The Last Ditch

Pupils 'pass' language exam without speaking

Link: Pupils 'pass' language exam without speaking - Telegraph.

I know the main thesis of libertarianism is too tough for most people to accept. We have been conditioned by 60 years of Socialist government to believe that a caring society requires a powerful state. Indeed, most of us hopelessly confuse "society" and "state," assuming that every power given to government will be used skilfully and in good faith. Even if you can't accept that there should - as a matter of principle - be severe limits to state power, perhaps you can accept that there are areas in which the state is simply incompetent? Perhaps we can, case by miserable case, scale back state power?

If exams were set by competing private companies, they would need to be credible in order to build a brand. Some people might - of course - elect to take EaziExam Limited's "chav special" papers, just as some people will (amazingly) buy a Lada. However, everyone would know what such a qualification was worth, when compared with the competing ToughCorp product.

Politicians running a state education system should obviously not be in charge of monitoring its performance. It's simple common sense. If they are, they are bound to rig the statistics. Could  anyone really be so naieve as to expect otherwise? Yet that is the situation in Britain. Through its control of the National Curriculum the Education Ministry has now engineered a situation where you can get an EaziExam® qualification in French, without having written a single French sentence or having been subjected to the "stress" of uttering a word of the language to a stranger. The situation is no better in other subjects. But, unless you attend a private school working towards independent qualifications such as the International Baccalaureate, you have no "ToughCorp" option.

We can argue all day (if you are buying the drinks) about whether the state has a place in certifying the accuracy of petrol pumps or in lecturing children about the dangers of drugs. You may find it hard to accept my view that there is no need for a state education system at all. But surely you must agree that setting exams is outside its competence?

Study finds commercialism harms Britain's kids

Link: Study finds commercialism harms Britain's kids - Telegraph.

Why does a serious, supposedly right wing, newspaper give credence to a study producing anti-capitalist results, commissioned by the National Union of Teachers? For that matter, why should anyone take seriously an organisation telling us that "Commercialism" is bad for our children, when it also tells us that comprehensive education is good for them?

Frankly, I am much more concerned about the political propaganda which occupies so much of the curriculum in Britain's schools. I rather doubt that the NUT will be sounding alarm bells about that any time soon.

One part of this story did make me smile. The report informs us that

Nearly a third are unhappy with how they look.

I am surprised the Puritans of the NUT are not onto the problem. Surely physical attractiveness is "elitist", "divisive" and "unfair?" That more than two-thirds think they look just fine must be unacceptable!

[Note: to buy the book featured in the image (at a knock-down price which delivers the market's verdict on its thesis) click here.]

UK 'one of worst countries for social mobility'

Link: UK 'one of worst countries for social mobility' | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

According to Labour's "Schools Minister," Jim Knight (my emphasis);

"While we continue to see a flow of negative speculation about the current state of education, the facts tell a different story. Pupils achieved the highest ever GCSE results for English and maths - meaning 62,000 more left school in 2006 equipped with the basics than in 1997."

Now let's see. Which is better? academic research (aka "negative speculation") or assertions by Ministers based on data their government has rigged (aka "the facts")? Fortunately as one of those "working class children born in the 1950's" who had a better chance than his peers today, I don't have to answer the question. I know the answer because I have lived it.

Nothing and no-one has done the educational opportunities of the working class in Britain more harm than the Labour Party. I suspect that Harriet Harman knows that full well, as her choices for her own children prove.

Edukashun, Edookayshen, Education

Link: Willetts must have known it would horrify Party | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph.

All three comment pieces in the Daily Telegraph today were about the Tory Party and grammar schools. Alice Thomson says it best however, with these words

The Tories seem to have ditched what they always held dear - a belief that those who worked hard and were talented would be rewarded - to embrace the socialist principle that all must have prizes

Boris Johnson, usually the Conservative Party's voice of sanity, for all his Eton-nurtured capacity for intellectual wrangling is unable to save the party from Willett's appalling gaffe. It was a speech that did not need to be made. No potential Conservative voter is pleased by it. Secretly, I suspect that, despite the huge opportunity presented for mischief - a goal so open that even the talentless Prescott couldn't miss it  - few Labourites are either.

For Conservatives, health is the third rail of British politics. In our hearts, we know that only Labour could ever reform the National Health Service. The Conservatives have only to mention it for voters to panic. One day, God willing, it will be Labour's destiny to clean up the mess it made of British healthcare. The last 10 years have simply shown us that it is not yet that day.

