Layer 447 . . . The Rights of the Child, Education, Michael Morpurgo, Schools, the Dimbleby Lecture, Lessons in Hate and Violence, and the Need for Apologies.

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Continuing with yesterday's economics theme, the following articles are very good summaries of the case for Keynesian approaches, and the case against Friedmanite economics:

The Economy: We Are All Keynesians Now

Friday, Dec. 31, 1965

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842353-1,00.html

from 2008

The End of the Age of Milton Friedman

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-madrick/the-end-of-the-age-of-mil_b_94228.html

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Children and Education

The wellbeing of children, the brainwashing & indoctrination of children, the education of children, and the abuse of children, are subjects that every one of us should be concerned with and pay attention to.

I'm still seething about that insane 'Tiger Woman' and her abuse of her own children. [see last blog] I'm even more seething about people like her who encourage other parents (and teachers) to put extreme pressure on children to achieve academically at the cost of their overall wellbeing, at the cost of their right to a proper childhood, and their right to a proper education.

I'm now seething at a programme that was broadcast by Channel 4's 'Dispatches' team this week -

Lessons in Hate and Violence

Dispatches goes undercover to investigate allegations that teachers regularly assault young children in some of the 2,000 Muslim schools in Britain run by Islamic organisations.

The programme also follows up allegations that, behind closed doors, some Muslim secondary schools teach a message of hatred and intolerance.

The programme is presented by reporter Tazeen Ahmad.

Dispatches: Lessons in Hate and Violence will not be available on 4oD at this time, due to an ongoing police investigation concerning subjects featured in the programme.

http://www.channe4.com/programmes/dispatches/episode-guide/series-80/episode-1

There are clips of the actual programme on the website, where Salahuddeen Ali has commented:

Great documentary. I am a muslim and I find this issue of muslim teachers/schools abusing children worthy of broadcast and investigation. As a muslim child growing learning the Quran, I was beaten and whipped. This is a fact. I read many muslims comments saying they're unhappy about this report. Well I hope they realize that when abuse is applied to children in their faith schools it will not be hushed down in respect to their image. Children's rights are above any faith, group or agenda. Thank you for this brilliant work.

Mohammed Abdullah commented:

Although I have not watched the full program I believe it is right to bring these issues to the forefront just like one would do with racism. Indeed there are preachers in Mosques and Madrasa's preaching Islam without the proper knowledge of the subject. We can deny the truth much as possible but these problems do exist I myself have experienced this. Those preachers only have a tunnel vision of religion and do not have a broader knowledge of this world. Those preachers who spread hatred, corruptions and mischief in the land they need to be bought to Justice. Al Quran Surat Al-M?'idah: Chapter 5: Verse 33: gives clear punishment for those who Spread hatred, Corruptions and Mischief on the land. I would like to praise TAZEEN AHMAD for this brilliant work.

The programme had used hidden cameras to film teachers and teachers' assistants barking at children and indoctrinating them about the vileness of non-Muslims - shouting at children who weren't concentrating hard enough on their Koran-reading. Worse than this, they were shown kicking and slapping children for not working hard enough.

The children worked in isolation - not speaking to or collaborating with any of their peers in their learning.  During unsupervised break times some of the children were aggressive and abusive to one another.

But let's be clear - this model and this pattern of learning exist in many other schools throughout the country, where children learn through didactic instruction, learn by rote, learn in isolation, and have an unbroken diet of uncreative, meaningless cramming.

It's a disgusting fact that more and more children learn in ghetto schools of one sort or another - instead of learning alongside children of all backgrounds and abilities. This is something the 'free schools' idea is meant to promote. The Tories have been searching for ages to figure out a way of giving public money to private and independent schools in order to reduce private tuition fees, and this a perfect wheeze for doing it. These people really do have a sense of entitlement to exclusive schools which are subsidised by public taxation, and which are run by the parents whose children benefit from them. People like Toby Young want control of the curriculum, the management, the recruitment of staff, and the style of teaching - and they don't give a toss about what more enlightened people say about the learning and wellbeing needs of children. Their sole aim is to have a neighbourhood school for their own children, run by the parents, which doesn't charge fees, and which will guarantee 'rigour' and a smooth passage to the Oxbridge college of their choice.

