Category: Education

Misology in America Part 4 - Gender

Misology in America Part 4 - Gender
By Robert E. Reis

Misology is the hatred of objective knowledge gained by the scrupulous use of the scientific method when it contradicts the political goals, ideology or religious faith of the misologists.

Misologists dominate the discussion of public policies in several areas in the modern world.

In the United States misologists predominate in the media, the universities, the schools, and among the elected politicians and the clergy.

Part One presented evidence that misologists dominate the public discussion of the distribution of the general mental ability factor or IQ in various identifiable human genetic clusterings.

Part Two presented evidence that misologists dominate the public discussion of the health hazards of smoking tobacco.

Part Three documented the stranglehold misologists hold on the public discussion of homosexuality.

This essay will evaluate the evidence for the beliefs that mental ability is equally distributed among men and women and that male oppression is the sole explanation of the failure of women to succeed in many fields in proportion to their numbers.

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Beyond political correctness.  Beyond even whiteness studies.  UPDATED 02.10.07

"The white majority has rights, damn you.”

That’s my short response to all the activists in academia who are guiding the process of white annihilation, physical and moral.  We know the nature of these creatures, and their politics.  We know their terms: if we do not accept to self-annihilate as “supremacists”, as “the privileged”, as “oppressors” but, instead and simply as the people of the West, insist upon our free life, our nature, our rights, our interests, then, automatically, these “educators”, these human dross, label us “haters”.  They allow no resting place to us.  The venomous, reptilian energy of these people knows no stop, nor anything but the prosecution of its own special hatreds (pdf):-

Definitions and Descriptions of Racism

WHITE SUPREMACY: White supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of oppression of continents, nations and peoples of colour by white peoples and nations of the European continent; for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege.

WHITE (as in “white people"): The term white, referring to people, was created by Virginia slaveowners and colonial rulers in the 17th century.  It replaced terms like Christian and Englishman (sic) to distinguish European colonists from Africans and indigenous peoples.  European colonial powers established White as a legal concept after Bacon’s rebellion in 1676 during which indentured servants of European and African descent had united against the colonial elite.  The legal basis of white separated the servant class on the basis of skin color and continental origin.  The creation of “white” meant giving privileges to some, while denying them to others with the justification of biological and social inferiority.

WHITE PRIVILEGE: A privilege is a right, favour, advantage, immunity specially granted to one individual or group. and withheld from another

White privilege is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of: (1) preferential prejudice for or treatment for white people based solely on the colour of their skin color and/or ancestral origin from Europe; and (2) exemption from racial and/or national oppression based on skin colour and/or ancestral origin from Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Arab world.

And two pages on, to put the knife in:-

A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system.  The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.  By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination.

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’

A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called “blaming the victim"). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent.

And on page 8, to close every escape route:-

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The QCA are humble men, with a lot to be humble about

Britain’s World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says.

The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach, the Government said.

But although Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Martin Luther King have also been dropped from the detailed guidance accompanying the curriculum, Sir Winston’s exclusion is likely to leave traditionalists aghast.

There’s no suggestion that WW2 as a whole is being dropped from the curriculum, but it does seem a bit difficult to teach it without reference to three of the conflict’s most crucial leaders. Will they say that Britain wanted to appease Germany, and then all of a sudden had a feat of schizophrenia and decided to make war on it? Or will internal politics still be discussed, albeit with Churchill’s name being scrupulously avoided, like the nitty gritty in a prep school sex education class?

Or...or...will it be all about the Holocaust and the 20m...10m...certainly, definitely 6m (or we’ll extradite you to Austria and lock you up for suspected group libel). And the lamps made from Jewish skin, and the incinerators, and all the other relics of essential activities the Germans obviously prioritised, above getting some labour out of their prisoners, whilst fighting a modern war against larger and better financed opponents. But here I am, trying to apply reason to the Nazis’ actions. Don’t I realise the whole Nazi hierarchy was stark, raving mad?!

It’ easy enough to see what the matter, from the point of view of leftie educationalists, with Churchill was. He spoilt the morality story that is the Holocaust. He was a Euro who mustered the resistance to Hitler, suggesting that Jews owe us much to Euros in gratitude as we to them in compensation. No Euro can be shown so much as sheltering Jews, lest we unleash A Second Hitler.