That is not true for education. Comprehensive schools are a greater disaster for Labour voters than for Conservatives. The working classes of the North of England have no hope of buying themselves either into a private school or the catchment area of a less foul State school. A Conservative government could, by reforming schools, do something for them that Labour never can, because education is for them as the NHS is for us. They are secretly waiting for us to solve the problem.

Until Willetts put his foot in his mouth, that hope alone kept alive minority Tory votes in Labour heartlands that could one day have been built upon. No-one even seems to have noticed that many of our immigrants in the past 20 years are from communities, such as the Indians and the Chinese, who value education much more highly than the native English. Their votes are up for grabs too. Immigrants are naturally more aspirational; naturally more Tory.

Boris tell us that the end of Grammar schools was politically inevitable in a democracy because;

it became an arithmetical and electoral certainty, over time, that the rejects outnumbered the successful

What tosh. He should not fall into the elitist trap of describing those who failed to get into Grammar Schools as "rejects." In doing so he  defames the work of generations of dedicated teachers  who were able to provide excellent education to those who went to Secondary Modern schools; education carefully targetted to their abilities.

I was taught by some of them. I took the 11+ but my area went comprehensive that year and I was never told the results. Instead, I was sent to the local secondary modern school - rebadged as a comprehensive. There were some superb teachers there, doing their best. They were as bemused by me as no doubt the Grammar School teachers in the next town were by some of their new intake. However, they had long shaped the destinies of the majority of children in my town. Their former pupils were respectable, hard-working and better-educated than their children and grandchildren are today. They are the ones failed by Anthony "I will close every fucking grammar school" Crosland's public school ultra-leftism, every bit as much as people like me.

As for the electoral arithmetic, what defeatism on Boris's part! The kind of ignorant chavs who think that selective schools are wrong because their little Shane, Wayne or Sheena will never pass an exam will not only never vote Conservative, but will probably never vote at all. They are irrelevant. It's all about triangulation, Boris. Margaret's policy to steal Labour votes was to sell council houses. Everyone was astonished by the aspirational instincts she unleashed in the Labour heartlands. Your equivalent could be the restoration of educational opportunity to the working class.

No-one, in their hearts, truly believes in comprehensive schools. Don't listen to what Labour politicians say about it. Look at what they do when it comes to their own children. Cherie Blair, Diane Abbott, Ruth Kelly and Polly Toynbee would be secretly delighted if selective State education was brought back. Of course they won't say so. They will kick, scream and defame, but so what? Triangulate them and move on.

Willetts has a point to precisely this extent. It is best not to hark back to the past. We should not speak of "Grammar Schools" or "the 11+". We need new branding and some less crude (and less final) selection mechanism. If he will apply his two brains to devising such a system; one that Kent Conservatives would accept instead of their Grammar Schools, he will be on to an election-winner.

More than anything else, this is what the Conservatives can do for Britain's future. No nation can long survive the huge waste of human potential represented by the present system. To compete in the world, we need to maximise the potential of every pupil. Even the Socialists know it in their hearts. Even as they ranted against us, they would be secretly, guiltily glad that we had saved their grandchildren from Crosland's evil legacy.

Tories to 'sever links' with academic selection

Link: Tories to 'sever links' with academic selection | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

Perhaps to a shadow education secretary who went to the King Edward's School in Birmingham and a leader of the Opposition who went to Eton College this makes some sense. Perhaps to them, embracing the failed educational radicalism of the 1960's is in some way hip. To someone who actually went to a comprehensive school, it is nothing less than a betrayal.

Nothing has damaged Britain more in my lifetime than comprehensive education. Ask my young relative who was reduced to pleading with his teacher to be allowed to work in a store cupboard so that he could be away from the chaos in his classroom. Ask Frank Chalk. The Soviet Union was never so ultra-left as to believe that one size fits all when it comes to schooling. The British Conservative Party is now officially to the left of the CPSU.

If the Grammar School system "entrenches advantage", why has social mobility declined since it was - for the most part - abolished? According to research from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science;

• In a comparison of eight European and North American countries, Britain and the United States have the lowest social mobility
• Social mobility in Britain has declined whereas in the US it is stable
• Part of the reason for Britain's decline has been that the better off have benefited disproportionately from increased educational opportunity

The researchers concluded that social mobility has declined over the last 30 years in Britain and that this is in part due to:

the strong and increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment

Precisely the relationship in fact  that was, for a brief time in British education, broken by the Grammar Schools. Comprehensive schools are so destructive of working class opportunity that they might as well have been designed to keep clever working class children "in their place."  Sometimes, I think they were.

h/t Bel is Thinking

The Failings of Grayling (Part 2)

In fairness to Professor Grayling, this post could be written about most British academics. I only single him out because I have been reading one of his books,  “The Meaning of Things.” I read it in response to his rebuke that I had judged him harshly on too little data. He is, alas, neither better nor worse than the average British academic.