These schools may be less hate-filled than those shown on the C4 documentary, but just as negative in their effect through causing fragmentation of the system, entrenching privilege, promoting ghettoisation and destroying the rights of children to a proper childhood and an enjoyment of school and of learning itself.

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Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo is an exceptional human being, and a great champion of the rights of children. He was rightly given the honour of delivering the Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV this week.

In this year's Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Michael Morpurgo explores the increasingly urgent issue of children's rights, and investigates the wrongs that young people have to endure.

One of Britain's most popular children's authors, Morpurgo has written over 120 books and more recently he has become a campaigner on behalf of children, both at home and abroad. In this role he visited the Middle East where he witnessed, first hand, the difficulties children face in times of conflict.

His most well known book, War Horse, was recently dramatised to great critical acclaim and it is now being made into a Hollywood feature film by Stephen Spielberg.

Related Links

    * Wikipedia: Michael Morpurgo (en.wikipedia.org)
    * Michael Morpurgo: Home (www.michaelmorpurgo.com)
    * BBC Scotland: Authors Live - Michael Morpurgo
    * BBC News: Entertainment & Arts: Michael Morpurgo on War Horse and beyond
    * BBC News: Entertainment & Arts: How to operate a War Horse puppet
    * IMDb: War Horse (www.imdb.com)
    * BBC News Magazine: How children's war fiction has changed

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ymf57

Seven days left to view this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ymf57/The_Richard_Dimbleby_Lecture_15_02_2011/

The Rights of Children - summary of the lecture

UN Convention on Children's Rights - do we live by it?

Only two countries have yet to ratify this convention - Somalia and the United States.
 
The right to survival, access to healthcare, liberty and education

These rights are woefully neglected.

3.5 million of our children in the UK are mired in poverty.

Some of the most vulnerable have been appallingly treated.

We must tackle the impoverishment, neglect and exploitation of children.

The Yarls Wood detention centre - a deeply shameful institution - injustice was done to children put in this prison.

"Motherland" - a play by Natasha Walters.

"12 big men banged on our door. They took us to a police station."

We lock up asylum-seeking children, even though they are innocent of any crime.

The rights of children are flagrantly ignored.

"Are we doing the best for our children? No - and we are all to blame."

Librarians are the unsung heros of the book world. Unglamorous
people like this make a real difference to children's lives.

The younger the children, the less status for the people involved. Primary school teachers are the worst paid.

We have a short-term target-driven mindset. We need to go back to the needs of children. We need children to burn brightly and shine.

What we actually do is corral them and stifle them - we put them in places where success and failure [in tests and exams] is all that counts . . . Fear of failure is what does the most damage. We're like Mr Gradgrind in Dickens' 'Hard Times', whose notion of education was to ram 'facts' into children's heads . . .

We may not beat children any more, but I wonder how far we've moved on since Gradgrind . . .  We still have classes that are twice the size they should be - far too big for teachers to make proper relationships, particularly with children who are already disengaged and alienated.

New Zealand ranks 4th in the OECD education rankings, and doesn't have league tables. Finland ranks 2nd, and children there don't begin formal schooling till the age of seven. Britain ranks 20th.

We must remember that we are preparing children NOT simply for employment, or for the common good, but for the difficult decisions they will have to make in their personal lives, for the moments when they will have to take responsibility for themselves and for others, when they will be tempted to have inappropriate sex, or to take drugs, or to bully someone, or carry a knife, or throw a brick through a window . . .

There is no league table for mature behaviour, for the quality of relationships, for self-worth and for self-confidence.

The quality of their relationships is the most important factor in any child's life.

We must allow children to go 'off-piste', and we must trust them.

