On the silence of my fellow teachers

How are you, a person, an educator, who dedicates upwards of forty hours a week on the development of children unmoved by the pile of small bodies in Gaza?

To my fellow educators,

As I write this, a child in Gaza picks up the fragments of his mother from a blood soaked floor and an orphaned teenager cares for his orphaned baby siblings in a refugee camp as bombs rain down on them and their stomachs twist in hunger. Children hold onto the shrouded forms of their parents before they are buried forever and parents place biscuits into the limp hands of their babies, something sweet for an eternity without them.

As we think about half term plans and looming exams and the latest cogsci buzzwords, as we debate clipboards and cognitive load and cold calling, thousands and thousands of beautiful, innocent, perfect children lay in mass graves in Gaza, their bodies disintegrating. They were joyful and curious and cheeky, brave and vulnerable and smart just like the children that fill your classrooms everyday, perhaps like the children you bore from your own body too. Their parents loved them like the parents of the children you pour all that expertise and dedication into. Their parents provided for them, prayed for them, combed their hair and cooked them healthy dinners like the parents of yours do. They made sure they did their homework and had clean uniform, the right equipment and extra tuition. Each child was an entire universe strung on love and hope and pure magic and each death is not just another number in an ever rising toll but a plane of existence extinguished.

And your silence is deafening.

I know what it takes to be a teacher. I’ve been one for seven years. The years of study and graft and honing of skill. The love of your subject yes, but also, that joy of spending your days with young people, helping to shape them into well-rounded, capable adults who can flourish in the real world. That delight of a lesson gone awry as a child asks you a left of field question; their hilarious anecdotes, their childish innocence. No matter what made you come into teaching, you have stayed for the kids.

Why then do you have nothing to say as a civilian population, half of whom are children, are wiped off the face of the earth? Sorry, not wiped. That is too sanitised a term for what is happening. They are bombed into bloodied pieces. They are burned until they disintegrate. They are deliberately starved until their bodies whittle away. Their limbs are blown off and they are operated on with no anaesthetic whilst their surgeons are targeted by snipers and the electricity has been long cut off.

This genocide that is destroying them is sanctioned by our leaders, funded by the state and facilitated by your silence.

I wonder, how can you look at the little Aishas and Mohammeds in your class, the teenage Maryams and Ahmeds and not see the children of Gaza staring back at you? How can you spend your time perfecting your craft to disseminate information in the exact right way to the Khadijas and the Omars under your care but draw a blank when it comes to mustering up any semblance of condemnation for the manufactured massacre of children who look like them, miles away in Gaza? 

It’s not just the Aishas and the Mohammeds and the Maryams and the Ahmeds. Children are children, are they not? Every Emily and Jack, each Holly and Oscar is equal to the children of Gaza. They bleed the same, weigh the same on the scales of meaning and leave the same aching chasm of loss when they are gone.

I don’t understand it, this silence. How are you, a person, an educator, who dedicates upwards of forty hours a week on the development of children unmoved by the pile of bodies in Gaza? How can you claim to be someone who is “in it for the kids” when you offer nothing but silence in the face of a genocide of children?

Okay, I get it. We are “apolitical”. We don’t go discussing our voting habits with our students or putting up “Vote Tory” posters in our classrooms. But when does politics cease to be political and become pure humanitarianism? In the case of Ukraine, it seemed clear. Blue and yellow flags erupted in our Twitter bios and on our classroom walls. We held fundraisers in school halls, covered the conflict in PSHE and read poems by Ukrainian children in English class. 

What has happened to this sense of morality, this compass of what is right and what is wrong now that it is children with darker skin in a Middle Eastern country being displaced and orphaned, murdered and starved?

To not be silent then and to be silent now is the very opposite of impartiality. It is a political act, to choose when to speak up and when to look the other way. To decide who deserves your solidarity or condemnation and who doesn’t. Consider how that choice has been dictated for you by the government: it is the very essence of a political act. Your silence is political. Your tweets about things that don’t matter. Your neutral stances and your two sided statements are all political.

There is only one right way to respond to a genocide. 

It’s not just about speaking up for the victims though. Your willful, blissful ignorance is a safeguarding issue - a failing of your statutory duty to protect the children in your care. Your young people are on their phones witnessing their age mates torn apart by bombs built and funded by the country they call home. They are seeing the pieces of children that look like them and their siblings carried in plastic bags by bereft, wailing parents and they are also seeing a British government that sanctions this. And all the while they are placed under a school system that denies to discuss it at all out of fear of offending the wrong side and they live under a state that criminalises any expression of their righteous outrage.

