Majorityrights Central > Category: Education

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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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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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.”

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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There was a fleeting moment during my curious boyhood when it seemed possible that I might actually transmogrify into … an academic pupil.  I treasure the memory.  Purley Grammar School for Boys it was, on a September day in the late 1960’s.  An upstairs classroom overlooking the quad.  Chalk dust caught in the sunlight, rows of ink-stained desks, twenty uninterested, fish-eyed youths, Dougie Firmer and old Nicholson.

Dougie was the school genius.  It was already accepted that he was on his way in two years to Cambridge and then some top-Gag career in the higher etherium of the State.  Frankly, we were in awe not only of his intelligence but of his quite unreal urbanity.  Not only was he all brilliant polish for a seventeen year-old but he was brilliantly funny, too, and a natural mimic and extemporiser.  If by chance after the boiled ham and carrots he’d begin to extemporise in the lower sixth common room on the subject, say, of how old Jewitt got his limp or Rainforth his taste in shoes everyone quieted down instantly.  You knew to shut your silly prattle when Dougie gave forth, and belly-laugh with the best.

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If our universities - and, indeed, schools - are to recover we will need a new Thatcher, but all three parties offer us only Lenins.

Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham

On a day when Prince Charles spoke for us all and Charles Clarke spoke for the rest, I was pleased to find that John Ray had got there ahead of them.

He reported this article by English lecturer Joanna Williams.  She has come to the realisation that this government’s great drive for social inclusion is counter-educational.

Inclusion is, of course, code for equality.  But it’s code that we, as nice, decent, high-minded people are not meant to quibble with.  After all, who would protest at something so soft-focus, so clearly well-intentioned and humane as inclusion, whereas an awful lot of us will bitterly contest the harder, politically divisive issue of “equality” – be it of opportunity or outcome.  No, inclusion is a useful word, a real asset for the left.  We need to unpick the meaning of it ruthlessly because the meaning of it is that classic dictatorship of the proletariat: the lowest common denominator.

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Americans who don’t realize how traditional complexities often linger in England in spite of the left/liberal tendency of British politics are surprised by the persistence of faith schools there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, though, that the secular and multicultural commitments of the British state have now made faith schools an issue, or that the issue has its practical complexities that reflect something more general than peculiar English conditions.

The practical problem is that secular multicultural education is always bad, at least on any large scale, because schools of that kind can’t have educational goals that are more sustaining than pliability on the one hand and the effective pursuit of self-interest on the other. If the moral world consists solely of the conflicting purposes of various people, then you either teach children to do what they’re told or you teach them to get what they want. The results of such an outlook when applied to education are fundamental aimlessness, aggression, manipulation, boredom, stupidity, and general bad conduct. Everybody hates everybody, and nobody learns anything.

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