Forget the league tables and the targets, and let's break free of the shackles of a narrow curriculum - it's time to focus on the commitment and the talent of the people who touch our children's lives.

But we can't leave it all to the teachers. People from all walks of life can make a contribution.

Let's have more trips, visits and outings, more time in theatres, concert halls and museums, and let's get them out into the open air, tramping the hills . . . all this should be an integral part of their education, a right of every child - not an extra. It will pay dividends in the end.

What we absolutely do NOT need is to be closing down our libraries, cutting down our youth services and our provisions for special needs . . .

Let's give children the time to dream, to listen and to learn.

Too many of us, and too many children, are disengaged and alienated.

I shall continue to speak up for the rights of children as best I can.

"I hope you understand the enormity of my fury."

"One day we will apologise for Yarls Wood, and for the bureaucracy of neglect."

Very well said, Michael. 

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One day we, the English - not the Scots or the Welsh, since they don't have them - will apologise for SATs, for league tables, for bureaucratising and micro-managing teaching and learning, for national 'strategies', for the narrowing of the curriculum, for depriving children of their right to learn in a stimulating and creative environment - learning at their own pace, pursuing their own interests and passions, finding their own voices, developing all their intelligences, developing the habit of joyful lifelong learning.

How many of us have continued to speak up for the rights of children, in spite of the pressures to ignore them, in spite of the pressures to return to Gradgrindism? How many  have kept their heads down, for fear of government agents and inspectors, for fear for their futures in their careers and in education? How many have been bullied and cajoled into silence, and how many have been converted willingly into the education Newspeak, and the language of attainment, SATs, value added, strategies, NLS, NNS, targets, payment by results, monitoring, challenge and all the rest?



How many parents and how many paid professionals have even a half of Michael Morpurgo's vision for children, and even a tenth of his determination to stand up for children's rights?

How many need to hang their heads in shame?
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Layer 135 Political Culture, Radical Shifts, the Last Chance Saloon, and Children’s Services

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Polly Toynbee had another excellent column in the Guardian this week, with every sentence worthy of the highlighter pen:

Labour has one last chance to catch the public mood

Anger at fat cats and tax dodgers needs a political narrative to sustain it. Brown must look to Obama and take the lead.

Are we in the midst of a radical shift in political culture? Measuring its significance or durability in the febrile moment is not easy. Is this anti-banker, anti-bonus spasm only a transitory fit that will be gone as soon as house prices start to rise again? Forces pull in both directions: governments try to re-assert their power over markets, while the masters of the universe try to carry on as if nothing much will change.

Now even a Conservative press rages at company functionaries still rewarding themselves undeserved fortunes.

See how the Telegraph and Mail follow the public mood with anti fat-cat invective these days: a year ago such talk was "class war" and "the politics of envy".

Yet how profound and long-lasting will all this be? How long before the masters of the universe assert themselves again, ride out the spasm, find new loopholes and intimidate future governments with warnings against any interference that risks the fragile recovery? After all, no sign of culture change reaches the boardrooms. GlaxoSmithKline just gave its CEO a 17.6% pay rise, bringing his salary to £1m with five times that sum in shares.

The cartel of top earners sitting on each other's boards has been blamed, along with the tiny coterie of auditors and remuneration consultants who pumped up pay and signed it off as the "market rate" they had created. Is there a sign the government dares to blow in fresh air?

It now looks as if closing tax havens will be the G20's key success. Obama campaigned on the Stop Tax Havens Act now in Congress. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel want Switzerland added to the blacklist, along with the 30 to 40 others. Brown has been latest on this issue, with an ignoble record of resisting EU attempts.

