This year
in England we gained another liberal law protecting the ‘rights’
of the few over the many. Once again our schools will take this
up, adding to the many difficulties that beset the English
education system.
The
infamous Sexual Orientation regulations 2007 (SOR) "make
discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation unlawful..."
[1] This applies to any organization, company, or individual
and relates to job applications and services provided.
It
continued, "[This] Discrimination is unlawful in civil law
rather than being a criminal offence. A person who believes that
he or she has been discriminated against unlawfully may bring a
case to a county court, which can award damages, including
compensation for injury to feelings."[2] So our courts will
decide what constitutes discrimination. While most of our
courts are quite conservative, the liberal influences grow by
the year. It will be interesting to see what they make of this
latest law.
Perhaps in
answer to the many uncertainties, the department of education
guidelines suggests that the teaching of the Faith will not be
prevented... "However, the concerns expressed are that faith
schools will no longer be able to teach according to an aspect
of their belief or faith — which is the importance of
traditional family values and that single-sex relationships are
sinful. (...) The regulations will not prevent any of this. So
for example, if a faith school (or indeed any school) teaches
that the Christian and Muslim faiths decree that same-sex sexual
activity is a sin then the school will not be acting
unlawfully. Similarly, if a pupil asks a teacher his views on
homosexuality and the teacher gives his view, then again, that
teacher will not be acting unlawfully"[3]. It remains to be
seen if the courts could be used to rule if a certain religious
course is discriminatory. Although this may be unlikely as most
schools already refuse to teach Christian morality. Priority is
instead being given to the teaching of the liberal religion,
which is not too surprising as our education system has been run
by liberals for the last few decades.
The first
major attack on our educational standards occurred in the 1950's
with the creation of the comprehensive school [4]. Being yet
another attempt to produce the ‘equality’ promised by the French
revolution. ‘A school for everyone’ is what we were supposed to
think, but all we had was another modern institution that would
fail to live up to its name.
After the
attempts in the 50’s and 60’s to pervert our education system in
the name of equality, our liberal governments have continued to
tinker with the education system. Ever more liberal ideas were
pushed through under the pretence of improving the standard of
ability of all children.
These
attacks on traditional education have only made it more
difficult for children to meet higher standards in further
education. At best the policies allowed things to stay the
same, but most have made it worse. While our politicians can't
add two and two (another problem caused by the education
policies of the 1960’s?), they have managed to pervert the
education system and have allowed the ignorant to teach. When
the blind lead the blind they both fall into the pit. Now the
average person in the street cannot tell that half the laws the
politicians now make are rubbish or in fact dangerous for our
liberty. Looking back one wonders whether they did it all
deliberately?
To solve
the problem of so much under achievement the Blair Government in
their wisdom came up with the idea of targets to show how well
they were doing. At the time it was suggested that these
targets were rather simple and easy to achieve, but it later
spectacularly backfired with a long list of failure. The
targets in English and Mathematics were eventually achieved five
years too late. It shows real incompetence to miss your own
targets! Our new Brown Government recently talked about doing
away with most of the targets, they claim it is a waste of
money. The embarrassment at the continued failure to meet the
targets may be the real reason.
One of the
few areas of success for our education system has been IT
classes. Certain children using there new found knowledge to
set up web sites to organize various criminal activities. “Gang
members are using IT skills they learn in school to set up web
sites where they arrange fights for sport”, [5] was one of a
number of reports of the misuse of IT by school children in our
newspapers.
One target
has been rolled out repeatedly, “50% of the population to go to
university”. This is regardless of ability, as shown in the
increasing drop out rates in our second and third-rate
universities [6]. The stream of complaints about the drop in
the standard of degrees only seems to become more frequent, and
the dream of half the population with a university degree seems
ever more distant.
Another
problem we have is the blunt social engineering being attempted
by our government; university application forms will, from 2008,
include questions asking whether applicants' parents have a
university degree. What possible relevance is this to an
application? Also, details of parental occupation, ethnic
background and whether or not applicants have been in care will
be shown to admission tutors ahead of the selection process, in
an attempt to make our student population representative of
society at large [7]. If this continues one day soon it will be
illegal to give student’s grades for their work.
The
continued failure of previous policies has led to an increasing
desperation in government, leading to ever more extreme ideas.
One policy we have not heard too much about of late is the
‘respect camps’. The closest we have so far, is a few holiday
activities in some of our schools over the summer. These are
run by community groups and volunteers, a far cry from the idea
proposed a couple of years ago.
The
Government is a lot of talk and little action, the nearest we
will get is “all schools by 2010 to offer activities during
holidays and throughout the year”, [8] so no camps anytime
soon. The previous record of our government makes it unlikely
that they will keep to this, even without the problems that
plague this idea; while we have plenty of schools empty and
unused over the summer, using them is not easy. They will have
great difficulty trying to find ‘teachers’ (Zookeeper,
entertainer, social worker, and volunteer police officer would
be more accurate job descriptions). It will also take a lot of
extra wages for the staff of certain schools to come in for
another six weeks of abuse a year. Insurance, security and the
long-term contracts, with the private company's who run some
schools all make it rather difficult. Add in Government
incompetence and red tape, these camps become almost
impossible. That is without the problem of getting the children
to go in the first place.
