Layer 37 More Bloody SATs

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With SATs week drawing to its close I’m afraid it’s time to write some more about this depressing subject. I say this because I’ve just chanced up a Melanie (spit) Phillips (gob) piece in the online Spectator (yuk). It’s sickening stuff. Nasty, stupid, right-wing cretinous garbage of the first order. But she does us all a favour in one simple respect. In wanting to show off her biting and trenchant intellect in another thrown-together piece of rubbish she reveals the true idiocy and nastiness of the right-wing mindset regarding schools, children and teachers.

This vile woman incredibly used to write a regular column in The Guardian. I've never understood why the paper employed her since it was always obvious that she was bigoted, authoritarian and had absolutely no empathy with liberals or progressives. So now she parades her supposedly huge intellect (cor!) in her blue stockings and her jackboots in the house magazine of bigots and reactionary nutters. She must really give those old (and young) duffers a stiffie.

Now I’m saying this as someone who has no great love of teachers as a breed. God knows I’ve met enough of them, and since most of them are quite young (they tend to either burn out or else find a more congenial career fairly quickly - a bit like the army) they often have issues around maturity, naivety, egoism, consistency, arrogance, etc. It’s also true that a lot of them struggle to get up to speed with the demands of teaching in the most deprived and impoverished areas of our cities and rural areas. It usually takes a lot of perseverance, a lot of grit, and a lot of determination to always do right by children to enable the average teacher to reach the stage of being a competent, mature and balanced individual who can work well under pressure.

However, I do care very much about all the excellent teachers who are disregarded and sneered at by Phillips and her ilk, and I do care very much about actual children, which she patently does not. At least, not the ones who attend state schools. Not the ones who struggle to reach the sacred Level 4 by the age of 11, and have to be cajoled, pushed, lashed and crammed towards it by teachers who are being cajoled, pushed and lashed into cramming them, who in turn are being cajoled etc by head teachers who are being . . .

Miss Whiplash Phillips, of course, as self-styled queen of the commentariat, does more whipping and lashing than anyone when it comes to schools and teachers. Maybe there are others who do it with more style, and certainly with more subtlety and beauty, but of course this is someone who would only want to be admired for her brains and the firmness of her opinions even if she had a staggeringly beautiful and sexy body, perish the thought. I often think of her as the female Chris Woodhead. Surely they’re created from the same test tube?

So this is what she says. And I quote.
“The SATs are not a test for pupils. Their sole purpose is to test the teachers.”

There we have it. There’s no point denying it, all you SATs lovers. This is really why you put the system there in the first place, and why you’re so determined to keep it. And to hell with the quality of learning and teaching, which the SATs system distorts and corrupts.

To hell with the alienation of non academically gifted children (and also a hell of a lot of those who are academically able, and are able to see through the uselessness of the cramming and rote learning that goes on). To hell with instilling a love of learning for its own sake. To hell with creativity and the fostering of children’s imagination. That kind of rubbish isn’t going to get you into Oxbridge, especially if you live on a council estate (unlikely anyway), and isn’t going to enable you to turn into a clone of Ms Phillips and her bilious tribe.

Phillips lays into Mick Brookes, General Secretary of the NAHT, a man who has served education as a head teacher himself for many years, and is clearly deserving of some respect, and speaks sneeringly of him as if he’s a complete fool. She calls the Commons Schools Select Committee “invariably idiotic”. She’s particularly hard on the Schools’ Minister, the hapless Jim Knight, but we’ll let that pass, since nobody has any regard anyway for this dozy front man, this puppet, and I’ve done my fair share of sneering at him in the past.

I’m really at a loss for words to say anything else about Phillips and her views, this woman who is happy to sacrifice all else as long as we go on using SATs to test the teachers. But I feel anger also for a profession that allowed itself, and allowed children, to have this nasty instrument of measurement inflicted on our schools, wreaking devastation on real education, when what was needed back in the eighties was a speeding up of the movement towards better curriculum definition to allow for the development of all of each child’s intelligences, and better systems for assessment for learning, and for the tracking of individual pupils’ progress.

Larkin wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” But the poem goes on:

“But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.”

Well Madame Phillips certainly is the favourite attack dog (bitch) of the Spectator classes, and prides herself on her ability to go for the jugular. As far as I’m concerned she can carry on her vicious campaign of hatred for all things slightly left of centre, and I for one will happily ignore her, but when it comes to children getting fucked up by the collateral damage, both directly and through having the legacy of indifference and hatred passed on through the generations, then I suggest we take stock and decide that enough is enough.

With some reluctance I suggest you have a look at the piece in the Speccy, since you might find my report on it hard to believe, and think I’m making it up. No, sir. You just couldn’t.

And then again, let’s just say thank you, Mel P, for laying it all on the line, and making this issue so crystal clear, for one and all.

And for a special treat visit Jim Knight MP’s website, and learn about all the good things he does for South Dorset. I take it all back, Jim. You’re a really nice man. You obviously really, really care about children. Love the goatee, by the way. Cool!

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/701706/do-keep-up-minister.thtml
http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Be_The_Verse
http://www.jimknightmp.com/
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If you get off on reading Mel P and fancy hearing/reading the words and wisdom of another female saddo and nutter, another weird and whacky 'lady', then this is the week for Cherie Blair, whose autobiography, which will probably make her at least a million, has just been published. She's actually being employed by the BBC to read sections aloud on "Book of the Week" next week. The Beeb obviously thinks it's a good read. On the other hand check out the review of it by Libby Purves in the Times Online, which calls Blair "self-serving, smug, opportunistic, vain, shallow-thinking and nasty", which also serves as a nice little summary for her husband, as well as Mel P.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article3918782.ece
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