Layer 412 . . . Weird Scenes, Doors of Perception, Education, Standards, Blake, Huxley, The End of 2010, a Happy New Year and a Brave New World

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Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free . . . ?
Desperately in need of some . . . stranger's hand?
In a . . . desperate land?
Lost in a Roman . . . wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain . . .
There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine . . .

The Doors - from "The End"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGXeXm0uMDo

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    "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

 - from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_doors_of_perception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Brave New World's ironic title derives from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:

    O wonder!

    How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_Heaven_and_Hell

    "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
    Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
    From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
    Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
    from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."

- William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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In the town called Education they refer to the examinations known as A levels as the 'Gold Standard'. Everything flows from this. The gold mines and the Factory Schools flow from this.

Entry to university flows from this. The structure of the school system flows from this. The academic curriculum flows from this. The rejection of sensible proposals to broaden the curriculum into something resembling the international baccalaureat  flows from this. The rejection of the idea that children should not have to specialise in either the sciences or the arts, flows from this. The prohibition on pupils following their own learning journeys flows from this. Pupil angst and alienation flow from this. Teacher angst and alienation flow from this.

Is it any wonder that so many teachers leave the profession so soon after qualification?

Is it any wonder that so many children, and so many adults, are borderline insane? And so many of them are . . . literally . . . driven insane. Or become morose, depressed, angry and resentful.

You don't believe me? Take a look are the statistics for teenage drug taking in this country. Also for adult drug taking. Does taking heroin, cocaine, and all the rest, strike anyone as . . . sane? Where does the urge to do those things come from? Where does the failure to control that urge reside? Whose town? Whose government - which cares only about the gold standard? Which tries to shift the blame to individuals. Which sets up the system that is policed by an agency called Ofsted whose mission is to track down and persecute anyone who is deemed to be failing to support the Gold Standard. I use the P word advisedly. Nobody escapes the Ofsted inquisition . . .

If A Levels are the Gold Standard, then what are the tests that are administered at the age of eleven called? Let's call them the Bronze Standard. Or the bog standard. And then it neatly follows that the tests we give to sixteen year olds should be called the Silver Standard. Pupils who achieve success in at least five subjects at grade C and above at the Silver Standard might be considered as being 'on track' to achieve the Gold Standard. You see, it's all one big race.

Who are the drop outs? Why do they drop out? Are they dull and dumb? Have they no stamina? Do they lack motivation? Do they take drugs?

We just. Don't. Know. Although some of us think we do; and some of us don't even care.

How many of our children drop out before the age of eleven - let alone before they reach the Gold Standard? The Town Council would have us believe that the drop-outs have been badly taught. They'll tell you it's all the fault of the teachers. We need to hunt down those failing teachers. We need to sack those failing teachers.

There's danger on the edge of town . . .

The Town Council employed a Director of Education, who we'll called Mr Mutt. The Town Council were unhappy that so many pupils were not on the Gold Standard. Not on the Silver Standard. Not on the Bronze Standard. Not on any damn standard. They were desperate to raise standards.

"It's mainly the fault of the headteachers," said Mr Mutt. "They don't care enough about raising standards. They don't know how to raise standards."

Ironically, Mr Mutt didn't know anything about education. Or children. Particularly Primary age children. But really - not ANY children. Neither did he know anything about pedagogy. Or about how to be a school manager or a school leader. And why should he know? He was simply a bureaucrat. All he needed to know about was Standards and bureaucracies. And how to get rid of people who didn't raise standards. Which is what he did. And still those standards didn't rise.

So Ofsted came along and said this man hasn't been raising standards. He's a failing Director of Education. He doesn't know how to raise standards. Neither does he know how to provide decent services for schools. He can't even ensure that people in his department get paid the right amount, and at the right time. Which is surely something quite basic  to his job description. Why can't he even run a proper payroll system? Let alone a school system . . . No wonder the unions and the headteachers are so angry . . . Why has this Town Council been employing him for the past ten years?

Since the Town Council couldn't answer that question they decided not to employ him any more. So they gave him a year's salary and said would you mind pushing off, you hopeless bureaucrat? (Though they continued to employ a man, the Chief Executive, who was supposed to have been responsible for the performance management of the Director of Education throughout the previous decade. In fact they made him directly responsible for the day to day running of education, following the departure of his ex-best buddy. Even though he was an accountant and knew nothing about education.)

Weird scenes inside the gold mine . . .

The ex-Director of Education re-trained as a Performance Management consultant and began travelling the country, advising school governing bodies on the performance of their headteachers. In his heart of hearts he was a little bit in love with headteachers. In the deepest, darkest recesses of his twisted soul he truly hated  headteachers.

Ride the King's highway . . .  Ride the snake . . .

It all makes sense, in a weird kind of way . . .

