One of the crueller games we played as children was to see what nonsense we could make the supply teachers swallow. I remember one person who managed, for a few glorious minutes, to convince the luckless stand-in that his Muslim faith prohibited him from reading out loud during the month of Ramadan.
If there is a scintilla of truth in the stories that some pupils in schools from Fredericksburg, US to Sevenoaks, UK are identifying as cats, I suspect that it starts in a similar place: taking a teacher for a ride.
Our attempts to con the teacher did reflect something about the society we were growing up in, of course. Newspaper panic about the supposed excesses of hyper-liberal teachers in the face of religious conservatism, the increasingly draconian measures pursued by governments after 9/11, New Labour’s proposed blasphemy laws and the emergence of a more muscular “New Atheism” meant that religious freedom was a perennial topic when I was in school. Today scare stories about children identifying as domestic pets and barnyard animals reflect a broader debate about people’s social freedoms, and the extent to which our beliefs about ourselves should be respected or rejected.
These stories have a way of making themselves become true: if some enterprising child in New York hasn’t already tried to make a teacher’s life difficult by claiming to be a cat, they surely will soon.
But they also point to a wider political addiction: the temptation to see every problem as having a school-shaped cause or solution. In any given month, I might expect to read or hear some demand for everything from woodland survival to “family values” to be added to the curriculum. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has blamed schools for the spread of what he calls “the woke mind virus”. And Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, has sought to remodel what is taught in the state as part of his own “war on woke”.
Politically minded additions to the curriculum are neither a new innovation nor one peculiar to the right. Whether it is adding a fuller account of the British imperial past to curriculums or slavery to American ones, there is no shortage of attempts to fix a social problem through changes to what is taught in or done by schools.
Given that changing a curriculum or altering the legal obligations of schools or universities is something states can reliably do, it’s not surprising that governments tend to reach for that lever indiscriminately. But I suspect that another reason is that when you shunt a problem on to schools, it is hard to prove if you fail. It’s very easy to assess whether or not a school is turning out pupils who are literate or numerate, or to measure whether lessons about reproductive health are driving down the rate of teenage pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections. It is much harder to measure whether you are teaching community spirit, healthy attachment styles or how to survive in adversity.
As a result, piling yet more obligations on to schools is an attractive solution if you aren’t sure how actually to fix something, or if you’ve talked a problem that isn’t real on to the public agenda. This comes with a big cost, though: it distracts schools from their actual central purpose. Geoff Barton, the head of the ASCL, the professional association for British school leaders, recently described safeguarding as “the number one priority of everyone in education”, which caused politicians across the spectrum to wonder why the “number one priority” wasn’t education. There was much less reflection on the fact that Barton’s words were a consequence of their own policy choices.
My friend’s antics were easy to deal with: he wasn’t Muslim, it wasn’t Ramadan, and there would have been no Quranic basis for him not to read out loud in any case. And in the present day: human children aren’t, in fact, identifying as cats.
But what both panics reflect is a real question: how in a liberal society people live alongside those with whom they sharply and viscerally disagree. How far should I be able to impose my belief about identities and pluralism on to you, and vice versa?
The difficulty of striking that balance deserves serious thought rather than lazy remarks about kids claiming they’re cats. And school leaders ought to get much more from their governments than being forced to be the easy conduit for the latest moral panic or an off-the-shelf solution for a problem they are not equipped to solve.