Unsafe Space: School that WANTS to challenge pupils

A GRAMMAR school is providing pupils with an ‘antidote to political correctness’ by running classes where Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other controversial issues are confronted head-on.

Simon Langton in Canterbury, Kent, is creating a forum named ‘The Unsafe Space’ to counter growing challenges to free speech. Sixth-form pupils will be asked to look at ‘the most beautifully disturbed and disturbing ideas, all of them presented without trigger warnings’.

Scheduled lectures include the subjects ‘women versus feminism’ and ‘not all cultures are created equal’.

Professor James Soderholm, director of humanities at the school, which is mixed in the sixth form, said the first session would be devoted to a controversial memo circulated by former Google engineer James Damore. He was fired in August for claiming that women were innately less capable as engineers.

Head teacher Matthew Baxter says Mein Kampf – which outlined Adolf Hitler’s political ideology – will not be studied, but incorporated in the ‘wider debate’. He said the course is designed to enable pupils preparing for university to discuss ideas outside of the conventional curriculum.

Some parents criticised the idea but Head of School Ken Moffatt insisted yesterday that the forum will uphold the British value of tolerance.

‘We are not so gullible as to believe that “freedom of speech” means the right to say anything at all,’ he said. ‘It does not mean we will indulge homophobic, xenophobic, racist or sexist beliefs.’