Toddlers Are Now to be Told Not to Mind Their Peas and Cucumbers
Civitas, 8 July 2008
Newly published guidance for play leaders and nursery teachers instructs them to be on the look-out for and to reprimand racist attitudes evinced by toddlers.
“No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action”, they are reportedly instructed.
Among potentially racist behaviour of toddlers for which nursery teachers are instructed to be on guard and ready to take them to task is their saying “yuk” when presented with unfamiliar foreign food. The guidance warns: ‘Children [might] react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying “yuk”.’
Published by the heavily publicly-subsidised National Children’s Bureau, the guidance bids nurseries report as many such incidents as possible to their local council.
It states: ‘Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.’
Although at first I was tempted to dismiss the guidance as just another instance of political correctness gone mad, on reflection I find it deeply disquieting and sinister for two reasons.
First, if, as they often do, toddlers dislike the taste of unfamiliar foods, their dislike has absolutely nothing to do with the colour of whoever might have cooked or invented the dishes. It has everything to do with the unfamiliarity of their taste.
To suggest that there is something reprehensible about young children disliking or evincing their dislike of unfamiliar foods is downright totalitarian.
Yet that is precisely what the NCB guidance suggests, when it states that if children ‘reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes.’
There is nothing unacceptable about a child disliking the taste of some unfamiliar food. Nor is there anything unacceptable in a very young child indicating such a dislike by their screwing up their face and saying ‘ugh’ when presented with it. There is plenty unacceptable in it being claimed unacceptable for toddlers to do so.
Second, and even more worryingly, there is the relish(!) with which the NCB seemingly wishes to contribute to the victim-culture in which racism is detected around every corner, including now, it seems, those of the nursery.
As a matter of fact, xenophobia, if not quite racism, seems to be hard wired into human beings. Infant psychologists at Harvard have discovered that:
‘Five month old babies will look longer at somebody who spoke to them in their own language. Older infants want to accept a toy from someone who has spoken their language. They like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’
If toddlers at nurseries evince such apparently innate preferences, are they to be told off and is their doing so to be reported to local authorities as racist incidents?
If not, just what is the difference between those forms of behaviour and cases where a toddler turns up their nose at some unfamiliar food?
I would be truly interested to know what the NCB’s answers to these questions are, but I shall not buy their book to try and find out.
Instead, I shall continue to spend any spare cash I have on exotic Indian curries which reportedly have been found to ‘produce a “natural high” which makes us crave them more than other foods.’
I trust the NCB will not report me to the Commission for Equality and Human Rights if, as might all too easily happen, it should perchance get wind of my culinary preferences – so widely shared among my compatriots of every race, creed and colour.
Totalitarian is indeed the word – but this new form of totalitarianism has deep roots. For many years, the expression of many preferences – for orthodox sexual morality, for the past, for like minded communities – has been all but criminalised. It is certainly stigmatised, usually as “bigotry”. Assume the “wrong” sort of accent in jest and people look round nervously. Refuse to fill out meaningless forms in any number of occupations and your continued employment is on the line. Fail to employ the requisite number of women/”blacks”/”gays”/”differently abled” in your business and you face state sponsored snooping. The situation has snowballed so suddenly that many people now take the new restrictions as normal and live two lives; one for public consumption and another for deeply private confession. The way in which we should respond to this is not clear. On the one hand, there is a raft of classical liberal objections which boil down to three main points: how can the state know that an individual’s motives are suspect; why should it presume to investigate so far in the first place and if people are as the left suspects them to be, what price democracy? Then there is the radical libertarian point: why should people be deprived of their prejudices? If a lesbian hotelier dislikes heterosexuals, why should she not refuse to cater for them? This point is almost never advanced today, but it is through legislating against such possibilities that the current crop of over zealous regulations have been allowed into public life. There are, finally, a number of tory points – but true toryism these days is called “Powellite” and ruled beyond the pale. Nevertheless, we should air them from time to time, just to exercise freedom of thought. They can be expressed as follows: personality itself is nothing but a tissue of preferences and “prejudice”. One may like Mozart, pineapple juice and women with large posteriors for no reason other than that they are subjectively pleasing. To attack prejudice too vehemently, therefore, is to abolish the individual altogether. Hence the left wing notion that “the personal IS political.” It is true, however, that the body of one’s preferences will arise from one’s culture and so form the backbone of society. Tamper with the assumptions on which a society rests and which filter through to the individual as “prejudice” and you slowly but surely start to pick that society to pieces. Thus it is that in “freeing” society from the body of assumptions involved in Christian marriage, the left has reduced us to our current condition of moral beggary. Yes, there are freedoms aplenty and yes, reform was necessary but it has been both too fast and too hostile to what went before. The liberal is properly a sort of supersubtle conservative who loosens the plates of society without dismantling the shell. Finally, the conservative will realise what the liberal will not and what the socialist actively denies – that nature and indeed HUMAN nature, not society, is the primary constiuent of reality. Society can only, therefore, play a modifying and an ameliorative role. Tories are comfortably aware that nature will involve – as has been pointed out – a preference for the familiar and for the similar. Toddlers inevitably fall foul of all modern moralism therefore, because in their aboriginal humanity they prefer faces of their own colour and accents like their own. Society should develop freely along the lines of simple humanity, not asking too much of its members and not allowing for fascist enthusiasm either. It should respect whatever it has invented by way of custom in the marking of universal human experience. It should certainly never aim to perfect its members according to canons of angelic disinterest. That is the very seed of totalitarian cruelty.
Like you Mr Conway, I am so tempted to mock…. ‘Such infants have clearly behaved inappropriately. Whatever they claim by way of feeble “goo goo ga ga” type excuses, we must stand firm when they are removed from the sandpit. White supremacist attitudes need to be eradicated…..’
However…
Lets not do that: Your article hits the nail on the head when it says this is more than political correctness gone mad.
But: Please, please, please, please – can we face up to the stark, blank, crystal clear-with-bells-on it fact – that political correctness has not, and never has, “gone mad”?
It is a calculated, successful ideological strategy by “Masters”; motivated by the power and hedonism of virtue. It is a coping strategy by others, fearing or wanting reward from their Masters.
It is not, nor ever has been, well-intentioned.. or engaged in by do-gooders.
It demonstrates every known psychological tool of the bully there is. Feigned victimhood, virtue, deceit, a desire to coerce others and also to eliminate threats and opponents through lies and exclusion.
We took that wrong path in the road years ago with this issue. Intent – dismissed conveniently as irrelevant by the PC brigade – is actually everything in these issues. People differ, even err, but reasonable people – with true tolerance – will recognise this. They forgive, compromise, are philosophical, argue then make up, or just basically agree to differ. They also stop if they sense the argument has gone too far. Intent – the desire for power over, or elimination of, others — reveals the true fascists.
For the PC brigade, faced with an opponent, there is no such thing as too far.
It is only the PC brigade that views someone’s different mindset as a genetic defect. What next: surgical removal of racist genes?
Cripes, what more evidence of the true inhumanity of PC does one need than this?
(… Sorry for the rant.)
This story is just revolting