Consider, for example, Roger Scruton's observations based on an academic career partly at the same college as Grayling;

By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.

One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair’s behest , with the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of “Companion of Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honour to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. We should ponder some of the other recipients of honorary degrees from British academic institutions—Robert Mugabe, for example, or the late Mrs. Ceausescu—or count (on the fingers of one hand) the number of conservatives who are elected to the British Academy.

While Grayling is intelligent and articulate the abiding impression left by his book is that he is unremarkable in his thinking. His opinions are as groomed as his flowing locks. There is no cliché out of place. Had he spent his life shaping his views to qualify as one of “the Great and the Good” of our Establishment, this is precisely where he would have arrived. One can predict his view on almost any given subject without effort.

The failings of Grayling (Part 1)

I have just read Professor A.C. Grayling's book The Meaning of Things. The book is a collection of his pieces published as "Last Word" columns in The Guardian. If you feel ideologically out of place in modern Britain you should read it. It will not make you feel less alienated, but it will explain a great deal.

You would not know it from reading this book, but those of us who fear for liberty in Britain owe Professor Grayling a debt. In the very heart of our darkness (the Guardian's Comment is Free columns) he has written strong words against New Labour's attacks on civil liberties. He has exposed the Right Honourable Anthony Charles Steven Lynton Blair's twisted thinking on ID cards and the Database State. He has articulated what so many of us in the British political blogosphere feel in our wrenched guts, which is that New Labour is an enemy of individual freedom. Only an academic could be surprised by that. Almost a century of history has taught the rest of us that those who despise carrots inevitably favour sticks.  Yet an English academic capable of writing the following is worthy of our respect:

But no amount of giving away hard-won, long-standing civil liberties is going to defend us against the tiny minority of criminals and lunatics who can, if determined enough, do us harm. The right response to them is not to hide away behind generally ineffective laws that restrict our freedoms but to assert our freedoms boldly and to live them courageously.

He is also sound on the subject of free speech, as this quotation from an online interview at Three Monkeys Online (in which he was asked about the imprisonment of David Irving for holocaust denial) shows:

I have no time for revisionists and Nazi apologists, and in so far as Irving is such (and is provenly at least the former), I have no time for him. But it was quite wrong to put him in prison for his unsavoury views. The freedom of free speech results in our hearing plenty of things we do not like, but the right way to combat bad free speech is with more and better free speech, not with the law and certainly not with imprisonment or censorship.

Professor Grayling took me to task for lack of intellectual rigour when I set out my first impressions of him after hearing him speak at my daughter's school. He commented that:

Evidently you don't read widely enough, listen hard enough, or take enough care over the assumptions you make.

I have tried and will continue to try to respond positively to that rebuke. It is taking a while. I am no aristocrat of academia. The people pay no tithe so that I may read, research and think without distraction. I have a business to run, a heavy schedule of travel and a family with which I like to spend time. I have read more of his writing however and in the light of the articles cited above, I accept that it was entirely wrong to describe him as;

an apologist for New Labour's and now Blue Labour's despotic approaches to government.

I did not, indeed, take enough care over the assumptions I made when writing that. I apologise unreservedly.

Professor Grayling balks at the extremes to which the Rt Hon. Anthony C.S.L. Blair has taken New Labour thinking. Having read The Meaning of Things, however, I fear he must take his share of the blame. He has, together with so many fellow-academics with "a permanent list to port', helped fertilise the intellectual soil in which Blair's political bindweed has flourished.

TO BE CONTINUED

What is the point of blogging?

Why am I still here? As I watched the British prisoners suck down to the murderous pixie who leads Iran, my reasons for political blogging died. Britain’s educationalists, for so long more dangerous than any external enemy, have triumphed. Those young sailors and marines displayed the cultural cringe that must now betray us all. Faced with a deadly enemy, they saw an equally-valid culture as worthy of respect as our own.

They  probably, as one of my readers commented,  "don't know who Nelson was". However, I am sure they know all about Britain’s “wicked” imperial past. They will know everything of her role in the slave trade, save for abolishing it within her empire (only the second country to do so) and then using her navy to suppress it elsewhere. They will not know that the Anti-Slavery Squadron of the navy in which they now serve liberated 160,000 slaves between 1811 and 1867 off the coast of Africa.

