn this so they can meekly submit to being dominated, and the non-white ones so they can understand how best to dominate.

Come exam time, students must demonstrate knowledge of the social context that novels are set in to achieve high marks, which once meant discussing the reasons for urban poverty in the era of Charles Dickens. Now it means knowing that, in 1970s Britain, in the words of official online BBC school revision material for the book:

Sometimes people incorrectly blamed immigrants for economic troubles…. This image [on the website] shows students protesting against a politician called Enoch Powell, whose speeches encouraged people to commit violent, racist acts in the late 1960s.

Enoch Powell’s speeches did no such thing; they simply encouraged an end to mass immigration and proposed to kick people like Syal out before they could do any real lasting damage to the nation’s society, culture, and future English literature curriculum. Far from encouraging racial violence, they warned of racial violence inevitably brewing, as expressed in his famous phrase “Rivers of Blood.” Looking at the race riots that keep breaking out across Great Britain today, is it really possible any longer to claim Enoch was mistaken in this prediction?

But this does not matter; indoctrinating teens too young to know any better with blatant lies is the whole point of this exercise, not telling them anything politically inconvenient, like the actual truth. Again, I would have been utterly unable to resist telling my classes that Enoch was right in everything he was saying here, which would have led to me being sacked a second time.

The BBC also kindly provides key quotes from the text, relating to key themes in the novel (racism, racism, racism, and racism), for students to memorize and spew back out page-wards in their final exams:

Meena feels physically sick when she hears people using racist words or hears about racist incidents. When [a white youth named] Sam is racist towards one of Meena’s uncles, she says: “I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. My legs felt watery and a hot panic softened my insides to mush.”

Sounds like diarrhea. Maybe you’ve had one too many curries again, Meena? And that would be me being sacked for a third time.

Blackboard Jungle
With old-fashioned attitudes like these, I suspect I may now find myself in a minority as a schoolteacher in England. According to a diversity-in-literature campaign called Missing Pages organized by U.K. body TeachFirst, which specializes in parachuting clueless lefty white graduates into inner-city sink schools so they can pretend they’re Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, a massive 98 percent of contemporary British educators think it is important to have books by non-whites on the curriculum, regardless of their quality or worth.

Why is it now suddenly thought so vital that books by blacks and browns should be on the syllabus? Because, according to one non-white London Assistant Headteacher cited in the report, “My catchphrase at school is ‘You cannot be what you cannot see.’” That’s not true: She evidently can’t see that she’s being the arrogant, colonialist-minded racial oppressor here.

When I first applied to become a teacher, I considered my most important task to be to try to pass on a sense of our shared culture and literary heritage to the children sitting in front of me, who back then were mostly still white English. Now the key task of English teachers seems increasingly to be redefined from above as being to break the bonds between the generations, not affirm them. Which I suppose, in a certain way, does make some sense, as a white kid from South Shields does not actually share any ancestral bonds whatsoever with a newly imported black kid from South Sudan.

When I was teaching, there was still room on the curriculum to choose which books and poems to study for the children’s coursework, leaving me free to select texts I thought were actually worth reading and preserving, like Far From the Madding Crowd, Vile Bodies, and The Turner Diaries. But even back then, there was still an inordinate amount of classroom time spent analyzing explicitly anti-racist fiction.

“Sir, why do teachers think we’re all racists?” one girl once asked me. I had to explain that we didn’t, the lefty examiners and curriculum-setters did, before opening up the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird yet again and detailing why she should never try to frame an innocent black man for rape. At the time, I still thought the answer to this was, “Because it is morally wrong.” Now I realize the true answer should be, “Because there’s no need, there’s plenty of guilty ones hanging around on every street corner for real, funded by your parents’ taxes.”

Prints of Darkness
The classes I taught all being born pre–Tony “Let Them All In!” Blair, the very, very few non-white kids I had charge of were of necessity all perfectly well integrated, perfectly pleasant on an individual basis, and of zero civilizational threat to anyone. (Apart from the one single Muslim girl who demanded we all not read Animal Farm because it had some pigs in it.)

Texts like Mockingbird had always left me somewhat indifferent, but as I still thought the simplistic moral lesson to be imparted by them was basically little more than “Listen, class 4B, don’t lynch all those imaginary black people who don’t even live here yet from the football posts at lunchtime,” I didn’t particularly object. I just made my way patiently through such semi-agitprop and waited until I could move on to Yeats or Shakespeare, the writers I actually enjoyed.

Yet such texts now seem to me almost like a form of preliminary moral grooming: Reel the kids in with the soft anti-racist stuff (by white liberals), then truly hook the next generation on the hard stuff (by black race Marxists): from scripts by Harper Lee to scripts by Spike Lee in ten or fifteen all-too-short years. First it was just, “Hey, white kids, don’t hate the blacks!” Then, once that generation had been successfully softened up and rendered morally defenseless, it was, “Hey, white kids, hate yourselves instead!”

Essentially, I was being employed as a child-groomer without even realizing the fact. And it wasn’t all that hard to con me in this fashion, either. By choosing American novels to fatten the kids up on, cynical curriculum-setters exploited the fact that most British people know next to nothing about U.S. race history. If I’d been told to peddle Anita and Me, with its apparent line (I’ve never actually read it, and never actually will) that Enoch Powell was going around giving nonexistent speeches telling people to behead the Pakis and burn the coons, I would have been able to see through it as all being lies immediately.

By giving me Mockingbird to tout instead, however, Department of Education agenda-setters leveraged the fact that most English people of my generation, myself included, had vanishingly little genuine interest in the American Civil Rights Struggle™ in the Deep South, and so had unquestioningly “learned” about it passively on TV through a preapproved lens purely of misleading Hollywood propaganda films like In the Heat of the Night or The Defiant Ones. And so it came to pass that I, too, as a useful idiot teacher, played my unwitting part in the downfall and conquest of my own ancestral civilization, the precise reverse reason I had entered into the profession in the first place.

I suppose that must be what you call literary irony.