Katie Hopkins said I was brainwashing children. But they need to learn about protest

As a teacher, I regularly have to remind students of the perils of using social media, but earlier this week it was me who came under fire for something that I’d written on Twitter. Katie Hopkins, writing for the Daily Mail about Monday’s protests against the UK government’s close alignment with the Trump administration, suggested that the tens of thousands of protesters were all unemployed, unwashed child-neglecters, and explicitly stated that the people who supported the protests should be sterilised. In response, I said that I had gone to the protest after a long day at work and that I had taken a banner made by some of my students, who incidentally had “more heart (and brain) than her”.

Now, my crime wasn’t to have tweeted something nasty about Hopkins; the scantest glance at her Twitter feed shows you that many people regularly do that. My offence was to be a teacher who had been to the protest. The worst of it was that I had taken a banner made by my students.

Hopkins quickly reposted my tweet proclaiming that I was “brainwashing” children. My Twitter feed went crazy. Setting aside the personal attacks, people were calling for me to resign. I should be sacked. “Someone”, they said, would be in contact with me about this. They began circulating links to the Department for Education (DfE) and encouraged each other to register complaints with them to inform them of my “illegal” activities.

This is when I started to panic. Not because I was worried about the personal repercussions, but because I did not want my actions to have any negative impact on the school where I work and my great colleagues. The other thing that concerned me was that people were embellishing the story. Post-truth reigns supreme on social media because anyone can say anything.

My “indoctrination” of children had seen me “abandon the curriculum”. I had “brought in my own materials” and made the students create a banner to represent my “warped” political views. Someone claimed that the banner was a piece of anti-Trump propaganda. Many retweeted that “fact”. It was actually a Martin Luther King quote.

Incidentally, the crime of which I am truly guilty, of which my students remain unaware, is that I took a piece of their work to the protest with me. I’m currently teaching a unit on protest through time, where students have been learning about the Chartist movement, the female suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in America. The timing of teaching this unit could not be more poignant. It has coincided perfectly with the increased grassroots activism we are witnessing on our streets on both sides of the Atlantic.

When we started the unit I had no idea up to 2 million people around the world would take part in the Women’s March just days before my lesson on the female suffrage campaign. One of the students I teach had been on the march with her mother, and so the actions of the women that we were learning about – women who were demonised by some sections of society at the time, ironically – made tangible sense to her.

She could feel a deeper connection to the topic because in 2017, women – her and her mother among them – were still marching. It’s the same with the civil rights movement. There are national demonstrations planned for 18 March in the UK to “Stand up to Racism” over 50 years after the Civil Rights Act was signed in America. In Britain, the impact of slavery can still be felt today and while we may have made significant progress since abolition, we have still not had our first black prime minister.

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Significance is one of the key concepts enshrined in the national curriculum for history in England. The significance of an historical event can only be judged afterwards. This, as the adage goes, is something that only time will tell.

And time tells us – and our students – this: we’ve marched a long way. In theory we have equal rights in this country irrespective of gender, ethnicity, or religion. Time tells us that the people who marched for those rights were often stigmatised at the time, but ultimately that they were on the right side of history – why else do we now celebrate them? While some sections of our society, including the media, choose to demonise those of us who want to keep their fight alive, my students would recognise this as continuity over time: there have always been some people content to stand on the sidelines and simply hurl abuse.

The world around us tells us that the march isn’t over, and it can’t ever be over. The rights we enjoy in Britain – and in the US – are not God-given. If we want to hold on to those rights, and if we want to reduce the inequality that persists in our world – sometimes as a direct result of earlier oppression which was based on gender, ethnicity, or religion – then we have further to march.

It’s only right that our schools follow the government’s advice to actively promote “fundamental British values” so that students leave school equipped with the knowledge and the desire to continue the fight for equality as they become active citizens. There’s never been a better time to promote those values – and it’s right that our teachers around the country are doing so by teaching our young people about protest.