#StandWithUkraine but Remain Neutral: Will War in Europe Show the True Colours of Education’s Neutrality Imperative?

From the Brexit debate to the Covid-19 pandemic, public service news sources, such as the BBC, have been criticised for platforming extreme opinions with the rationale of balancing public debate. The most extreme examples of the imperative for ‘neutrality’ come from some southern American states, where school boards have instructed teachers using books about the Holocaust to also provide access to material with an ‘opposing’ perspective. In the UK, the new Political Impartiality in Schools guidance published by the Department for Education in February singles out youth-led activism under the Black Lives Matter banner, and criticism of Empire, as being contentious and in need of ‘balancing’ with opposing views. Straying into teaching about solutions to, rather than basic scientific facts about, climate change is said to be ‘political’ and therefore inappropriate and teachers ‘should avoid expressing their own personal political views to pupils unless they are confident this will not amount to promoting that view to pupils’. How then are schools expected to negotiate discussion of an ongoing war in Europe, which cannot be depoliticised? Even describing it as a ‘war’ is taking a side, since the Russian government refuses this description. A purely humanitarian response, let alone a show of blue and yellow solidarity, would offend the neutrality imperative as it is modelled for schools. How might young people develop their ideas about citizenship as they seek to reconcile the immediacy of knowledge sources they consume and participate in outside school with the supposed political vacuum of the classroom?