In April
an attempt to solve the problems with discipline in our schools
brought the headline... "NEW DISCIPLINARY POWERS LAY DOWN THE
LAW FOR SCHOOL TROUBLE MAKERS", which must have caused all
the troublemakers to quake in their boots! "[T]hey give
teachers a clear statutory right to restrain, detain and remove
unruly pupils, confiscate mobile phones that are being used in a
malicious or disruptive way and punish pupils for poor behavior
not just in school, but also on the way to and from school."
[9] This government document tells us the problems that many
teachers face, but to give teachers similar powers as police
officers, without the training seems madness. The
teaching unions were not impressed and warned their members to
be careful in using the new powers. The last thing we need is
more teachers off sick after suffering injuries at the hands of
pupils, or more legal problems caused by children suing their
schoolteachers.
If that
wasn’t enough, a month later the government gave teachers the
power to search pupils [10]. Not that we will see any change,
the teaching unions complained that their members had enough to
worry about without the added confrontation. Most teachers
certainly would not want to search children, even if you
survived stopping and asking to search them, what would you do
with all the knives, drugs and guns? The worst schools already
have metal detectors, security guards, and police on site all
day, so the children hide their knives and guns off site to pick
up later. Why any parent would send their child to such a
school is anyone's guess.
Another
announcement told us Saturday school is the latest idea [11],
but this has been quite common in the private schools for many
years. Most of these schools have some lessons on Saturday
mornings. To balance this a couple of afternoons a week are
given off (mainly for sports) and they have longer Holidays.
The state school I taught in opened on Saturday mornings to
detain the worst miscreants! But the older pupils did not turn
up, the only time we would ever detain them was on Friday
afternoon, the school hall was packed for an hour at the end of
school time.
After an
attempt to bribe 16-19 year olds with 30 pounds a week, did not
go to plan. [12] Besides the longer days, and "summer camps" we
are now told we need an extra two years to educate our children.
“Plans
to force teenagers to stay in education or training after 16
could lead to mass truancy and needless criminalisation of
thousands of young people, a teachers' leader warned yesterday.
Raising the school leaving age to 18 might mean already
disaffected pupils felt their "agony" was only being prolonged,
warned Geraldine Everett, chairman of the Professional
Association of Teachers. (...) Schools minister Jim Knight said:
"It is only right that we are looking at all options to keep
young people engaged in education or training up until 18 -
whether at school, training or in a job. We must not allow young
people to be left behind.”[13]
Sadly the
schools minister could not see that the real reasons for young
people being left behind are the disjointed government education
policy, political correctness, poor teaching, poor facilities,
and a limited curriculum that is irrelevant to most inner city
children.
Anyway if
the ‘teachers’ can't do the job over 5 days, how does an extra
day help? Will children be more or less engaged during their
lessons for an extra 4 -6 weeks over the summer? I think we
know the answers, but our politicians seem to think that the
longer the horse is at the trough the more it will drink.
Expecting
teachers to work 6 days a week, let alone losing the perk of the
job, the summer holidays with more work, will make the job even
more unpleasant. As the workload has increased over the last
few years the amount of teachers taking on exam marking during
the summer has fallen. To solve this problem the exam boards
started to use computers to mark exams, with rather poor
results! We should also see the amount of time taken off sick
rising from its already high level. They tried to ban early
retirement but that has not stopped the flow of experienced
teachers leaving. These new ideas only cause more problems, and
are unlikely to solve the ones we have at the moment.
The
attempts by our politicians over the last few years to ‘improve’
our education system have been the equivalent of rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic. Our politicians change the color
and position of the deck chairs, always gaining good publicity!
While no attempt is made to change direction, we are told there
is only one course and it can’t be changed. The work of the few
good teachers we have has only slowed this progress.
As our
education system goes ‘full steam ahead’ towards the approaching
iceberg, increasing numbers of parents hasten for the ‘lifeboat’
of home schooling [14]. This causes great worry among the
teaching unions and some members of the government.
Consultations were held last year, with tough talking from
politicians, but for now their attempts to limit home schooling
have failed. Their latest plans have been watered down, no new
inspectors, no new law, no more money.
In
practice it is very difficult for the inspectors that there are
at the moment to do anything. Even the most ignorant parent can
do better with a couple of children, than an ignorant teacher
can with 30! Adding all the time wasted during the school day
changing rooms, etc., gives home schoolers quite an advantage.
The
education authorities have a limited database, so the inspectors
only know about the children removed from school, or children
reported out of school, the rest they know nothing about. An
attempt was made to register all children on a central database,
but the funding was used up on consultancy fees.
Some of
the home school children I teach have been removed from school
and are inspected, this involves receiving a few threatening
letters, but once the inspector visits and sees the work, they
go all quiet. Some are very helpful, in one area of London we
get the use of state buildings for home school groups free of
charge, and they are not interested in what we are teaching!
Home
schoolers don’t have too much to fear at the moment, there is no
room in the schools for all the home schooled children anyway!
NOTES:
[1] http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/wholeschool/equality/sexualorientation/regulations2007/
guidanceforschools/
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_school
[5] www.tes.co.uk/2412217
[6] http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2802629.ece
[7] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6923772.stm
[8] http://www.tes.co.uk/2412244
[9] http://www.dfes.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2007_0061
[10] http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/wholeschool/healthandsafety/schoolsecurity
[11] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/17/nedu117.xml
and http://hiddenireland.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/poor-children-do-not-deserve-saturdays-according-to-liberals/
[12] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6926017.stm
and the government site; http://ema.direct.gov.uk/ema.html
[13] James
Meikle, education correspondent, Tuesday July 31, 2007, The
Guardian
[14] http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2020083,00.html
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