Essentially keeping up with the authoritarian Labour regime requires knowledge of other authoritarian states, and imagination fired by the literary presentation of dystopias.
Che Guevara remarked that you cannot build socialist man without building socialist consciousness. Old minds honed by experience and learning, whether formally academic or from living along, are rarely susceptible to consciousness-raising by means available to a newly installed bunch of neo-fascist power stealers. In the memorable words of Hillary Clinton, it takes a village - ask My Lai, Civitella in Val di Chiana, consider the zbrodnia katyńska, to name part of the sad role-call, before our generation will learn its lesson.
Lessons are offered to our children though; and we send them into the primary schools still thinking of such institutions as one of the greatest achievements of the post enlightenment world. After all, how many of us were propelled by education's jet engines, like Comets, into the bourgeoisie? Whole decades of academic study considered the rise and rise of the clever children of the formerly denied.
We are encultured to believe in education as our assault course on the Glittering Prizes. And upon this false conciousness within our generation is built the Project's programme to undo the acculturation and goals we lovingly nuture and sustain within our families both for public and financial success and, just as much, for personal fulfilment and enjoyment of the extravagant riches of our cultural inheritance.
You can fake everything but the closing prices, and the closing prices on the formal purposes of English primary schools are that 40% of the pupils cannot read or use simple calculation.
The true purposes of English primary schools and their success in target achievement is unpublished in the public domain.
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Aha I wondered where we were going . Or more simply Labour have to maintain a class excluded from advancement or what would be the point of redistribution and all those lovely jobs.
In urban areas I genuinely suspect this is is deliberate
I wasn't quite saying that N, more simply there is an intention within the state education system to downgrade the importance of family life and beliefs and inculcate a common (and in my view degraded) social and cultural mindset.
Thus the wise parent does not expect from the state education system what the system pretends to offer. And should be very wary of what it does offer and attempts to impose.
But to be illiterate and innumerate in England is a public disgrace and private distress of such magnitude
any parent must wonder what their children are doing all day.
I have believed for the past few years that school is a useful way of keeping the children from the house whilst things get done, and that's it. Parental input is far more valuable to the sprogs than washed-up socialists.
Gordon Brown's new wheeze of allowing schoolchildren the vote is inspired and will ensure a heavy bias to socialism in the future. Raise the voting age to 25, I say (Churchill would have said 30!).
Bit of a waste of public money though TT - not that wasting public money seems to matter, or they think they're getting good value - all those votes bought, all those chances denied to the young as Newmania notes.
Mostly it isn't helpful to compare what's happening in England and what goes on in similar areas in Italy, but it's hard to see what goes on in a primary school here and what goes on in one in England. The maestra wouldn't put up with not reading, not learning the curriculum and not knowing simple (actually quite complicated by the quinta elementare)number; 40% unable to read and calculate - that's boggling. It has to be deliberate , it's nothing to do with money spent or ability or deprivation or privilege.
Still, people must look after their own children; if they accept it...
You are such an excellent writer, Hatfield Girl.
40% - I know, it's terrible and I think the underlying cause of it is this:
Proper education does not sit well with the ideology of a system of learning which is free of discipline and punishment. The net result is what we have - do you really think it was all part of a designed strategy to dum down our people ? Or do you think that is what it has become ?
My grandparents were better educated but ignorant of politics nonetheless and when I suggested to you some while back that my own schooling had let me down (with regard to Scottish nationalism) you told me that it was more to do with feeling than education.
We cannot write like Newmania E-K; he was born with that gift and he's worked at it, formally and just for the joy of it, and made it quite remarkable.
The rest of us need to learn and, as you say, it's harder and the discipline chafes us more.
And that is what you say too; there isn't achievement without disciplined learning, except for the Newmanias, and they are rare enough not to be the model schools should be working to; as well, even those who can do it anyway will make nothing of their gift if they are offered nothing to develop and enhance it.
So the remarkable become duller than they might, and the rest of us become ditchwater. And the cruelly denied 40% don't wake up at all.
And yes, there is a wicked strain of seeking mediocrity of outcome which is acceptable in return for martialled minds and a miserable command of our cultural weapons.