Transparency changes things. Labour has a year to lead the public mood; so far it has been dragged along behind it. With no political narrative, this chance to push back the forces of inequality will be lost. What bitter irony if loathing of Labour means the Tories take over despite the first authentic egalitarian public mood in years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/10/brown-bankers-bonuses

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There were well over 200 comments posted on Comment Is Free after this article. Oxzen wrote:

It’s hard to say, sometimes, whose comments are the most annoying to have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff on CIF - ignorant conservatives or rabid leftists. Polly Toynbee has been consistently a thoughtful, intelligent, left-of-centre commentator who deserves the respect and high regard of all social democrats and left-liberals, who after all make up the majority amongst the thinking classes, and indeed the masses who voted for the Labour landslide in 1997.

She's consistently criticised New Labour from a progressive position, and advocated transformational policies that are in line with what most of us want in terms of greater social justice and equality, in terms of tackling poverty, improving schools and early years provision, social services, the health service, and so on.

This latest column was a brilliant summary of how things stand politically in this country, and why Parliament, not just New Labour, must seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact the reforms that we, the people, demand.

If Brown and New Labour can finally bring themselves to do something truly radical they could even find they have substantial support from swing voters, middle of the road conservatives and the pissed-off middle classes. And lets face it, it's only though radical action they stand any chance of winning back support from true socialists and progressives.

And if radical action doesn't improve their popularity? Too bad. After all, what's the Labour party for? It wasn’t created to provide a little trickle-down wealth, to maintain inequality or preserve dog-eat-dog unregulated capitalism.

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Someone signed in as jgm2 wrote this wonderful comment:

Re: “However the nazis are just the most familiar example and by no means the only. It always worry me when politicians try to capture the public mood because government should be about leading, not cheer leading.”

Fred Goodwin is just Gordon 'Big Brother' Brown's equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein. It's a cliche but it's unfortunately true. This government doesn't consider '1984' a warning. It considers it a fucking blueprint.

Rewriting history. Infallible leadership. Perpetual unwinnable wars with constantly shifting alliances. Privileged Party members and insiders all well looked after. Until they step out of line at which point they are immediately ostracised. Control of the 'media narrative'. Constant surveillance. Constant monitoring of our movements/correspondence/phone calls/e-mails. Individuals being singled out by the state for mass hate-fests.

Sod Jules Verne getting lucky predicting the yanks would pioneer space travel. Sod Leonardo Da Vinci and his drawings of 'helicopters'. George Orwell truly was a fucking genius. Every single fucking nightmare scenario he envisaged. Bang on the fucking money.

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Children’s Services

I was listening to people talking on the radio this morning about the Sharon Shoesmith case, and the idea that local authority directors of children's services need to be offered training and support so that they can do their jobs properly. Bless. What a wonderful country we live in - we create these mega high powered jobs by insisting on merging education and social services - huge jobs that virtually no-one is able to do effectively, let alone be qualified though professional training or experience to do them - and after a couple of years we say, wouldn't it be a good idea if we give these poor incompetent underqualified sods some proper training and support? That should fix the problem. At least after that none of them will be able to claim that they didn't know what they were supposed to do and didn't really know how to do it, like they do now.

Incidentally, I’m not commenting here on the rights and wrongs of dismissing Shoesmith - I’ve already done that in previous blogs. Simon Jenkins wrote a good column about it this week:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/11/simon-jenkins-ed-balls-babyp-shoesmith

“Shoesmith's biggest mistake was not to be a bank boss.”

What I’m concerned about is the way this government has played about with bureaucratic structures with little or no consultation or preparation for the changes it drove through, and I’m livid about the way it which it maintains its command and control clunking fist policy with its targets and inspections culture that does nothing for children, and reveals little of value about the true effectiveness of local authorities.

Simon Jenkins rightly berates Mr Balls for the central part he’s played in developing and maintaining the targets culture, and for being a ludicrous lifelong professional politician with no knowledge of, or feeling for, the real world outside of Westminster.

