#435 Katharine Birbalsingh - Britain's Strictest Headmistress

If I think back to where we were in the world six years ago, I think 2020 was the peak of a lot of madness.

2020, 2021, of course, there was the whole COVID pandemic situation and the way that was handled in different cities and countries around the world, which I don't think we have recovered from or ever will recover from, if I'm being completely honest.

And then there was also all of the BLM racial madness.

I often say 2020 to 2021 was what I call peak woke.

That was like the peak of the censorship, the, I would say, manufactured racial conflict, the gender wars, the transgender mania.

where it was just every single aspect of it i mean in the usa you had people taking over city blocks and trying to establish autonomous communities with chas and chop and so many crazy things happen and i think like most people have kind of deleted it from their memories intentionally or unintentionally um and it's quite remarkable how six years from now yes of course there are societies still facing some of the same challenges But I would like to think that we are certainly in a better place in the West in general than we were five or six years ago.

Do you agree with that assessment?

Yes, but I think that those of us who are working with children and who are sort of have their eyes open recognize that the damage that was done there then was was so huge.

It's interesting when you say you don't you're not sure we'll ever get over it.

I 100 percent agree with you.

And that's because of the damage that was done to the culture of our societies and of our schools.

And I mean that across the Western world.

And those children, what adults don't sort of realize is that those children become adults.

And so when, you know, people your age and above, maybe a little bit younger than you and above, they look at Gen Z and they think, why are Gen Z so different? They're different because of what they were taught in schools.

And so anyone who was in school or university during that period of 2021, you know, 2021, 22, you will have you would have been immersed in that peak woke time.

And what happens to you when you're a child and when you're still forming your sort of foundational understanding of the world? It sort of sticks with you for life unless somebody comes along to undermine that and to show you how wrong it is.

And so I think we have a lot of young people nowadays who think very differently to those of us who are older and we wonder why.

And I'd say partly it is stemmed from that peak woke time and that peak woke time established a culture in our schools that hasn't left us.

It's actually kind of crazy to think that someone who's 20 years old right now would have been 14 or 15 during that time period.

Exactly.

Or even somebody who's 25.

They were 19.

They were in the middle of university.

So, you know, yeah, that's exactly right.

So you've got, you know, basically everyone in their 20s, you've got to think, oh, gosh, you know, they might see the world differently.