There’s a terrifying piece in today’s Sunday Times by an anonymous teacher, revealing the scale of national self-hatred in schools with large Muslim populations, aided and abetted by hand-wringing woke teachers who never stop apologising for Britain’s sins. Here’s an extract:
“The Taliban do let girls go to school,” boasted the teenage boy. “But they stop them when they turn 11, which is very fair.”
In an after-school detention, a handful of pupils were doing their best to convince me, their teacher, that Afghanistan was much nicer now the Taliban were in control. Nothing I said would convince them. It turned out these children not only supported gender inequality but were fans of executing all manner of criminals too.
My pupils are a lively bunch. The school, where I teach humanities, is a large academy in the south of England and caters to those from poor families. Most are Muslim and a few have lived in Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. They burst with character and enthusiasm for improving their lives. I work hard to help them and have a genuine pride in them, in a way only fellow teachers will understand.
But I also worry about them. I share some of the same concerns that Katharine Birbalsingh expressed after her legal victory last week, when she successfully defended a High Court challenge to her ban on prayer rituals. In the absence of a clear commitment to British values, she argued, identity politics was filling the vacuum.
The more I get to know my pupils, the more distressed I am by some of their views. Of course, teenagers have always aspired to radical chic in order to shock their elders. In my youth, we lounged around the school common room repeating Frankie Boyle’s most offensive jokes.
But this generation is different. The other day, in response to a comment made by a pupil, I asked a class of 13-year-olds to raise their hands if they hated Britain. Thirty hands shot up with immediate, absolute certainty.
I’m not sure how many of my pupils support the Taliban. It is probably a minority, but not a small one. Many of the boys I teach hold shocking views on women. One Year 8 pupil regularly interrupts lessons with diatribes about how western society is brainwashing young men into becoming more feminine. Most of the lads I teach think women should have fewer rights than men. They spend citizenship lessons arguing that wives should not work. […]
Due to the Gaza war, no group is more despised than the Jews, with pupils regularly making comments of pure hatred. Teachers are asked: “Who do you support: Israel or Palestine?” We are supposed to remain neutral, but some staff adorn their laptops with pro-Palestinian slogans.
And this reflects a big part of the problem: my school and many others are rolling over and not even attempting to mount a defence of western values.
My colleagues tend to believe that the solution to our pupils’ dislike of Britain is to design a curriculum that is packed with hand-wringing about western imperialism and institutional racism. If we teach them we did wrong, then they will know that we are sorry and move on, the argument goes.
Worth reading in full.
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Great photo well done. When I work from home, that is often myself with my cat at least for a few hours. We are mandated to be in the office 2 days a week (IT large bank). Many of us go 3 times or more occasionally.
There is absolutely no doubt from own experience that you are far more productive in an office. I don’t buy the WFH productivity bullshit. The only savings is travel- time to travel and related costs which are significant.
I would be in the office 4-5 days/wk (1 hr 15 min public transport commute), bar the very significant transport costs (often unpaid by firms). This is maybe the excuse used by the uncivil serpents.
Totally agree. I found the train journey good for reading or having a snooze but it would depend on how reliable your service is. I had to laugh when I read this morning that nationalising the rail companies was to focus on delivering for the passengers when there was me thinking the railways are run for the benefit of the unions overpaid and underworked members. I worked for London councils as a direct and indirect employee and both provided a season ticket purchase service so the annual cost was spread over the year.
I am way more productive at home for various reasons
Our firm ranges from 100% home to 100% office and all shades in between and I have noticed no pattern to how productive people are based on where they work
I too am more productive WFH because I’m not being constantly interrupted by others needing to access the single computer owned by the garage for which I do bookkeeping. I go in as they close on a Saturday, take a back up, bring it home, do my work and return a fresh back up before they open on Monday morning. Better than freezing to death, exhaust fumes, interruptions by mechanics who need to access data and those pesky customers!!!!
Indeed. Our office is too noisy for me but suits others.
Every business should choose what works best, but I do feel that insisting people go to offices is partly motivated by bored bosses, partly by a desire to fill expensive office space, and lazy managers and lazy thinking that says if you are at a desk in an office you are producing something. I would much rather see a focus on productivity from each individual, not on where they happen to do their work.
It depends on your role. My son is a software developer and he could concentrate on his work better at home rather than with colleagues interrupting him. Yes, he took time out to do the school run but he more than made up for that at other times of the day. Now he’s moved into management, obviously he has to go to the office more often
I manage people remotely and it seems to work – a manager should be looking at work produced, not presence at a desk. Of course if personal, in-person interactions are very important to a role then that is what should be done.
There needs to be a culture of ‘getting the job done’ for the employer to get the benefit of working from home. Some organisations have it – many do not.
I feel that “working from home” (i.e. doing some work in between all the distractions of home life) leads to lower productivity. As a self-employed freelance translator, I’m familiar with all the things that can tempt you away from your desk, but I also know that I have to be self-disciplined if I want to earn money. If I were on a fixed salary, that incentive would not be there.
I would normally deplore that loss of productivity in the public sector, but I’m actually quite cheered by the drop in productivity of the Net Zero crowd. The less they do to mess up life for the rest of us, the happier we’ll be.
I don’t know why this would surprise anyone, especially if you are a sad person like me who enjoys watching property programmes. During the COVID fiasco, they were full of London and other large town based civil servants who were moving out of the cities for a new life, because they were able to work from home now. These included local authority employees who, it seemed, were able to relocate hundreds of miles away from their employing council. None of these can want to return to their offices having spent so much to get away from them and they can’t have been isolated cases the TV production crews stumbled across.
Don’t judge others by your low standards. Some people enjoy the satisfaction of getting the job done free from distractions from colleagues just wanting to chat and endless unproductive meetings