Why do so many of the town's teenage girls become pregnant? Why does the town have so many teenage fathers? Have these children not heard of contraception? Do they not have access to contraception? Do they not want to use contraception? In what sense have we educated these children? Or have we, in effect, NOT educated these children? Which bits of them are educated?

What makes them carry knives? What makes them use those knives . . . on one another? What makes them get drunk and throw up on one another? What makes them steal and rob? Don't they know it's wrong to do these things? Don't they have any values? Have they not been educated?

Or shall we just say that they're feral children who are beyond education? Beyond any help? Beyond caring about? Beyond any decent standards . . .


Maybe we could blame the parents. Or television. Or the Internet. Or computers.

Lost. In a wilderness of pain. Desperately in need, of some stranger's hand . . .

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A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/aldous_huxley_4.html

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Thank you, Aldous.

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Happy New Year!.

Layer 388 . . . Education, the White Paper, and the Alexander Review

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Schools and the teaching profession in England stand accused of cowardice, complacency, confusion, disunity, lack of professionalism and lack of vision. Not by Michael Gove. By me.

Through failing to resist the assault on its professionalism by successive governments the teaching profession has forfeited its right to be seen as a profession, and appears to be a divided bunch of self-interested functionaries who simply do as they're told, even when the people doing the telling are plainly idiots and cretins who have NO clue as to the needs of learners and teachers.

Who are all these 'superheads', for instance, who have allegedly 'turned schools around'? To face in which direction? The 'Standards Agenda'? Teaching to the tests? 'Driving up standards? Uncritical adoption of governmental 'reforms'? Creating factory schools that constantly drill and coach pupils with league tables their sole concern? Yes you bastards - you know who you are.

Of course the best of the best have managed to achieve government targets without sacrificing concern for individual children and without letting go of a determination to provide schools that offer a broad and balanced and creative curriculum. All of which is much easier to achieve if you have a proper comprehensive intake of pupils and a stable staff.

But it's been a dog eat dog world, and it's likely to get even worse. Thanks to Gove and co.

Schools' sole concern from now on ought to be for the pupils and their families. That's to say, for the total wellbeing of their pupils, and not just their test scores.

Unless schools are enabling children to grow up loving school and learning to love learning for its own sake, and feeling that every day is enjoyable and creative, then they are failing in their duty. Schools are NOT businesses, and they have no business behaving as though test and exam scores are all that matter.

Take Primary schools. Why have they not joined together and said we're going to adopt wholesale the recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review? For the answer to this question, see paragraph 1 - above.

The headline on the front page of the Times Educational Supplement - no hotbed of revolution - on Friday October 16th 2009 said,

Alexander Review: Give us back our schools

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6025096

by Helen Ward

Biggest investigation since Plowden demands end to era of centralised control

The biggest investigation into primary education in a generation has demanded that England’s schools are reclaimed from politicians who have imposed a “state theory of learning” on teachers.

The final report of the independent Cambridge Primary Review, published today, calls for the depoliticisation of the classroom, with central control slashed to a minimum and funding pumped into schools.

The study, which has taken three years and draws on the work of more than 3,000 researchers, begins: “Ours is a public system of education which belongs to the people and is not the personal fiefdom of ministers and their unelected advisors.”

Its recommendations include that formal primary education should not start until the age of six, and that the current system of league tables and national tests be scrapped and replaced with a new system of accountability in which teacher assessment plays a stronger role.

Professor Robin Alexander, who led the inquiry, said he was irritated that the debate over education had been presented as a simple battle between “the trendy” and “back to basics” factions.

“The whole discourse has been hijacked by the mythmakers,” he told The TES. “This is about reclaiming the debate, it is about resetting the agenda for professionals.”

The final report, Children, Their World, Their Education, is being sent to every school in the UK, including secondaries and special schools.

It is the largest inquiry of its kind since Lady Plowden’s in 1967, but is more independent than its predecessor. The Alexander Review was funded by the Esmee Fairbain charitable foundation while the Plowden report was commissioned by the government of the day.

Many of its findings have been revealed over the last year and half in a series of interim reports, including an assertion that childhood is not in crisis, and that primary schools provide a safe haven for young children in a changing world.

John Bangs, head of education for the National Union of Teachers, said teachers would applaud many of the review’s conclusions, including the change in official primary starting age. “Professor Alexander is spot on that education is too important for the factionalisation of party politics,” he said.

As the report notes, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, as well as Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary have criticised the interim reports for containing “a collection of recycled, partial or out of date research”.

However, both the anti-centralisation and the subject specialist recommendations will appeal to the Conservatives, which have pledged to move funding from agencies to the frontline.

David Laws, Liberal democrat spokesman for education, said: “The strength of the report is that it’s not been commissioned by the Government and its terms of reference haven’t been unnecessarily restricted. It is able to recognize some of the achievements of primary education and progress made in the last decade while also being willing to be critical about those things that have gone wrong. We feel very strongly that the degree of micromanagement and interference is on a scale that would never have been tolerated and would have been seen as shockingly totalitarian 30 years ago.”