I suppose from now on Jews will be presented as saving themselves. Maybe the role of the three Israelis and one Israeli dog who enlisted will be emphasised (better ignore those nasty Nazi-supporting Zionists - oh, I know, call them British instead). Or maybe we’ll get educational videos like The Great Escape (from Auschwitz). Modern teens barely know what century WW2 was in, so why shouldn’t they swallow this.

Regardless of how it is played, Churchill’s attempts to unite his country against the Nazis will be all but forgotten. Maybe some stray puff of collective guilt for the Nazi crimes will even attach itself to us. Some gratitude.

A quick review of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Kozol doesn’t explain his role very well, but it seems he is a freelance researcher into minority schools and an apologist for minority student failures. He relies primarily on narrative to try to show that minority schools are underserved by society, but a careful reading just reinforces that minorities are innately ill-equipped to compete in modern society.

Kozol laments the resegregation of schools after a couple of decades of trying to use busing to integrate schools. Integration however failed to improve the academic performance of minorities (Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans). It seems that parents still have an interest in living among people like themselves, and will relocate to communities where their children can go to school with those like them—with a challenging academic program and a safer environment.

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Never mind the Fundies, get the English

From the Daily Mail today:-

Schools with mainly white pupils will be forced to send their children to mix with other races and religions.

A legal duty for schools to promote community relations comes into force in September.

Government guidelines to help them comply could require staff to take children on visits to multi-ethnic schools, stage joint plays and sporting events or twin with other schools.

Ministers said some suburban teenagers had never met a Muslim or Hindu and needed more contact.

Ofsted, the schools watchdog, will be given the power to force schools to comply. Those who do not risk being consigned to a failing list.

Teachers’ leaders said the guidelines were heavy-handed and unnecessary.

The advice says schools should “give their pupils the opportunity to mix with and learn with” pupils from other ethnic, religious and class backgrounds.

Lessons in all subjects should help to teach children tolerance and break down prejudice.

Schools must encourage pupils to strike up e-mail friendships with children at schools with a different racial or religious mix. They should also consider inviting imams and vicars to talk.

... One in five schoolchildren is from an ethnic minority, official figures show. Two per cent of secondary schools and 5 per cent of primary schools in England have no ethnic minority pupils.

Alan Johnson brought in the requirement for schools to “promote community cohesion” after abandoning plans for admissions quotas for faith schools.

The Education Secretary wanted all faith schools to reserve a quarter of places for non-believers but changed the plans after opposition led by the Catholic Church.

Instead, he said schools should be required to demonstrate they are improving community relations.

So the prime-mover of this deeply unwelcome proposal is The Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP, who was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Skills in May 2006.  Here is his ministerial team, among them Jim Knight, who seems to be connected with this particular proposal.

The political provenance of this initiative is the failed attempt to legislate powers for local councils to make new faith schools reserve a quarter of places for children outside the religion.

Johnson defended that attempt by declaring, “There must be a balance between preserving the special quality of faith schools and building greater community cohesion and understanding between different cultures.  By opening up a proportion of places to children of different faiths where local communities wish this, we will help create a system where all faith schools play a full part in the education of local children.”

The principle involved in this seemed clear at the time, even if it was not directly enunciated by ministers for fear of inflaming Pakistan in the North.  Islamic schools narrow their pupils’ understanding of the majority way of life.  Experience of the Kufr and the Kufr’s faith might tell little Moslem mites not only something about the England in which they were domiciling, but about themselves, their teachers and even some of the Suraw.

Now, it was not a particularly good proposal.  Natural balkanisation is better.  And the Bishops took it as an attack by secular leftists on faith schools per se, which is certainly not what Johnson said.  But the implicit focus seemed to me to be in the right place for once.

The new proposal, however, is quite different.  Now we are not talking any more, even implicitly, about challenging Islamic fundamentalism.  It’s the English instinct to separate that ministers find offensive.  The old, self-hating leftist twitch is back.

Well, in my unending quest to be charitable to politicians I persuaded a certain John Standing (who, you will understand, is someone extremely well-known to me but, strangely, to no other living being) to e-mail Lucky Jim the Schools Minister and his Tory Shadow, Nick Gibb MP.  Nothing too complicated.  I don’t want to tax their limited intellectual resources:-

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Schools Slow in Closing Gap Between Races

J. Philippe Rushton posted [evol-psych yahoo] the above article by Sam Dillon in the New York Times regarding the much heralded closing of the intelligence gap between Blacks and Whites (11/20/2006). Dillon states “Still the studies have all concurred: the achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.” It was mentioned that there have been six recent studies published on this issue, I just read four, and I believe I read the other two a couple of months ago. Nothing new really, except that the expected closing of “the gap” (PDF) just isn’t going to happen.