They probably don't know the history of people abducted into slavery by Muslim rulers from British ships and English coastal towns. They will know, however, of every time their country has fallen short of the high standards set by Ghana, Nigeria or the Islamic world. They will also know, in their guts, that Islamophobia is a terrible thing, though they will not be able to explain why. Frankly, they will have been so brainwashed that you could stick “ophobia” after anything you liked and they would be automatically unmanned.

Why then should they risk a beating - or even the indignity of being mocked for their resemblance to Mr Bean - for a country they have been taught to despise? A country which suspects anyone who respects its flag of being a fascist?

If (happy fantasy) we could now purge our Ministry of Education, Universities, teacher training colleges and the staff rooms of our bog-standard schools, where could we find the people to replace those we defenestrated disinfiltrated? Generations have been lost to this self-loathing indoctrination. As Show of Hands sing in their song Roots;

We learn to be ashamed before we walk,

Of the way we look and the way we talk

The great public schools now teach to the same National Curriculum and even independent-minded teachers tell pupils not to lose marks by, for example, critiquing the poems from different cultures added to the GCSE English curriculum.

“Yes I know it’s technically poor dear, but there are no marks for saying so.”

Our decline and fall will not even feature the fun and games with which Ancient Rome distracted itself at its end. If you Google for examples, it becomes hard to argue that England is hopelessly decadent. Puritanism is still a powerful negative force and every description of a pleasure, even in the advertisments for spas and resorts, is accompanied by a ritual justification to do with how hard we all work. The English don't feel they deserve pleasure. We are unlikely even to fiddle as London burns.

When our time comes, I fear that as a nation we will submit as meekly to dhimmitude as the 15 submitted in Tehran. Perhaps one day, from the ashes of an Islamic Republic, a new England will rise.

Until then, is there any point in wasting breath, ink or bandwidth?

TO BE CONTINUED.

Educational Conscription

Link: Educational Conscription: Pity the poor teachers.

If like me, you feel that someone old enough to marry, have a family or serve his country in the armed forces is old enough to make his own choices about education or training, please sign this petition. Anticipating the usual cynical comments, please understand that I know it's probably a waste of time. I agree that it will probably make no difference to a government so undemocratic that its "online consultation" on the subject offers no negative options to most of the questions!

But if I didn't believe it was better to light a candle than curse the darkness, why would I write this blog? And if you didn't believe it, why would you be reading it?

University policies that filter out middle classes

Link: University policies that filter out middle classes | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

Little did we think when we decided to send our children to a private school that we would be subjecting them to Cultural Revolution-type selection under which they would be punished for being "cosmopolitan elements" rather than "good proletarians."

The joke, in our case, is that both parents are "good" proletarians (as if such nonsense matters). We were the first members of our respective working-class families to go to university. So we could have saved ourselves the biggest single expenditure of our lives, sent them to the local comp and watched them waltz (given their native talents) into Oxbridge on the basis of their exemplary class origins.

That would not have affected our decision. A good education is not a merit badge or a step to some career; it is an important end in itself. We know from direct, bitter experience that it could not have been guaranteed at the sort of State schools my wife and I attended (and in which she later had the misfortune to teach).

As it turns out, an additional benefit of educating them privately is that they can now learn about the all-important role of victim status in British society. Such status may sometimes (as in this example) provide short-term benefits. However, the moral debilitation involved in laying claim to it will always outweigh the advantages. The debased British educational Establishment is now unwittingly offering my children this lesson.

Frankly, I am more concerned at present about the Principal of their school. At a meeting for Lower Sixth parents' last weekend she managed to make the two following statements, within seconds of each other, without apparent embarrassment;

"Despite what you read in the papers there is no discrimination. However, it is true that your children may face more demanding entry requirements."

Logically, only one of these statements can be true. It seems she has learned doublethink, a key skill in British education.

From statistics provided by her assistant, it seems the school maintains a higher than average success rate in obtaining offers from all universities except Edinburgh, which now openly discriminates on ethnic grounds. Presumably, if it were not for less demanding entry requirements for State school pupils, that rate would be even higher. Our children will find themselves at University alongside students who did not (by the standards applied to them) deserve their places. Yet another free lesson in life from the British State.

Recruitement to universities on a social, rather than academic, basis must inevitably debase the educational currency.