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Ah yes, David Laws. I remember him well. One of the main movers and shakers in the coalition negotiations, I seem to recall. Foxy little guy. Gove's counterpart in the LibDems.

As Kundera said, politicians rely on our forgetfulness. 

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Disadvantage lies at heart of primary review

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6025135

Robin Alexander praises schools as ‘the centre that holds when things fall apart’, but while rejecting media ‘myths’ of a generation in crisis he argues that more must be done to narrow the gap between vulnerable children and the rest. Helen Ward reports

Forty years ago, the Plowden report declared that at the heart of the educational process lies the child.

Now, the most comprehensive inquiry into primary schooling in Britain since then has laid out its vision of education. And central to its vision is the disadvantaged child.

“For this is our bottom line,” the Cambridge Primary Review states. “The education of young children matters immeasurably - to them both now and in the future and to our society. It matters to all children but especially to those who, in our divided society, lack the massively compensating advantages of financial wealth, emotional harmony and a home life that is linguistically, intellectually, culturally and spiritually rich.”

The review, which set out to examine how primary education can best meet the needs of today’s children, is indignant about the politicisation of education.

In the final report, edited by Professor Robin Alexander, the review’s leader, rails against media myths of failure and politicians’ ill-founded claims of success.

The report’s prevailing mood is underlined by its headline conclusions: reform Sats and scrap league tables, extend the early-years foundation stage to Year 1, rebalance the curriculum, train teachers to become educators not deliverers of ready-made lessons and carry out a full review of special educational needs provision.

The report is more than another shot in one of the many battlegrounds of education. It is deeply serious, foreseeing that “sensationalising headlines will do nothing like justice” to the breadth, weight and authority of the evidence. But it is readable and not without humour (among the 88 historical milestones it lists are 1969’s “back to basics”, 1992’s “back to basics again” and 1998’s “back to basics yet again”).

It is an ambitious attempt to go beyond governments, override spats and appeal directly to “all those interested in primary education”. It concludes with 75 recommendations that the 14 authors believe would provide the education and the childhood that all children deserve.

It begins by exploring the state of childhood, noting one father’s complaints about his son’s alleged truancy and failure to do his homework - comments made in Mesopotamia 3,500 years ago. Is the modern “crisis in childhood” real? What is the evidence?

Start by listening to children, suggests the report; 72 per cent say their peers are “kind and helpful”.

Health, education and respect for children have improved vastly. There are genuine concerns about equity, but the distorted picture of “blighted” childhoods prevents change where it is needed.

The review praises primary schools as “the centre that holds when things fall apart”. It praises the Government’s efforts to narrow gaps in educational attainment.

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the review was correct to draw attention to disadvantaged pupils and the inequality in the education system.

The report is independent, but it is responsive to the political landscape in which it finds itself. It advocates change in a system that seems to be constantly changing. This term, the Government is due to announce its final decision on the recommendations of Sir Jim Rose’s review, which was limited to the primary curriculum.

The Rose review recommendations, which have been widely welcomed in the profession, call for the national curriculum to be rearranged into six areas of learning and six essential skills, in an attempt to give teachers more flexibility. The new curriculum is due to be introduced by 2010.

But the Cambridge review calls for the process to be suspended. Sir Jim’s review has fundamentally missed the point, it argues. The problem is not curriculum overload, but a mismatch between what schools have to do and the skills of their staff. Primaries need more teachers and more specialist teachers in addition to generalist class teachers.

But how seriously will politicians treat its proposals?

As the review notes, some of its recommendations have already been taken up - including scrapping National Strategies - though ministers dismissed them when they were made in its earlier interim reports.

Professor Alexander knows only too well the risks that the final report’s calls may be ignored or even attacked as “off message”.

It concludes: “The Cambridge Primary Review is for the longer term, not the next election… its final report is not just for transient architects and agents of policy. It is for all who invest daily, deeply and for life in this vital phase of education, especially children, parents and teachers.”

In other words, it is for you.

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Key recommendations

End the “state theory of learning”. The Government should not tell teachers how to teach.

- Extend the foundation stage to age six. Have a single primary key stage.

- Prioritise narrowing the gap between vulnerable children and the rest.

- Undertake a full review of special educational needs.

- Follow Professor Alexander’s curriculum recommendations, including the creation of 12 aims and eight domains.

- Reform assessment; stop current Sats; scrap league tables; assess all areas of the curriculum and use sampling to monitor national standards.

- Undertake a full review of primary school staffing.

- Reform initial teacher training.

- Protect rural and middle schools.

- Protect and expand school libraries.

- End primary/secondary funding differential.

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FAQ

Q. What is the Cambridge Primary Review?

A. A three-year inquiry into the state and future of English primary education.

Q. Who is Robin Alexander?

A. Director of the review and fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge University. He was one of the “three wise men” who led a government inquiry into primary education in 1991. He has long advocated a more central place for oracy in primary education.