I cannot imagine the idea of a word book for every piece of work, the assembling of viewpoints that are tangential but illuminating on a given topic, the consideration of rhetorical device and a series of rough copies until all that becomes second nature when presenting an argument, is part of the school curriculum; and certainly not the consideration of masters of the art and how they set about particular tasks.
There are rhyme books here, some very old; in a small house in the country someone was writing poetry with intent and skill in nearly every generation (pity they're in the wrong language for me).
You and TT are together on no votes for children; but when it comes to state education, there aren't votes for grownups either. Who is listening when what is wanted by the suppliers is being delivered ? Pity about the reading and things.
I just feel that, though it's a definite slippery slope, it was all created by bad fortune rather than design. Bad fortune and also lack of will from those naturally opposed to the erosion of educational standards. The ideology of alleviating individual pain and humiliation was held to be more important than the greater good. And here we are - exactly where many of us said it would get us all those years ago.
As for Newmania's skills I fully agree with you. Perhaps you ought to consider, Hatfield Girl, that his mojo is fully switched on in your presence as he seems to have the hots for you - he never writes on my blog like that.
;-)
Started as poor design, bad fortune and misunderstanding E-K, you're right there, and it was horrible for those who kept getting told to try again, so avoiding that made it worse; pretty deliberate now though. 40% when all that cognitive stuff on knowledge and skill acquisition produced in the last 10, 20 years is there? No, 40% is deliberate.
N's playing literary games at many levels - he can't help it.
I remember being taken to hospital from school with a piece of dry macaroni stuck in my ear. I was bored and I was about eleven - ELEVEN, doing bloody collage with dry peas 'n' stuff ! My geography classes consisted of colouring in charts and talking about crop rotation all the time as taught by a refugee of Idi Amin's regime - that was when she wasn't lecturing us on our 'debt' to the third world. It was a form of indoctrination no doubt about it.
But what of the children who were well educated and passed their 'A' levels ? Weren't the universities they went to the greatest hotbeds of leftism ?
Where our 40% of sub-literates comes from is that generation of graduates (and subsequent) who hadn't the inclination to sit children in rows facing an authoritarian figure at the front and teach them basics by rote ie phonetics and times tables, hence generations of illiterate inumerates - all by default of a well meaning but misguided philosophy. I also feel that ethnicity has had something to do with this too - a lowering of our cultural standards to those of incomers in order to spare hurt feelings. All this was wrong as we see today.
Put simply the social Marxists in our midst doubtless exist but their strength and abilities are overestimated. I do not see one Vladimir Putin among them - perhaps there is such a figure pulling strings from behind the doors of some grand office in Whitehall, I don't know.
My despair is with the paucity of opposition to this decline. The right party could win by a landslide and many of our ills could be cured in a thrice.
A thirteen year old daughter returned from school to report that in her class (which was studying the Roman empire)people in her group had decided that the via Salaria was so called because it had to be heavily salted in winter for the cars. That sort of time-wasting, asking not telling and using teaching techniques appropriate to much younger children, if then, does damage too; the blanket refusal, to carry the pupils beyond their very limited experience, is denial of education. Meant to be studying Romeo and Juliet in another lesson the entire class spent most of the time hotly debating the pros and cons of breast feeding (a choice which was no doubt in their immediate future); daughter's contribution, that she'd try and get a wet nurse like her father had had was met with really angry rejection - you live in the olden days, that's disgusting -, so there's some nasty conformity pressure to their abysmal cultural imaginations too.
People from other cultures do better than many,EK, and other countries with many incomers aren't showing this collapse in standards. As you note, lack of discipline and an absolute requirement for attention and appropriate classroom behaviour is wrecking the life chances of 40% of the children.
Whatever and from whever this failure of an educational philosophy and practice has come - and it was well analysed and discussed during the Thatcher years as well, but attempts to eradicate or even limit it have always failed, it has spilled over onto further generations and into the whole culture of welfare and interference in people's lives.
And it's very, very aggressive, so even teachers who don't think well of it conform to its requirements expressed through their workplace and work structures.
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