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Non-white headmaster + 98% white school + virulent anti-racism = what, exactly?

Doctor (of?) Anthony Edkins is not English.  He is, however, headmaster of the very English Harrop Fold School in Worsley, Manchester.  He is really rather keen on anti-racism, and appears to have taken to himself and his staff the task of instilling this charming philosophy in his lucky pupils.

The result is that Harrop Fold is rapidly becoming the most heavy-handed, notoriously white-hating school in the country.  Last April, a 10-year old boy who, allegedly, had called an 11-year-old mixed-race pupil a ‘Paki’, ‘Bin Laden’ and ‘nigger’ during a playground argument was charged with “a racially aggravated public order offence”.  When the case came before the court, District Judge Jonathan Finestein remarked, “This is how stupid the whole system is getting.  I was repeatedly called fat at school.  Does this amount to a criminal offence?  It’s crazy.” (For this opinion, let it be said, he received the due amount of contumely from the educrats).

It is a law of liberal life, though, that extremists, left unchecked, will unfailingly push their luck too far.  The brown-skinned Edkins, who inevitably describes his school as “vibrant”, has succeeded in this mighty ambition.  It’s surely all downhill for neo-Marxist fanaticism at Harrop Fold from here:-

Schoolgirl arrested for refusing to study with non-English pupils

A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English.

Codie Stott’s family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers.

The 14-year-old - who was released without charge - said it had been a simple matter of commonsense and accused the school and police of an over-the-top reaction.

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A tale of two Sandys

Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, only just ennobled, not yet detached from his political roots, not yet one of the great and good:-

It is a great honour and nice to be associated with a part of Kent where I live and where the countryside and traditional villages are so wonderfully and uniquely Kentish.  I will be fighting Kent’s corner in the Lords.  Of course, to all my friends, colleagues and people in Kent I hope I remain just Sandy.

Now, it happens that Kent’s corner includes an impressive clutch of selective Grammar Schools that have been fighting for their existence for forty years.

So, surely the new Conservative peer must want to see Kent’s precious senior schools protected from the egalitarians and social engineers?  He must be a believer in the good Conservative principle of rewarding ability?  And that of parental choice.

But here’s Lord Bruce Lockhart after a few months of exposure to the ermine and altruism:-

Proactive admissions policies could be used to establish a better ethnic balance in schools.  In towns where the totality of the minority ethnic population is 15 per cent of the whole, we should consider the use of numbers in admissions policies.

We have to get to a situation where people regard the total ethnicity of a town as being represented in schools, otherwise we are never going to be properly integrated.

Children start off being colour-blind and this is a wonderful thing.  But if you have schools where the children are being educated in different ethnic groups you are going to lose that and you are simply not going to have integration.

If we are to have stable communities and to prevent the rise of the far Right, our job now is to put all these issues on the table and open a public debate.

The first question I would ask is precisely how “just Sandy”, the Conservative councillor and all round good guy, metamorphosed into a MultiCult leftist.

No choices left

The cleavage between right- and left-liberalism can be summed up in a word: choice.  When people are encouraged to make their own choices they somehow never make the ones that the social engineers require.

School choice ‘means classroom ghettos’

Giving consumers choice in public services - and particularly in schools - is causing acute risks to racial equality.

That, at least, is the view of the Commission for Racial Equality which warns that Tony Blair’s commitment to increasing choice undermines that other current political mantra of increasing integration.

Indeed, it’s feared that choice will encourage racial segregation in an already highly segregated country.

This report was a special feature on BBC 1 evening news.  Mark Easton examined the educational divide in Blackburn, where ...

22% of the population come from ethnic minorities but 90% of non-white primary school children go to overwhelmingly non-white schools - up from 60% in just six years.

In secondary schools too, segregation is increasing.

Twenty-five years ago Pleckgate High School was predominantly white.

Today, 30% of pupils are white and the latest intake is 20% white.

“It is the parental choice that is having the main impact,” says head teacher Robin Campbell.