"Balls runs one of Whitehall's worst departments: ask any teacher or social worker. When accidents happen - nobody in authority wanted Baby P to die - the charge of negligence cannot rest with local staff. In this top-heavy and hierarchical public sector, it should go to the top. Those who always claim the credit must take the blame."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/childprotection-social-care

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I hear on the grapevine about the leadership in certain local authorities running around in frenzies, convening whole-day meetings of 50 or more senior children’s services managers, looking at ‘issues’, doing ‘workshops’ in which directors of education get down on the floor (literally) with flip chart pads and marker pens, trying to map out ‘how to move forward’ with the children’s ‘wellbeing agenda’, desperately trying to think what to do about their latest Whitehall-generated set of targets or the fact that they still have so many schools being hammered by Ofsted, blah, blah, blah . . .

I hear about ‘school improvement’ managers trying to reconcile their concern about children’s wellbeing with the fact that they’ve spent several years banging on about raising SATs scores and GCSE scores to the exclusion of all else. These poor dears must in some dim way realise that they’ve been the very agents of the destruction of real education, as far as children are concerned, since these are the people who have turned schools into soulless and joyless results factories, using and abusing children and teachers for their own wellbeing in terms of career progress.

Forcing children to do ‘Big Writing’ instead of anything meaningful, to use more ‘connectives’ in order to create longer and more middle-class-sounding sentences in their writing (extra marks in tests!!), to use more ‘Wow Words’ (flowery and usually inappropriate terminology - extra marks in tests!!), and forcing children to do less of the things they actually enjoy doing and more of the stuff they hate doing in order to jack up the schools’ test results - all of this amounts to the abuse of children, though no-one wants to admit it.

And of course they’ll all continue to deny what’s happened and insist that they did things they thought were right for children - as if getting a low Level 4 compared with a high Level 3 at the age of 11 really means a damn in terms of ‘access to the curriculum’ at secondary school. As if stressing children, boring them and denying them their human rights (for example to a broad, balanced and interesting curriculum) is better for them in the long run than helping children to see that learning can be enjoyable for its own sake, whatever your current level of literacy. Never mind a creative and active style of learning that’s bound to make children more enthusiastic about school than a dull life of drudgery in the education workhouse.

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This is a good column in today’s paper, by Seamoose Milne, especially for political anoraks:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/miners-strike

The miners' strike of 1984-5, which officially kicked off 25 years ago today, was . . . a social and political tipping point that has had no real parallel anywhere else in the world. And now that the free-market fundamentalism unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the strike's aftermath is being so comprehensively discredited by the crisis of deregulated capitalism she championed, it should be a good time to reassess the most determined bid to resist it in the first place.

The full costs of the war against the miners - including the strike, closures, redundancies and economic and welfare costs - are well over £30bn at current prices and far exceed those of the more rational energy policy the Tories rejected to crush the core of organised labour.

A generation later, these debates about the strike can seem arcane. But its outcome could not matter more for the country we have inherited. It's not just the wreckage of mining communities, but the entire political and economic direction has been shaped by the fallout from that convulsive dispute. The enfeeblement of unions, the explosion of inequality, social atomisation, the collapse of confidence in a political alternative and Britain's harsh brand of neoliberalism all flow from its aftermath. Success for the miners would, by contrast, have at least seriously weakened Thatcher, reined in the government's worst excesses and halted Labour's headlong rush for the third way.

The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.
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Layer 78 Education, Regulation, and the Rights of the Child

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It’s enough to make you despair when you come across pieces of crap in The Guardian like the one its ex-editor Peter Preston had published in the Opinion pages on Monday this week. Thank goodness so many readers took the trouble to lambast him for it in Comment Is Free - the good old Guardian’s brilliant facility for allowing readers to post an instant response on its website. Modern digital technology can be truly wonderful when it’s used imaginatively - in this case creating a community of interactive writers and readers-who-also-write. Oxzen also posted a response.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/commentanddebate-sats-banking-regulation

It’s not the first time Preston has written appalling reactionary nonsense in the Guardian - not by any means. It was this exact week last year, almost to the day, that he wrote a piece called A Molehill of Mange, taking to task the authors of a report into children’s unhappiness with schools and teachers. Preston ludicrously claimed that these poor little ‘blank slates’ had been grafitti-ed and scribbled on by their unscrupulous teachers and thereby made to believe that modern force-feeding teaching methods aimed solely at raising SATs and GCSE scores were making their lives in school tremendously dull, tedious, boring and frustrating. As if millions of kids up and down the country needed to be told that. As if they were actually enjoying school but preferred to claim the opposite. As if they’d been brainwashed by their lazy leftie teachers into believing something that was clearly untrue.