Q. How is this review different from Sir Jim Rose’s?

A. Sir Jim was commissioned and paid by the Government to look at the primary curriculum. Professor Alexander’s review has been funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and looks at the whole of primary education.

Q. What does Professor Alexander think about primary schools?

A. Primary schools appear to be under intense pressure but in good heart. They are highly valued by children and parents and in general are doing a good job. They do not neglect and never have neglected the 3Rs… For many, schools are the centre that holds when things fall apart.

www.primaryreview.org.uk

What the report says…

 . . . about teaching staff

England has 198,200 primary teachers and 172,600 primary school support staff - one adult for every 11 primary pupils. This is investment on a remarkable scale.

The class teacher system is taken for granted, but does it best serve primary pupils’ needs?

It arose because it combined cheapness and efficiency in the context of large classes, a basic curriculum and view of teaching as little more than drilling of facts and skills. But subject knowledge is the elephant in the room.

A national review of staffing and funding policy is required. And more specialist teachers are needed, especially in upper primary.

A two-year PGCE should be considered to help to achieve this. Initial teacher training should move away from compliance culture. The Training and Development Agency for Schools’ professional standards need changing as they encourage conformity rather than originality and do not recognise that experienced teachers need autonomy to be effective. Continuing professional development is often patronising.

Headteachers need to be supported so they can focus on leading learning. The current model in which the head is burdened with a proliferating range of responsibilities is no longer tenable for a single person.

Teaching assistants have liberated teachers from tasks that diminish time with children, but the use of TAs as teachers is not acceptable. They need training for working with small groups and children with SEN.

. . . about pupils

Legitimate concerns exist about children’s lives today, but the “crisis” of modern childhood has been grossly overstated.

For most children, perceived risk is much greater than actual risk. But for a significant minority the risks and deprivations are at least as severe as they are portrayed and it is here that attention needs to be focused. Social disadvantage blights the early lives of a larger proportion of children in Britain than in many other countries.

Britain is very diverse - and to an extent which at the time of Plowden would have been unimaginable. The transience and unpredictability of migration and the inadequacy of local information adds to pressure on schools. The review encountered evidence of discrimination against marginalised groups, within the education system as well as in society.

. . . about government

Assumptions and formulas for funding primary education should be reviewed. The staffing of primary schools should be led by the curriculum and the needs of pupils. A new funding formula is needed, preceded by a national staffing review. Excessive funding variation between local authorities and key stages should be eliminated.

The National Strategies have cost £2 billion. Savings arising from terminating them should be shifted from government and local authorities to schools.

Centralised reform has produced important and necessary changes in children’s services, but has gone too far in relation to curriculum and pedagogy. The role of government should revert to providing the administrative and financial framework, setting the goals and scope of the national curriculum and the broad standards primary schools should achieve.

Assessment should be reviewed and league tables stopped. Children’s learning should be assessed formatively throughout the primary phase and summatively before the transfer to secondary school. A separate system should be used to evaluate schools and monitor national standards externally, using sample testing.

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What's happened since this report was published? Anyone taken any note of it?
Not really. People like Balls and Gove have done what people like them usually do. And the Primary sector, to its shame, has kept its head down and failed to demand full implementation of the above.
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Layer 224 . . . More Bullshit Bingo, Strangling, European Union and Parliamentary Standards

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More synchronicity . . .

Following on from yesterday's musings, I came across this piece about The Stranglers:

When did you first realise that The Guildford Stranglers, as you were then called, had the makings of a really good band?

JJ Burnel: Well, not for quite a while, because the very few places we could get booked into usually asked us never to return again, or they'd pull the plugs on us! We tried a variety of different musicians, but nothing really clicked. Then we advertised for a keyboard player. We thought that was the extra voice that we needed. Hugh and I had been writing all the songs and they were starting to take shape, but it wasn't until Dave joined us a year later in 1975 that things really clicked. He sounded great and really reminded us of Ray Manzarek from The Doors. But Dave had never heard about them then. It was all down to synchronicity really. From then on, we started writing a lot more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/totp2/artists/s/stranglers/located/page1.shtml

 He's right of course - Ray Manzarek was one of the best and one of the most well-known keyboards players in the Sixties, and obviously The Doors were one of the very best bands. It always seemed me that those guys had a very similar keyboard style, playing in what were in some ways similar bands – capable of hard rock but also writing great original songs with terrific melodies and good lyrics.

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Who's Talking?

More bullshit bingo. Heard on the radio this morning -

“We need to look at how we drive more efficiency out of the business . . . ”

Leaving aside the small point that the correct grammar should be “drive more efficiency INTO the business” - this is still technobullshit. The key word here, of course, is DRIVING. Powerful people have to drive – like they're in a powerful vehicle. And of course they're the one with their hands on the steering wheel, putting the pedal to the metal.