“How do you resolve that? We are then into the realms of social engineering and I don’t think that would work in any borough

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National liberation anyone?

Liberals believe in freedom, surely? That’s what they keep on telling us reactionary, bigoted authoritarians. A number of students at Warwick L’Uni might just disagree, however:

Students at Warwick University have been banned from flying the England flag ahead of this month’s World Cup, it emerged today.
Students have been told that no flags can be displayed at windows before or after the tournament, and that flags of countries which did not qualify - such as Scotland - may not be flown at all.

The university authorities are worried that flying the flag might cause tension between students of different nationalities who live in the halls.

In other words, the ethnic situation at the university is so volatile that even the slightest reminder of the existence of another nation might send many of its students into a genocidal rage. Given what I think about Warwick University, this surprises me not in the slightest.

But surely the university, multiculti authorities should hesitate before admitting that its students are this hate-filled and intolerant of all nationalites other than their own. Might throw a spanner into the wheels of the Undivertable Enlightened Train, mightn’t it?

This is especially sweet and meet as Warwick has long carved for itself a niche as the most “tolerant”, “inclusive”, etc of L’Uni bins. Tolerance? For randy homosexuals, but not for patriotic Englishmen- or indeed patriotic anyones. Inclusive? It effectively excludes from its dominant culture the vast majority of all Englishmen.

The students in question sound like imminently sensible fellows, especially for a place like Warwick, with one exception. One of them said:

The university have treated us with contempt. They originally told us we weren’t allowed flags at all because flags might create an opportunity for violence.

International students have chosen to come to this country so I don’t think they will have a problem with the English flag.

I wouldn’t bet on it. Only too many British residents of a certain extraction regard ther penetration of the West as a continuation of the battle they lost at the Gates of Vienna. But then, given their disorderly behaviour, they aren’t particularly likely to be university students.

One of the ignominies inflicted by the West on its colonial holdings was the denial to them of expressions of their nationality. As I have written before, our ethnic guests are increasingly acting like our pith-helmeted masters.

I have had the doctrine of national liberation rammed into my eyelids by Leftie teachers: why, pray tell, does it not apply to the English?

Is the new psychiatric State coming to YOU?

A report from Canada:

The case of a 12-year-old Longueuil boy suspended from school when his mother refused to give him Ritalin has sparked concerns over who is in charge of the medicine cabinet.  Do parents have the right to say “no” when their child’s school says they need prescription drugs?  “Absolutely, they do,” said Montreal family law lawyer Alan Stein.  However, Stein said, some parents second-guess themselves when a teacher or school social worker recommends Ritalin, a drug that stimulates the central nervous system and is used mainly to treat attention deficit disorder.

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Can this be true?

Bring back segregation!.  “District 10 supervisor candidate Charlie Walker yesterday called for creation of a separate San Francisco school system for African Americans.  Separating blacks from whites is necessary because current education of African Americans is not working, Walker told the Sentinel.  “I am hoping seriously that we consider separating blacks from whites because it’s not working,” Walker reflected.  “What good did it do us to demonstrate to get our freedom when we didn’t get nothing out of it.  “The women, the gays, the Asians, the Latinos - they got it and we’re still sitting around here. In San Francisco alone, 42% of our people are unemployed.”

An English nanny

Expatriate Afrikaners living in the pleasant and prosperous southern English counties of Sussex and Hampshire are complaining about censorship on the internet.  (If by any chance you read Afrikaans see here.) One young man tried to access various SA web-sites from his school in Hampshire, and then again from a library.  But the response was a large STOP sign and below it the text:-

“County Council deems this site as Radical, and hence access is denied”

The words “restricted on the grounds of hate/prejudice” also appeared together with the tempting invitation, “if you have a question regarding our policy, please e-mail us at ”

So it is the hand of over-mighty government.

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Integrated Public Schools Bad For Blacks Too

Harvard’s Roland Fryer takes on the conventional wisdom that diversity is strength in public schools:

It appears that in integrated public schools, “acting white”—getting higher than average grades—does in fact lead to social consequences for black students. However, in private schools and unintegrated public schools this does not appear to be the case. Apparently, the social context of integrated public schools lends itself to an “oppositional culture” where blacks reinforce cultural norms in opposition to the norms of the dominant social class to self-identify.

