In this week’s episode of London Calling, James and I discuss my trip to a Norfolk tennis tournament where all the teenage boys have mullets, the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago and why it’s unlikely to derail Trump’s candidacy, Anne Heche’s car accident, which James thinks was not an accident, a conspiracy-minded newspaper called the Light that might as well be called the Daily Delingpole, the attack on Salman Rushdie, the cancellation of Jerry Sadowitz at the Edinburgh Fringe, and, in Culture Corner, how excited we are to see episode one of House of Dragons, the Russian novel James read in one sitting (Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time) and my rather more lowbrow summer reading — Sharpe’s Battle by Bernard Cornwell.
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I struggle to understand how this comes from a Department of Education under a nominally Conservative government. The possibilities I can think of are a) benign stupidity on the part of Ministers, b) malign non-compliance by guardians in the teaching profession, or c) both.
Maybe fake Tory MPs like fake Labour MPs send their children to private schools where they will uphold the political impartiality that by law must be upheld in all schools.
Can any parent justifiably complain of the political indoctrination of their children if they don’t register their outrage and objections to children’s indoctrination with the school managers and their MPs?
https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/02/17/political-impartiality-guidance-for-schools-what-you-need-to-know/
Woke is too polite a word for what these people are doing and are responsible for.
The root of the problem is the same as with almost every other industry: the centralisation of power in organisations and bodies that define standards and objectives. These self appointed arbiters of what is correct eliminate debate.
Then their ideas and standards infuse every aspect of the industry. Training standards, certification, accreditation, curricula.
This is what the left do. They concentrate power and then crush opposition and dissent to their ideology. They don’t believe.in the market.place of ideas.
Earlier I ran into a friend in a coffee shop, a teacher. She was working away at a laptop. I asked if she was a strike breaker, she said that many of her colleagues were resentful of today’s strike action & that they’d be using the time to catch-up.
I agree with the author that not all teachers are irretrievably lost but I suspect a majority are.
My husband is using todays strike day to mark 50 pieces of A level coursework.
My daughter is working today and like the previous comment, she’s using it to catch up on lesson planning and marking. Her school is a London comprehensive in a very multi cultural area – woke isn’t massively a thing at her school. She said she can’t afford to lose pay but disagreed with the strike on principle, having endured striking lecturers at uni. She was surprised how many teachers showed up for the first strike day.
The wokesters hate this, but the greatest determining factor for becoming successful in life and therefore ‘powerful’ is growing up in a stable, loving family with both parents.
Hence the Government trying to force a million more women into work when many would like to be helped stay home and bring up their children. I’ve know so many girls down the years who have said they hate the idea of having to put their children into childcare under the auspices of strangers.
Implying that running a home and rearing children is not “work” as the media does relentlessly is reprehensible. The reason childcare is expensive is because it is very hard work indeed. Not only is the proposal to deprive a nine-month old baby of love from 8 am to 6 pm repulsive, but it seems to be driven by two factors. Increasing the tax take and distancing infants from the influence and attitudes of their parents or carers, allowing for the fact that early-years education is also important. I have several grandchildren and would confirm the final two paragraphs of this excellent article. The brainwashing often doesn’t work because these youngsters have experienced something entirely different at home, among other things. Placing infants in a controlled environment for conditioning of a different kind is the clear objective of universal “wrap around” childcare. We used to be disgusted by this when decades ago it was introduced as common practice in communist countries and it is not a example we should follow.
Teacher’s Unions. A beast that won’t be slain. Good luck finding anyone willing to fight that monster. It is weaponised. ‘Teachers’ went to brain washing school, read the Guardian, watch the BBC and adore (as the article says) Thunturd, White privilege, Burn Loot Murder, xi Biden and every other dogma including the mental illnes of LGBTQZ+++ theology.
Teachers are as ridiculous in the main, as the NHS. Yes a few good ones here and there, but the Union is a beast of evil. Hence home schooling rising in popularity. But if you home school your kids….well you know what you will be called (‘literally H……)
A beast that thrives under Labour and Tories alike. The Tories are too afraid to tackle the issue but make lots of promises as elections approach whilst Labour arguably benefits from the indoctrination of children in a Leftist progressive educational system.
There needs to be decentralisation of the education system.
We introduced much greater scrutiny using the excuse that schools related to a certain religion were teaching terrorist sympathies. However, with left wing extremists in the Ofsted and school inspections having a bunch of standards incompatible with moral decency for many people, teachers have fled the profession, leaving a core of SJW extremists many of whose woke ideals appear, at core, to be a smokescreen for paedophilia.
There needs to be a loosening of state oversight and removal of requirements for schools – particularly church schools – to teach sexual material, under the banner of EDI. Parents should be given an education voucher and be able to choose to send their children to schools that best suit their beliefs for how children should be taught.
Parents should be given access to all teaching materials at the start of a term and all lessons should be recorded by CCTV camera and made available for download. It means teachers’ competence can be assessed and stops false accusations against teachers.
I note that there’s a load more public money being made available to force mums back into work and dump their infants into ‘childcare.’ A pity the money couldn’t be used to help mums (or dads) stay at home to bring up their children.