So who is this talking? Obviously a top businessman or woman, or a top civil servant who's in charge of A  Business or A System?

No. The guy talking runs the Association of Chief Police Officers. The Top Cop. And I'd put a very large bet on whether he, and most top cops these days, have at some stage been to a business school to get an MBA. Or is this jargon just something he's picked up from his dealings with Home Office officials who've been down that route and therefore habitually talk this bullshit?

He went on to say -
“You can deliver accountability, but you can't deliver policing under direct political control.”
“. . . the savings we need to deliver out of the back end of the business.”

He even talked about “a British brand of policing”!!!
Aaaaarrrrggghhhh!

How does anyone 'deliver' accountability? How does anyone 'deliver' policing? When did people start talking like this?

It's that macho thing again. It's maximum macho. I think the first time I heard this word 'deliver' it was in connection with the local Co-Op bringing a boxful of groceries to our house. The second time must have been at school during prayers - “Deliver us from evil”. So delivering is also something God or gods do. Is that how he sees himself? Or is he seeing himself as some kind of grocer? I think not. It's definitely an all-powerful omnipotence thing.

He went on to say,
“I would not want to lead a police force that was being told how to deliver policing.”
Of course he wouldn't. He wouldn't want to be told how to do anything.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8369000/8369748.stm

Probably quite right too. Maybe the top man at the national association of headteachers should have said many years ago that he would rather resign than bow down to politicians and bureaucrats who thought they had a right to micro-manage schools - people who invariably, by virtue of having climbed to the top of the political or bureaucratic greasy pole, are full of ambition and ego, and are determined to manipulate and maneuver their way to positions of power and authority. Usually ignoramuses who haven't a clue what goes on in schools. Just like the New Labour bastards who are now claiming they will guarantee 'delivery' of this and that in schools from now on.
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European Union

Bloody hell – Lady Ashton has a regional accent! And she was appointed by the Socialist Group in the European Parliament! How many people even knew there was a 'socialist' group!
Grew up near Skelmersdale and Wigan. She didn't go to Oxbridge either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Ashton,_Baroness_Ashton_of_Upholland


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/19/lady-cathy-ashton
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6923856.ece

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Parliamentary Standards

David Curry's the guy who was appointed to oversee the Parliamentary Standards committee. Yesterday he referred himself to – the Parliamentary Standards Committee.

On November 19th, 2009 Curry stood down from his position as chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Privileges after claims from the Telegraph newspaper regarding his expenses and has reportedly referred himself to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority for investigation.[2] - Wikipedia

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/6609018/MPs-expenses-David-Curry-quits-as-standards-chief-over-new-Telegraph-disclosures.html

You couldn't make it up.
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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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Layer 47 Blair, Brown, Blunkett, Blinkers, Bullshit and Blindfolds.

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Back home from the peace and quiet of Somerset. The noise levels here at home today are quite intolerable. This has been happening for the past 3 weeks, thanks to the water mains being relaid up and down the street, but today it’s worse than ever. There’s nowhere in the house I can go to get away from the racket that’s being created by pneumatic drills, cement mixer lorries, men shouting, drilling, etc. It’s incredible.

Of course the minute I write all this down they’ve decided to down tools and have a tea break, and there’s blissful silence, at least for a few minutes. To be fair this particular team seem to spend as much time off the job as on it. Which at least partly explains why the works have gone on for so long.

Right now there’s not even the sound of children over in the school playground because it’s half term. Summer half term. There are no major roads where I live, so for the next few minutes I’ll be able to enjoy blissful, peaceful silence.

I’m desperate to have my quiet street back again permanently. Throughout the six months prior to these water mains works commencing I had to cope with noise coming from directly across the street, where the school was being rebuilt and enlarged. The sound of lorries and vans arriving from very early morning, from earth-moving machines, diggers, cement mixers, dumper trucks, drilling, hammering, sawing - all of it was sheer noise pollution. Enough to drive someone like me, who values and loves silence, totally crazy.

I suppose I should be less egocentric and give a thought to the poor sods who have to operate the angle grinders and pneumatic drills, and show some concern for their health - their lungs breathing in the dust, their ears being battered day after day by the grinding and drilling they’re doing.

Summer half term, and the weather continues dull, overcast, cold, windy and raining. At least down in Somerset, where the weather was even worse, it was peaceful and quiet!

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The War on Teenage Terror.

There’s yet more chatter on the radio about knife crime, and what we can possibly do about it. People yakking and blathering on about the shocking frequency of knife attacks and murders, and the need for teenagers to have positive role models, and adults who are consistent in what they say and do. So might that be consistent in their stupidity and cluelessness, just like the pundits?

Police Commissioner Blair says we need to talk about it more. Someone else says that knee jerk reactions may get some kids off the streets and locked away, but won’t solve the problem. And, errr . . . . that’s about it. Clueless.