Can you imagine how infuriating, how confusing, how disenfranchising that is?

Children look up to us. Whether they admit it or not. That class who we think hates us ends up remembering our birthday or what exact brand of fizzy drink we guzzle at the start of a lesson. They take in everything about us. In a way, we teach them how to be an adult in a world they are not yet familiar with. What message does your silence send to them? What about your colleagues? The parents of your students?

I’ll tell you: your silence screams out to us that we don’t matter because we look, sound, believe, live a certain way. We don’t matter because our slaughter is at the hands of a western ally instead of a so-called enemy state.

I always knew that EduTwitter (the online spaces that teachers use to share best practice and pedagogical advice) had a disease at its heart. But I thought it was that of celebrity. Of idolising people who turn normal teaching habits into some copyright-protected newfangled buzzword, who charge thousands to ‘turn around’ state schools in poor areas, who build platforms and profits off their own apparent superiority in the classroom. But there is something else at EduTwitter’s rotten core, and that is selective outrage masked as impartiality.

I have seen this first hand in recent months, as myself and other teaching colleagues - many Muslim, some not - have been consistent in calling out Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

We have been bombarded with racist abuse and hate: accusations that we are being antisemitic in taking a stance on genocide. I have received replies messages from some of EduTwitter’s biggest names, including executive heads of prestigious academy chains, demanding I condemn Hamas if I expect others to criticise Israel.

Now, the sheer islamophobic audacity of such an expectation aside (why must I, a Muslim, condemn Hamas before I can show solidarity with a civilian population under siege by a Western ally unless you assume all Muslims are terrorists?) what does that say about the morality of this space we have constructed as a means to improve our craft as teachers? What does it tell us if platforms with thousands of followers can be so moved by something as innocuous as a girl doing 28 GCSEs or a picture of a clipboard but have nothing at all to say about Palestinian children being purposefully massacred, of babies being orphaned before they are born, of a little girl ripped in half, her insides dangling out of a building bombed in a place that Israel had told them to flee to safety?

If you fall silent in the face of all that then how can we ever, ever look to you for any form of guidance or advice again?

As well as being a teacher, I am the parent of a two year old boy. As a Muslim parent whose child is not yet in the school system, I am terrified at the prospect of my Muslim, Arab son one day being taught by someone whose heart wept for Ukraine but grew stony for Palestine. Someone who spent the last four months of genocide using their platform with thousands of followers to argue about behaviour policy instead of shedding light on the war crimes happening under our very noses.

I want you to know, silent teacher, that your actions not only disenfranchise and marginalise the children in your classroom who feel connected to those massacred children in Palestine, but that your silence makes them actively unsafe.

In at atmosphere that seeks to outright criminalise expression of support for Palestine, in a climate that is set on labelling condemnation of genocide as somehow antisemitic, in a state that is invested in dehumanising Muslims here to legitimise our slaughter abroad: amidst all that, how can I expect you to keep my child safe when infants who look like him were blown apart on your social media feed and you just scrolled past?

Like all teachers, especially of arts and humanities subjects, I have spent my career educating about the atrocities of the past and humanising the victims of monstrous events that we reassure them don’t happen anymore. War and genocide, bombs and persecution. How many of our students have asked us “But how? How did this happen? How did people allow this to happen?” whilst we explained things away with historical context.

And how many of your students, your colleagues, the families in your school community, are listening to your deafening silence now? How many of them finally have their answer: this is how it happens.

Silence and selective outrage and seeing what is black and white and calling it grey.

I want to end with the caveat that my focus on Palestinian children in this piece isn’t in any way intended to diminish the humanity of the men and the women of Gaza too. The vague messages that we have seen offered by celebrities and major platforms that simply call for ‘all children to find peace’ do nothing but undermine the humanity of Palestinian women and men who also deserve life and safety and security, and most of all liberation from occupation and an end to genocide.

That being said, the double-standards displayed by an entire profession quite literally predicated on the care and nourishment of children is simply too hypocritical to bear - hence my focus on the beautiful children of Gaza who deserve all the outrage, attention and wrath that EduTwitter manages to muster up for pretty much anything else.