So white flight from the diverse public schools may be good for the black students “left behind” in those public schools.  Of course, the politically correct fundamentalists would say it doesn’t matter how many black students suffer since integration is an overriding moral goal.  Integrate now, observe the damage and then try various things to lower the damage.  If it takes a generation, two, three… lost to the experiments with our children’s lives to get it right—so be it.  Sacrifices must be made.

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Ethnic studies

Comment from Jim Paine

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me as I’ve delved deeper into Ward Churchill’s writings and the general field of Ethnic Studies, it is that Ethnic Studies is little more than an academic echo chamber dominated by a few loud voices, Churchill’s being among the loudest. Now, most fields of study are similarly repetitious, but what makes the Ethnic Studies echo chamber particularly troublesome is that many of the academics within the field are not academics at all, but rather, they are political activists with teaching jobs.

Why is this so? I won’t go into the emergence of professorial activism, since that subject has been covered thoroughly here. Suffice it to say that since the ‘60s, the Humanities in general and Ethnic Studies in particular (requiring as it does so little real scholarship) have attracted vast numbers of otherwise unemployable activists. The short hours, the long breaks, the ample salaries, and the endless opportunities to inculcate gullible students with one’s beliefs make this a near-perfect safe-house from which to conduct one’s real business of political activism.

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Bussing vibrancy to the middle-class English

In my not wholly affectionate paean of two days ago to the people’s Prime Minister, Anthony Lynton Blair, I called attention to his government’s not wholly noble or far-sighted educational policies.

They are, you see, a bit strong on the old social engineering, especially if you happen to be middle-class and would prefer little Twystrum and Tabitha to be schooled with other English children like themselves.  It’s so much easier if their new little friends haven’t got to flop down in the direction of Folkestone five times a day or haven’t started thinking about sex yet.  But that doesn’t mean that all those other funny little fellas aren’t jolly nice little chaps, too.  Oh no, no, no.

And, certainly, it doesn’t mean that the Prime Minister’s courageous policies aren’t slap bang out of the centre of British politics.  As we all know, he really, really is a moderate, centre-of-the-road sort of guy.  After all, he gets criticised – actually criticised – for gluing himself to the latest focus group findings.  I mean , how consensualist is that?

Or this?

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University official sentenced for child porn, blackmail

Diversity and Equality Commissar Ronald Sinacore, age 56, has been sentenced to only 8 years in prison by Circuit Court Judge Jane Roush, who reduced a recommended 14 years. Sinacore told the court he was “deeply ashamed” of videotaping himself having sex with several young men in his home and campus office – and then trying to blackmail them.

This is how much George Mason paid the homosexual pedophile.

When I find a photo I’ll post it, in the mean time I hope he enjoys his stay in prison.

Update: A more moderate Geoff Beck? Ok. But....  see comments.

And it’s only geography for thirteen year olds

This is how my 13 year old daughter, who attends a private school in the south of England, is taught to comprehend the workings of Western business among the nice folk of sub-Saharan Africa.  It is a cartoon which liberal educationalists and text book authors Rosemarie Gallagher and Richard Parrish consider relevant to Key Stage Three Geography.  They put it in a text book with the catchy title “geog3” which they have co-written.

I am aware, of course, that there is much worse going on in other subject areas.  I am not holding up this petty product of modern leftism, which I’ve been examining this evening at my daughter’s request, as an especially egregious example of the propagandist’s art.  It is, I fear all too average.

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“Dual Immersion” Madness

A logical corollary of being an America-hater (a common phenomenon among intellectuals such as teachers) is a hatred of America’s language—which is English.  So the fact that there are now a lot of Spanish-speakers in America who need to learn English is used as an excuse to teach Spanish instead!  And “dual immersion” is the fiercest form of that—where not only Spanish kids but also Anglo kids are taught in Spanish!  And it’s happening.  They’re even trying to introduce it in Utah.  Note the following report (excerpts):

“As the Washington County School District continues to explore the possibility of teaching both English and Spanish at a local elementary school, Principal Dale Porter met with Spanish-speaking parents Thursday evening at Dixie Downs Elementary to discuss the program. Called “dual immersion,” the program would teach classes of evenly balanced English- and Spanish-speakers. Both language groups would learn the other language just as English is now taught in district elementary schools.... Those who live in Dixie Downs’ boundaries will not be required to participate and may choose another school in the district to attend.... Porter explained how all students in the program learn a foreign language - either English or Spanish - and how both language populations benefit from each other. The languages are taught simultaneously by bilingual teachers.”

