The Breaking of the Education Contract: Why we need to keep politics out of schools
Joanna Williams, October 2026
Education used to be about the transmission of knowledge and cultural inheritance; but British classrooms today present a rather different picture. Children are taught to affirm their individual desires and identities, while educational content has become startlingly politicised. In The Breaking of the Education Contract, Joanna Williams exposes the extent to which the curriculum has been captured by progressive ideology, arguing that this is a symptom of a deeper malaise: a moral confusion about what education is for.
Politicians today speak of education either in reductive terms of employability or as a means of addressing mental health and other social problems, allowing a fixation on race, gender and sexuality to take hold. Williams documents the rise of activist teaching methods and external organisations seeking to influence pupils, particularly through sex education and ‘citizenship education’. These have expanded far beyond their original remit, becoming vehicles for shaping children’s values and behaviour. Even traditional subjects like history, geography and literature have become subtly politicised.
Williams traces the intellectual roots of these developments, considering the influence of Rousseau and John Dewey’s ideas of education as a means of individual liberation. Drawing on an alternative educational philosophy inspired by Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and E.D. Hirsch, she defends education as an end in itself. Schools, she argues, should focus on introducing children to humanity’s accumulated knowledge – in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘the best that has been thought and said’ – enabling them to reach their own conclusions rather than be inculcated with a particular ideology.
In light of the failures of the current system – not least declining academic standards, weakening teacher authority and deteriorating relationships between schools and families – Williams calls for a knowledge-rich curriculum, greater parental involvement and a clearer separation between education and politics. Fundamentally, schools must recover their sense of purpose: to transmit the knowledge and cultural inheritance that enable children to think for themselves.
“Williams asks what happens to education when politics enters schools and argues for teaching that focuses, above all else, on transmitting knowledge. High academic standards, rather than classroom activism, best allow children to decide for themselves where they stand on contested political issues.” – The Rt Hon Sir Nick Gibb, former Minister for Schools
About the Author
Joanna Williams is an academic, author and commentator. Her books include How Woke Won (2022); Women vs Feminism (2017); Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (2016), and Consuming Higher Education, Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (2012). She is a columnist for the online magazine Spiked and writes regularly for The Times, The Telegraph and The Spectator. Joanna began her career teaching English in secondary schools. She joined the University of Kent as a lecturer in Higher Education and Academic Practice in 2007, later becoming director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education. Since leaving academia, Joanna has worked for think tanks, including Civitas and Policy Exchange, and has served as a Visiting Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.
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