First, provide the tools

There has been a sharp rise in references to sexual harassment, sexual abuse and safeguarding incidents in Ofsted reports since 2017. Conceivably, this rise could be due to an increased awareness or willingness to report such incidents among students or schools (it coincides with the #MeToo movement) or because Ofsted is giving more weight to a background level of incidents that were already occurring. However, other evidence and testimony suggests that the rising Ofsted references at least in part reflect a real and alarming upward trend. The rise in reports is concomitant with wider reported trends around bad behaviour toward teachers and classmates, and it is associated with the spread of other hateful attitudes and ideas; ideas often associated with the rock-bottom of online rabbit holes, but which worm their way into people’s minds, including children’s minds.

Whatever you may personally think about various so-called culture war issues and technology – the “alt-right”, woke and anti-wokeism, “incel” culture, fake and partisan news, the wide accessibility among children to pornography, and social media (often in closed, unmonitored groups) – this complex of cultural trends represents a real challenge to schools, parents and society at large. And when it is expressed as misogyny and other forms of hate toward peers in schools we must, as teachers, educators, parents, or indeed as philosophers, academics and concerned citizens, act with utmost determination to counter it. Of course this is true whether or not it’s on the rise, but if it is on the rise that makes the imperative all the more urgent, and there’s little harm in erring with proportionality on the side of caution.

But “counter it” how? The challenges are immense. We cannot fight the internet. Some schools and parents choose to restrict the phone use of older children, of course. To bar young people from channels like social media and tightly monitor their internet use is a proposal that has been widely aired in recent weeks, in an eminently understandable response to a most sickening act of violence. But such wholesale restrictions are probably technically near-impossible to implement, and conversely often quite easy to circumvent, and moreover even if you could somehow put all forms of interactive online communication back in the box, to do so would be illiberal, removing from young people the opportunities for creativity and positive connection that the internet also provides. Parentally-controlled oversight can also impede children from reaching out to peers or support services when abuse is coming from within the family.

We also cannot argue against every hateful YouTuber or biased news report or self-proclaimed misogynist influencer. We may very well not have the time and patience to keep up with the trends ourselves. And even a child entirely disconnected from the internet themselves is hardly immune to the spread of ideas by other means; means which may be as simple and unmonitorable as playground talk.

Even simply foisting counter-arguments on children, spoon-feeding them the right and better ideas (even when they truly are right and better ideas) is not optimal. It risks turning the would-be moral educator into just another “influencer”, and a boring offline influencer at that, without a flashy TikTok, to be swiped away if boring.

So what can we do? If the problem is framed as children subjecting other children and their teachers to misogynistic abuse, children accessing this or that content, children being algorithmically inculcated into believing hateful things… then this may seem like a paradoxical suggestion, but what we can do is this: trust children. But in order to do that with good grounds for confidence, first provide the tools: give them the opportunities to enquire and reflect together from a young age, give them oracy skills, critical and meta-cognitive thinking skills, give them facilitation that elevates their conversations and their thoughts… And then give them freedom, and trust them.

The tools we need are not: bans on whole modes of media, unenforceable age-restrictions, or reactionary censorship.

The tools we need are: space within the curriculum to reflect and think deeply; the values of care, criticality, creativity, collaboration; communities of enquiry that come together to really, really THINK; facilitator-educators who have the confidence to hold those discussions; and rich stimuli that offer inspiration and provocation.

And those provocative stimuli might well include some of the malign and hateful ideas spewing up from those online rabbit holes. We recently heard from a teacher whose class specifically asked for an enquiry on that particular prominent self-proclaimed misogynist influencer who makes so many headlines. The children asked for this topic, so they could themselves grapple with and understand what was being said by that influencer and about him. Now, this is a very challenging stimulus and a difficult conversation for any teacher or P4C facilitator. But she took it for the positive opportunity that it was. Because, with the right tools, and having developed the right skills for herself and the children under her care, she was able to give them those two profound gifts: she was able to give them freedom, and to trust them.