Much has been written in recent years, and even recent days, about the threat posed to the mental wellbeing of children by malign external forces, whether it be X generating nude images of women, the misogyny spread by influencers such as Andrew Tate, or the welter of ‘misinformation’ available online. But a story at the weekend reminds us of one of the most formidable actors in this department, one that continues to warp and taint young minds: our education system.

This constant drip of revelations and pronouncements merely reflects the dismal state of our education system

A state-funded computer game, developed with government backing by councils in East Yorkshire, now reminds teenagers that they risk being referred to a counter-terrorism programme if they question mass migration. In Pathways, an interactive game designed for 11- to 18-year-old pupils and funded by Prevent, the Home Office programme designed for tackling extremism, players are directed to help their in-game characters – a white teenage boy or girl – on how to avoid being reported for ‘extreme Right-wing ideology’. Players discover the consequences of ‘engaging directly’ with posts which talk about ‘the need to take back control of our country’ and ‘the erosion of British values.’ The game also comes with material for teachers, who are urged to use the resource to ‘demonstrate the local threat picture of extreme Right-wing activities specifically.’

We should be alarmed, but not surprised, to read of this development. Our education system has become obsessed by the ‘far-right’ of recent. This story comes only two months after it was disclosed that students at schools run by Orion Education, an academy chain in England, were being taught that Reform UK was ‘normalising far right views’. A diagram shown to teenagers placed Nigel Farage’s party on the political spectrum close to the Nazis.

This latest story also comes on the back of a year in which a schoolgirl in Warwickshire wearing a Union Jack dress was prevented from giving a speech about Britain at her school’s culture day, and one in which the country’s largest teaching union, the National Education Union (NEU), branded Reform UK ‘far-right and racist’.

This constant drip of revelations and pronouncements merely reflects the dismal state of our education system, one that has eagerly appropriated the fashion for describing right-of-centre opinions as ‘far right’ and now pushes this dishonest language on impressionable minds.

This ought to shock us. We expect this kind of reductive rhetoric from low-intelligence politicians such as Zarah Sultana or Zack Polanski, but you would hope that teachers, whose job it is to impart knowledge, would know better. Wouldn’t you?

Alas not. The lockdown years of 2020-21, which compelled many parents to take a far greater interest in what was being taught in schools, was a wake-up call for many. They were alarmed to discover just how politically skewed and detached from reality our curriculum had become, not least with its teachings on race and gender. Many people’s expectations of our education system, and of our teachers, is now at a nadir, something reflected by the staggering growth in home education in the UK in recent years.

Fears that schools have become academies of political indoctrination will hardly be dampened by a further disclosure this weekend. This was the finding by Deltapoll that 85 per cent of members of NEU now intend to vote for left-wing parties, with the Greens – a populist, hard-left party in all but name – being the first choice among respondents, polling well in the lead at 37 per cent.

Evidence of a crisis in education – that’s to say, its ingrained and worsening institutional left-wing bias and even radical lurch – is borne out with unremitting regularity. Higher up the chain, in recent days we have read of the United Arab Emirates cutting funds for citizens studying at UK universities over fears of youngsters being radicalised on campus, while at Plymouth Marjon University an academic claims that was he stripped of his emeritus title after making known his ‘controversial’ view on critical race theory – a theory which most people outside the cloistered world of academia find itself highly controversial.

Many adults of sensible, conservative, liberal or even Old Labour disposition are both exhausted by and alert to the meaningless smear ‘far right’, a blanket term of abuse designed to diabolise opponents. But we can take it. And we can argue back. And as parents – and as uncles, or grandparents – many adults are now fully aware to the indoctrination imposed on raw, fertile minds, on children who aren’t themselves mentally equipped to argue back.

This computer game represents but the continuation and perpetuation of a trend. It’s a reminder that the greatest everyday threat to vulnerable and suggestable children today comes not from influencers or other rogue actors, but from teachers and the state system itself.