This level of national discourse is appalling and shameful. Because all that people in power really want to do is tinker with the issues, apply sticking plaster to these running sores, and keep things pretty much as they are. The idea of a revolution, at least in consciousness, is very far from their minds. That’s the last thing they want - to have to think very differently about how we operate as a society.

At the moment they are incapable of thinking about and talking about what’s happening in terms of our national low levels of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence. They don’t even understand the concept of emotional intelligence, or emotional literacy as some prefer to call it. There’s no way they are familiar with the work of Goleman, for instance, let alone have any capacity to think about what an attempt to tackle these intelligences might mean in terms of the school system and indeed our national ‘culture’.

And yet a radical shift in our thinking and our ways of doing things is the only appropriate remedy for the trends that we see accelerating. It’s only a serious attempt to address the long term issues from the very roots of the problems that can possibly make any difference. Containment and punishment is not a solution or a policy that has any hope of success. And is this shift happening? Or likely to happen? Ha!

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The Standards and Testing Debate.

Estelle Morris, whom I wrote some very positive things about last week, had a column in the Education Guardian this week, which was pure bullshit. Idiotic, useless waffle of the very first order. I regret having to say such things, because it provides yet more ammunition for the political opposition, but then I AM opposed to everything this wretched government has done and is doing to the education system.

Morris’s column was headed ‘Genuine Engagement on this Testing Issue’, and it was anything but that. A good friend had cautioned me last week about being so fulsome in my praise of Morris, when after all she had consistently supported the government’s SATs agenda, and still does. Well here she is, writing and saying the most absurd nonsense.

She begins her piece by saying, “It is very difficult to have a sensible debate about testing”, and then goes on to prove her point by making idiotic assertions that have absolutely no validity. Here’s what she says:

“There was a time when the dividing lines in the testing debate were quite simply whether we should test children or not. That battle has been fought and won. Tests are an integral part of school life.”

Well, Baroness, you ought to know that the rest of the world doesn’t see it this way. Scotland, for example, has never seen it this way. Wales has just abandoned testing. Are these people all stupid? Or do they perhaps have some legitimate claim to having a correct point of view? And if so, then in what sense has the battle been fought and won?

Here’s the good, decent and caring Baroness, still a parliamentarian, still a Labour party member, seeing the world entirely in terms of the narrow debate within England. And yet she must surely realise there are still thousands of intelligent voices in this country, an increasing number in fact, who completely disagree with SATs and summative testing as means of describing and assessing children’s progress and achievement.

What she really means, of course, is that the debate within PARLIAMENT has been fought and won, and that’s all that really matters. She’s into realpolitic. She sees the world in terms of pure political power, and sure enough our politicians are overwhelmingly in favour of SATs and therefore there’s no point in debating testing any longer. There’s nothing like enough opposition to testing within the main political parties and within parliament, so we might just as well forget it and move on.

This is how politicians operate. New Labour has never been about principle and taking a stand, or showing leadership towards some legitimate ideological goals. It's only ever been about narrow political calculation and appeasing the floating voters. The realities of power, yes indeed!

They had a landslide in 1997, and also in the following election, and a massive mandate for radical change towards the type of society we ought to be, and they didn’t know what to do with it. There are no philosophers within New Labour, only ambitious technocrats and power brokers. People who consider themselves effective and efficient managers.

But I digress. Back to Estelle, bless her.

“Teachers use the (test) data to raise the standards further.”
And then she selectively quotes from the estimable Mick Brookes, gen sec of NAHT, to back up her assertions, which is a typically New Labourish thing to do, and leaves a very nasty taste.

“Data”, Estelle? What fucking data? Data that tells us how well children cope with tests, which effectively tells us nothing about anything important. What teachers actually make good use of is not tests but formative assessment (continuous assessment) which steers their teaching from day to day according to how well children are learning from day to day, week to week. Responding to end of Key Stage data helps no child whatsoever! This is nonsense!

Perhaps Estelle should pay more attention to the likes of Melanie Phillips, after all. Tests are there to measure the performance of schools - and that’s it, as dear Mel P will gladly tell you. But they don’t even do that effectively. And what if they did? What if they really did tell us how well schools are processing children through tests? Is that what we really want to know - what we really care about?

All good teachers and all good schools have systems for tracking children’s progress that rely not a jot on summative testing. They assess them in relation to clear targets for learning, in terms of outcomes in learning skills, concepts and knowledge. This is how progress is really assessed - continuously. If you really want to assess and rank how well schools are doing, then you ought to start by finding out whether or not they have good systems for formative assessment and tracking progress against agreed learning targets and outcomes.

We even know which skills, concepts and knowledge they ought to develop in emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence, and we know when children lack them, and no tests can give us this crucial information. Or any crucial information about children’s creativity, imagination and enthusiasm for learning. But then this government, and seemingly Baroness Morris, care not a jot for these things, and they don’t think parents do either.