This sad old ignoramus is literally beyond help. I remember last year emailing him some gentle admonishment which patiently and politely explained the errors in his beliefs. Did I get even a brief courteous acknowledgement for my trouble? No. Did he bother to read what I wrote and allow alternative thoughts to enter his closed and fetid mind? It seems highly unlikely. Oh well - no doubt he’s an extremely busy man in his retirement. Wikipedia seems to suggest as much.

Though I have an image in my head of the kind of retired country-dwelling reactionary who hangs out every day in his local saloon bar with a copy of the Mail or the Telegraph open on his table, sounding off his trite, ignorant opinions to anyone within earshot, people who in any case already think the same way as he does because they’ve already read the same sort of nonsense in the same newspapers.

There’s a whole gang of media whores like Preston who think the same way as he does because they have broadly similar backgrounds - grammar or public/private schools followed by Oxford or Cambridge. We’re talking here about people like the lovely Mel P (Melanie Phillips), David Blunkett and Andrew Adonis. All of them journalist/politician/self-publicists. Big mouths in the media. Big egos. Presumably they have their own club somewhere. I’d guess they all wine and dine together regularly, in and out of one another’s lives and homes. Chris Woodhead is one of them, and though I’m not sure he actually made it to Oxbridge as an undergraduate he did lecture at Oxford for a while. Tony Blair is their patron saint - public school and Oxbridge background, naturally.

What they have in common is a penchant for claiming they’re on the side of the masses in their wish to have every working class kid in the country raised above their station in life by cramming them for academic tests and exams, regardless of their aptitudes or preferences (because PP and his ilk know best), enabling them all to gain straight A Stars at A level, and giving them entry to the university of their choice, preferably Oxford or Cambridge, but maybe Imperial College if they have a working class bent for using spanners and welding equipment. After all, the country needs its inventors and scientists.

I have the feeling that Preston’s column this week was written mainly as a response and an admonishment to Jenni Russell, who’s written so many brilliant columns on education in the Guardian and last week was at it again - celebrating the fact that the government has quietly abandoned its apparent determination to keep SATs at KS3.

What Preston and co also hate is the thought that by pandering to (i.e. providing an appropriate and creative education for) the less academically able (i.e. less crammable) kids, our schools might be paying less attention to and actually holding back the vast bulk of middle class kids who naturally want and need to go to university in order to follow the life pattern wished upon them by their affluenza-infected parents, who, of course, will always be mortified if their little darlings score less than three or four A stars.

And this is the system we inflict upon our kids - academic success at any price, even if it makes them extremely unhappy and uptight in its process, and even if it turns them into raving egomaniacs with a snobbish distain for the benighted masses. That’s assuming they do ‘well’ out of the system. Pity the poor fucks who don’t make it, in spite of all the cramming. But as good old Dave Bluntit always says, there’s no excuse for failure, and the failures had better not excuse themselves either. If The Blunk can make it, then anybody can. Provided they have their special needs properly provided for, of course.

Preston’s current article makes a very foolish attempt to draw parallels between the worlds of finance and education. His very simple and very stupid thought (and he really only has one) is that if Guardian readers, including teachers, believe that it’s necessary to have our failing financial system much more tightly regulated then they shouldn’t be rejoicing that the government has decided to get rid of KS3 SATs in our supposedly failing education system.