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Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, September 17, 2005 at 10:06 AM in Education
Comments (7) | Tell-a-Friend

Death of a school

Ten years ago Moreland City College in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg had an enrolment of over 1000 students. Last year numbers had fallen to 270 and the school was closed.

Why? It seems that multiculturalism didn’t work in this Coburg school. A group of highly disruptive students gave the school a bad reputation from which it never recovered. And there is now evidence that these disruptive students were Lebanese Muslims who hated Australia and wanted to replace it with an Islamic state.

A former teacher, Chris Doig, tried to raise the alarm when some of his students danced with joy after the September 11 attacks. His concerns were ignored by authorities. Mr Doig said of these Lebanese students that “Some of the disruptive ones would say that Australia was degenerate and our legal system would be replaced by Shariah law in the not too distant future.”

He also said of the disgruntled students that “Some of these were so disruptive and even violent that staff and other students abandoned the school when they could.”

Nor is Mr Doig a lone voice. Two other teachers have supported his claims. One of these says that the disruptive students used to boast that Australia would become a majority Islamic country in 50 years. “They would do this by converting the infidel and by out-breeding the rest of the community.”

The elephant in the class room

Unlike those who stick with the MSM, MR readers know that liberalism, like love, is blind.  “Deprived children”, “rich and poor”, “inner city areas” ... the tiresome political trash-talk trips of the liberal tongue quicker - much quicker - than Chris Brand could say, “IQ?” But it was ever thus, and will be so as long as blacks and Moslems live among us, and as long as our taxes can be so pleasurably squandered on them by people like:-

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, will today admit that billions of pounds of Labour investment in improving school facilities since 1998 has failed to narrow the “class gap”.

In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, she will signal a fundamental shift in policy away from investment in deprived schools, to investment targeted more specifically at pupils in those schools who need the most help.

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Perverted Norwegians

This one should send Mark ballistic:  Sex-ed urged for 5-year-olds

A clinic that specializes in sex education and offers free birth control for youth in Oslo thinks sex education should begin while small children are still in local kindergartens.  “I think that the last year of kindergarten is absolutely the time to start providing simple information and answers to the many questions children have,” Siv Gamnes, head of the clinic (KSO, Klinikk for seksuell opplysning) told radio station P4 on Tuesday.  “There’s a lot of things they’re wondering about, and we can answer why boys and girls are different, and how a baby is created,” Gamnes added.

Most Norwegian children start attending kindergartens, or day-care centers, as toddlers and continue until formal schooling begins at the age of six. Gamnes doesn’t think age five is too early to start talking about sex.  That’s because she’s experienced a lot of misinformation among the youth who seek help at KSO.  “By the 10th grade, when many start getting sex education, many of the students are already sitting with information that’s wrong,” she said. “We have to ‘un-teach’ them before we can start teaching them.” Starting early with sex education can help prevent children from getting wrong information that they can go around believing for a long time, Gamnes said.

Source

The vanishing male teacher

This looks like a good one for Mark.  With child abuse accusations being what they are, I think men who go into teaching should be given a medal for heroism

When she interviews teaching candidates, principal Laurel Telfer favors the ones who show they have a heart for children, not just solid instructional skills. And if the best applicant happens to be a man?  That’s such a plus that Telfer says she does a “little happy dance.” Only two of the 35 teachers at her school, Rossmoor Elementary in Los Alamitos, California, are men.  “If you’re looking at what’s best for the students, it’s important for them to interact with the two sexes,” Telfer said. “The way men work with kids, there’s a difference in style and approach. I think students really benefit from having that mix, because as they get to middle school, they’re going to have a whole variety of classes. Men help bridge that.”

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British education and the London bombings

Below is a suggestion that appeared on a mailing list that I am on.  Following that is my own comment to the list

In all the articles I’ve read since the London terror attacks asking the question, “Why have Muslim youths become radicalized?”, Burhan Wazir’s article in today’s “Times” is the first that even comes close to answering the question:-

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Skirts now incorrect

Mark will love this one:  What’s the betting that the Headmistress concerned is lesbian?  And does it spell doom for Scotsmen wearing the kilt?

A UK middle high school has introduced a ban on skirts for girls, bringing in so-called gender-neutral dress that requires all pupils to wear pants, beginning this fall.

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