But they’ll carry on wringing their hands about the crazy, angry kids on the streets and their culture of knives, gangs and guns. And they’ll carry on wondering what to do about these fallen children of the underclasses. And occasionally they may give a thought as to why our children in general are the most miserable in Europe, if not the world.

But will they ever do anything about it? Will they fuck.

Towards the end of her article Estelle tells us that it’s basically the decision of head teachers if their schools choose to restrict and narrow the curriculum and concentrate on teaching to the tests. She comes to the astonishing conclusion that if parents don’t want their children’s experience of school to be limited, restricted and impoverished, then they should speak up and say so.

And this is the most outrageous thing for her to have said. Having spent years battering it into the heads of parents (and teachers) that good test results are all that matters, and it’s through SATs tests that schools will be judged, for Morris to now turn round and say that maybe education should be about something wider and more important and maybe parents should speak up about this, and if they did then “I’m sure the schools - and the government - would respond” - this is pure evil. This is abdication of responsibility and refusal to take a moral as well as a principled stand on crucial issues.

This is someone who knows or at least suspects that children’s rights and well-being are being violated every day in most schools in this country, and that teachers and head teachers, in tough areas particularly (though not exclusively), are being driven to despair and beyond by government policy and the Ofsted regime, and she has the nerve to tentatively suggest that the decision to do something about it might rest with parents - that if they feel strongly enough about it then they have the power to change it!

She’s sure the government would respond? Yes - if there were to be a mass protest by parents on behalf of their poor bloody kids. But don’t expect the government to change anything for the better on behalf of the kids and their hard-working teachers just because it’s the RIGHT thing to do! Clearly that could never happen! Even if they understood what’s right for children and what ought to be happening in schools. Which they clearly do not.

It’s also ridiculous to imagine that this government will disown the policies it’s been pursuing for so many years, or expect them to recant all the reactionary nonsense it’s been purveying. That would be one massive U-turn too many. Which is why the way forward is in fact for this government to be given the bullet. In the hope that a Parliament with no overall majority might actually make a fresh start on looking at key issues anew, and having to argue and debate properly the issues that really matter.

I truly look forward to the day, which I’m convinced will arrive, when we emerge from our delusion and our collective madness and say what the fuck have we been doing to our kids all these years? And who’s to blame, apart from ourselves?

Who led us into this nonsense? Why were those children treated so badly? Why did they miss out on so much? Why were their childhoods so boring and impoverished? Why were they crammed and homeworked to within an inch of their lives? Why did they not come to love learning for its own sake? Why was their creativity and imagination so under-nourished? Why was their mental and emotional health so damaged? Why didn’t they learn to manage their emotions, and develop a sense of awe and wonder, and learn to value life itself? Why were their spirits so downcast and defeated before they even got going?

Step forward all those who really had a chance to change things from 1997 onwards. Step forward Blair, Brown, Blunkett, Miliband, Balls, and the rest of you. Yes, even you wee Jim Knight, and you Estelle. You were our ‘leaders’. On with the blindfolds.

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Layer 44 Eyes and Ears of the Community

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Here’s the latest from the government, and from Beverley Hughes, the children's minister, on tackling teenage gangs and violence:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2281394,00.html

"There is a false dichotomy that schools are there to provide education only, and not for the welfare of the whole child. If they don't tackle these problems they are going to compromise educational objectives. Where there is a culture of fear and uncertainty in a school, it is something that not just the school, but youth services and police have got to grapple with.

"It's not schools taking this on alone, but they are in the unique position of being the eyes and the ears of the community; they see young people everyday." She added that areas had been identified where schools were being heavily affected, including London boroughs, and inner-city areas including Liverpool, Manchester and Nottingham. "It's very localised in these areas ... for some schools this is a big issue."

Pretty breathtaking hypocrisy really. Here’s a government made up of a group of ignorant, arrogant politicians that has done its best to turn schools, especially in inner cities, into miserable results factories, and they’re suddenly concerned about the welfare of “the whole child”!

Welfare! They mean they want schools to provide them with intelligence on the kids they suspect are violent gang members, since schools are assumed to be the ‘eyes and ears of the community’. Snoops. Spooks. Grasses.

“False dichotomy”? “Educational objectives”? Whose? Not mine, pal. My first educational objective is for kids to enjoy being in schools where there’s a stable, settled and well motivated staff who put the well being of the child at the very top of the agenda. Which is not happening. What they mean is they don’t want bullying to get in the way of swatting and preparing for tests. They’ve bullied teachers into bullying the kids into doing more homework, more ‘booster’ classes, and more ‘literacy’ at the expense of the broader curriculum and their enjoyment of school, and now they’re worried about bullying.

“Culture of fear and uncertainty”? It’s this wretched government that has created a culture of fear and uncertainty in staffrooms up and down the country, in our inner cities especially. Fear of the league tables. Fear of Ofsted. Fear of the Year 6 children not getting their Level 4s.