“We do not live in some kind of feudal system…”
Not yet, but if the sheeple don’t wake up and get a grip…
I couldn’t stomach the training and the implied expectation of adherence. So those going into it now are going to have a certain predilection which is a pity when it is antithetical to the spirit of education itself. But I think it goes deeper than this. The mystery schools were wont to use a technique called occult imprisonment if they wished to contain an adepts activities, if they strayed too far into politics for example. This happened to Helena Blavatsky – by means of ritual magic they were able to tie her energies up so that they wouldn’t manifest in political form in her early life. The greatest push of British occultism over the last four hundred years is the idea that the Anglo-Saxon culture would come to replace the Graeco-Roman culture.and have the same predominance. There is also an understanding that the future lies with the Slavic people and the attempt to thwart the inevitable lies at the heart of many evils. Rudolf Steiner said that in the time we are living in now, there will be laws against thought. Not explicit laws but certain hidden orthodoxies within the ideology and he said that it is our duty to oppose these forces.
“. . . a growing number of young people are increasingly tired of having woke narratives . . ”
Let’s hope natural rebellion of youth takes over …
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
My metalwork teacher was a socialist but I grew up to be right learning. I grew up. Lefties never do. Most schoolchildren dislike their teachers so we can see the outcome.
OMG this is like, so racist yeah? I mean, like, this was litchrally written by a Nazi, yeah?
I’ve taught (French/Spanish) in the state and private sectors (Kent/Norfolk) on and off over the years (now most definitely OFF), and as a private tutor. Now I drive a taxi, since the lockdown/vaccines killed my previously (moderately) successful business and I’m kind of, er, up against it. While temporarily engaged last year as a classroom assistant at the most highly regarded school in Dereham (centre of Norfolk), I kept a list of the most egregiously moronic/politically correct/whatever comments I heard uttered by the universally leftwing staff. Some examples:
The teacher (female, late 20s) read several pages of The Great Gatsby to the class (13 year olds) – difficult writing which they didn’t remotely understand. Sophisticated adults struggle with Fitzgerald; the teachers at N******* High considerably more:
– ‘notoriety’ pronounced “notoraty” (accent on second syllable)
– ‘ineffable’ = “intefal”
– ‘Nevada’ = “nirvana”
– ‘Duluth’ = “Dultha”
– ‘contingencies’ = “congencies”
– ‘saloon’ = “salon”
– ‘florid’ = “floor-rid”
– ‘singularly’ = “singuly”
– ‘antecedents’ = “anticents”
– ‘ingratiate’ = “ingranate”;
– ‘Buchanan’ = “Butchernon”. Repeated three times. Butchernon. BUTCHERNON.
– ‘haughtily’ = “hauntily”
– ‘the lady sat in state’ = “sat in a state”
– ‘vigour’ = “vye-gaw”
– ‘menagerie’ = “margery”
– ‘contralto’ = “contrarlo”
– ‘dilatory’ = ‘dial a tory’
– ‘tuning-fork’ = “turning fork”.
‘other’ was “uvva” and ‘rhythm’ was “rhyv’m”. There were plenty of other mistakes – the above were only the worst examples. She missed words out and she added words that weren’t there. She bored the children to tears and of course they learnt nothing because the text was too difficult for them.
This was a blizzard of ignorance. It took place in just one lesson. Why did Miss W***** choose The Great Gatsby as a text to be read aloud to the class in this way? Many other less challenging but still meaningful texts are available, so why this one? And having chosen it, why did she not pre-read it in order to be able to read it properly? What precisely does she think the children got out of this reading? Week in, week out, she delivers lessons of this kind. And she’s far from the only one at the glorious, respected N******* High, Dereham, Norfolk.
It isn’t teaching, it’s indoctrination. And the Government wants to ensure that even more children are indoctrinated from cradle to adulthood with increased taxpayer funding for state-controlled childcare … whilst doing nothing to encourage grandparents to care for their grandchildren, presumably because they might learn some “unauthorised” values and some independence.
Thank you for this insightful and ultimately encouraging article. There is another reason for optimism: the influence of parents is much greater than the influence of all teachers put together can ever be. All of us who have children have an opportunity and a duty to be an informal source of moral education for our children. It is a central part of being a parent.
I also believe that parents must be a source of pressure on schools. We have seen in America parents fight back on school boards, and in this country too, it is important that parents complain, calmly and politely but forcefully, to individual teachers or to head teachers, when their children are fed politically biased nonsense at school.
It’s posible we can make a difference. As an example, I wrote to our daughter’s head teacher disagreeing with him, rather strongly, on his request for parents to respect the teachers’ right to strike. His letter this time round excluded that request. Small steps …
Why are we surprised? The teaching unions have no respect at all for our children; they’re just pawns to be used for their political purposes. They decided not to teach due to the non-existent covid dangers posed to them by the kids. Now they’re on strike for more money. They are nothing more than f***ing hypocrites trying to blackmail the country.
I take great pleasure in drivig past the flag waving morons outside our local comp and giving them the finger.
I know it won’t make a bit of difference to them, but I get a lot of pleasure 🤣