He bangs on about hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids passing out of our schools as if it was a fact, as if he knows what he’s talking about. He rails on about the fact that so many kids fail to achieve five A - C grades at GCSE as if this so-called benchmark has any real meaning, and as if it’s in any case all the fault of the bloody teachers, as if those kids are now doomed to a life of failure and misery.

Because Pete and his mates can’t conceive of anyone being happy or fulfilled unless they’ve been to Oxbridge, or at least have an honours degree from somewhere. Because the only possible way for working class people to have a decent life is to get a degree and thereby get a highly paid job and a career that will enable them to escape from their appalling inner city and council estate ‘communities’. Isn’t that right, Pete? Mel? Anyone?

And here’s another thought for you Peter, old pal. Maybe - just maybe - those so-called illiterate kids would have left school as avid readers and far more capable writers and learners if their teachers had been allowed and encouraged to foster in them a love of literature and an ability to express themselves in writing, in their own ‘voice’, instead of wasting hours, days, weeks and years cramming them for academic tests and exams using the methodology of the so-called National Literacy Strategy.

The real irony is that it’s far more likely that this generation of kids would have achieved higher scores at GCSE if they had been properly taught by methodology that fosters a love of literature and writing, and a love of learning for its own sake, instead of being force-fed on the methodology of those who maintain a Victorian belief that children are empty vessels ready and waiting to be filled with Imperial gallons of facts, or those like Peter Preston who maintain a belief that children are merely blank slates just waiting to be written on by their teachers.

At heart, of course, these neo-conservatives are just fascists and elitists, and they can’t conceive of any system that isn’t top-down and imposed on the rest of us by the Special Ones like themselves who’ve been to Oxbridge or some other university and therefore have proven superiority of mind and spirit. Some of them may pay lip service to the concept of equality of opportunity, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s no way that common people could actually be their equal.

Some further reading for Peter and friends might be a little known Ofsted publication - ‘Schools Where Boys Write Well’ - little known because it goes against the grain of the disastrous National Literacy Strategy mentality and methodology. It’s even rooted in actual classroom practice, and some might say common sense, which is more than you can say for the untested, untrialled NLS. This booklet actually makes sense, which is more than you can say for Peter and his pals, who get their opinions from ‘data’ and from fellow ignoramuses, since they have no experience of the reality of life in ‘normal’ communities and ‘normal’ schools.

http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/765289/

STOP PRESS

News headlines this morning - why are so many more Primary pupils refusing to attend school regularly? Now let’s see . . .

Presumably they’ve been brainwashed by their teachers into believing they really, really dislike school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/22/comment.comment1 Molehill of Mange. The original classic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/16/sats-schools Jenni Russell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/22/sats-schools From today’s paper - an article by Dr Mary Bousted in response to Peter Preston’s piece.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7039966.stm The original report that inspired Preston’s Molehill of Mange

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/homework.ban Article on homework

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1563753/Boring-lessons-blamed-for-rise-in-truancy.html Telegraph article from last year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7681666.stm Yesterday’s BBC report on a big increase in the numbers of Primary pupils absent from school. Either more kids are falling sick in some way, in which case we need to ask why they’re less physically and mentally healthy, or they’re more disaffected by school, in which case we definitely need to know why. Either way I blame central Government, local government, the DCFS, Ofsted and their media cheerleaders, as well as the people in schools who sold their souls in order to carry out the orders of their overlords.

PS Oxzen holds no brief at all for all the teachers and senior managers in schools who actually are crap, and there are indeed quite a few of them. However, the majority of these schmucks have been badly trained, brainwashed and bullied for so long it’s hardly fair to blame them entirely for their own inadequacies, or to demand their instant dismissal. Hopefully there will, sooner or later, be a more enlightened regime which can offer retraining of a very high quality, that will enable these people to see the errors of their ways and enable them to become high-functioning, ethically-driven and enlightened professionals who don’t abuse children’s rights to a real education (amongst other things) in the name of raising ‘standards’.

http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf See Articles 29, 31 and 36 in particular.
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