Uncertainty? No-one’s certain any more what the fuck they’re supposed to be doing. It seems they shouldn’t be providing “education only”, but on the other hand we’ve been bullied by people who insist that getting those Level 4s and GCSEs and getting the schools up the league tables IS the only thing that matters.

Only now it isn’t. Schools have to get those government targets, but they also have to be the eyes and ears of their communities. And we all know what the crims will do to anyone they see as a grass. This is nonsense.

Of course schools should concentrate on education, and of course teachers should be educationalists, first, foremost and above and beyond all else. They should concentrate on the education of the whole child, and not allow themselves to be operatives in results factories chasing meaningless and counterproductive government targets.

They should be helping children reach their full potential in every aspect of their development, which means in terms of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spiritual intelligence, instinctual intelligence and physical intelligence, as well as academic intelligence. If we sort out these intelligences then by and large we won’t need to concern ourselves with providing the police with intelligence.

I once had a teacher who reluctantly agreed to take a Year 6 class but did so on the sole basis that she would not compromise her beliefs about providing a broad and balanced curriculum that developed all of each child’s various intelligences and encouraged creativity, imagination and a love of learning. Not that I was trying to get her to do otherwise - but she recognized the way things were going, in most schools. If only all teachers were strong enough to take a stand, and stand up for the rights of children.

Personally I have no issues with cooperating with the police where it’s clear that there’s criminal activity taking place. I don’t want the crims to get away with their activities, and I don’t want them hurting and bullying other kids.

But neither do I want idiot politicians and idiot bureaucrats to get away with their efforts to turn all schools into soulless results factories at the expense of real education - the kind of education that helps to prevent angry and disaffected kids from hating school, hating teachers, hating themselves, just hating . . .

Personally I’m sick to my soul with a nasty, soulless system of schooling that exists mainly for its own sake and its own survival, and cares not a jot about the criminal underclass and its sick children. And I’m sick and tired of the fact that so many schools exist only for the more able children, and for the purpose of reaching academic targets.

Teachers are not trained to develop the intelligences that stop kids getting into trouble in the first place. We have geography teachers, literacy teachers, teachers of science, teachers of maths, and so on. We don’t have teachers of children because we don‘t train them to meet the real and urgent developmental needs of our children.

We don’t educate children - we school them and we cram them and we haven’t a clue how to instill in them - especially the less academically able ones - any liking let alone love of learning for its own sake.

Teachers are entitled to tell Beverly Hughes and her ilk to fuck off and only come back when she’s persuaded her Cabinet colleagues to start showing some caring about real education and stop wittering on about their targets and driving up standards, to start showing some understanding and caring about the real needs of children and their families.

It’s incredible that in a supposedly civilized and enlightened country we’re still so ignorant about how to deal with the causes of madness and violence, and how to prevent children going off the rails. It’s unbelievable that we go on trying to ’drive up standards’ at such a cost to children’s well being, and we cling to 19th century paradigms as to what education is all about. “Give these children facts” indeed. It’s infuriating that we sow the seeds of disaffection and violence, and then try to crack down and punish children when they can’t cope, can’t control their fear and anger, and simply crack up.

We should be ashamed that we tolerate poverty and its effects on children and families. The only correlate of low achievement is not skin colour or class or gender or inexperienced teachers - it’s poverty.

But schools can make a difference, in the long run, provided they are allowed and encouraged to be places where children feel valued and happy and where they enjoy learning. English Primary schools used to be renowned world wide for being such places, by and large. But not any more.

English children are now deemed to be the least happy of any in the industrialized world. They struggle with childhoods that are toxic, and they grow up in schools and neighborhoods where their basic human rights are threatened and denied. Life for children in this country has been getting steadily worse, not better. Their quality of life has diminished, even if their test scores have risen, thanks to more and more drilling, rote learning and cramming.

We should all feel thoroughly ashamed. We should all be like that young teacher and from now on take a stand. From now on we should do what’s right by children, not do what’s right by a fucked-up, inhuman and ridiculous system.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said yesterday "The reality is that schools are an oasis of morality in a world that does not otherwise give many young people guidance and role models of good citizenship." Mr Dunford’s being a little optimistic if he imagines that there’s any substantial “guidance” taking place in schools. It takes a lot more than “guidance” to develop high levels of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "Something needs to be done. Schools aren't just dealing with the culture in schools, but in the culture of the wider community and culture of society.”

The problem is that everyone knows that ‘something needs to be done’, and many of us know what it is that needs to be done, but the people who have created our current system of education with its regressive and repressive and ignorant approach to ‘driving up standards’ patently haven’t a clue what needs to be done, they aren’t capable of listening to those who do, and they aren’t about to do a U-turn and admit they’ve been getting it wrong all these years.

They want quick fixes and they want to tackle the symptoms of the sickness we see all around us, increasing day by day. They're not in the business of finding cures for the causes of the sickness. They’re so far from enlightenment it’s laughable.
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