I have attached an entire article by Melanie Phillips on the education debacle in England. I have done so because the same thing is happening/has happened here in Australia.
I believe awareness is vital if we are to redress this terrible imbalance. I have brought the ball into my own court, so to speak, in that I now homeschool my youngest.
The causes are many but in particular I believe (excuse my harping on this) it is the Gramscian view of the destruction of a civilisation from within (the long march...), and this educational attack contains within it a cancer aimed at the Judeo-Christian worldview foundation of western civilisation. Sadly it has almost succeeded to the point of no return...however; like England teetering on the brink during and shortly after the French revolution...what prevented it from going the same way as France were the revivals that erupted....this too can happen.
Knowledge is power....Gloria in excelsious deo.
...........................................................................................................
The flak flying at Michael Gove shows he's bang on target
Sometimes, you can gauge someone’s quality from the enemies they make. By that standard, the embattled Education Secretary, Michael Gove, is a person of the highest quality.
He has been attracting unprecedented amounts of flak from the teaching profession on account of his education reforms.
And while on one or two occasions he may have given the odd careless hostage to fortune, the flak flying in his direction shows that he is bang on target.
At the weekend, he came under fire from head teachers at their annual conference. He was heckled, subjected to a vote of no confidence and compared by Bernadette Hunter, president of the National Association of Head- teachers, to a ‘fanatical personal trainer, constantly urging teachers to jump higher and higher’.
Previously, some hundred academics from university departments of education had complained that the new draft national curriculum entailed teaching a ‘mountain of data’ which would ‘not develop children’s ability to think’and demanded ‘too much too young’.
And what exactly was being demanded of these deeply oppressed children? Why, that they should be taught to spell and punctuate, know their times tables and start learning algebra and geometry by the time they leave primary school.
The kind of knowledge, in other words, that once was taken for granted because we all knew that children needed it so that they could, indeed, learn to think.
Mr Gove also found himself in hot water over his proposals to rewrite the history curriculum to inject some chronological order and knowledge about Britain.
In recent weeks he was further attacked for a passionate speech denouncing low expectations in the classroom. He suggested it was more valuable for a teenager to be reading George Eliot than a vampire novel, and tore savagely into infantilised history teaching.
He ridiculed a suggestion in the Historical Association’s journal that teachers might compare King John to a Disney cartoon animal, and mocked a lesson plan for 15 and 16-year-olds depicting the rise of Hitler as a ‘Mr Men’ story.
This brought accusations of ‘manipulating and distorting’ the Historical Association article, and an angry riposte from the ‘Mr Men’ teacher who said the idea was merely intended as a revision tool.
Mr Gove stood his ground; but subsequently, after it seemed that other parts of his speech had been misunderstood, he was forced to clarify that the history curriculum would cover not just Britain but the rest of the world.
Such rows show how careful he needs to be with the detail, to ensure that he provides no ammunition to his opponents which might obscure the validity of his overall message.
And goodness, how desperately important that message is. For more than any government minister in recent memory, Mr Gove has grasped the point about Britain's truly dire and terrifying educational decline.
He has understood that the core reason for this decline is what is being taught — or rather
not taught.
This has developed from a pernicious culture of low expectations and ideological fads, which has simply collapsed the very idea that education entails the transmission of knowledge.
Many teachers have no understanding of how so much teaching became — as Mr Gove himself so memorably commented in another context — ‘bonkeroony’.
The cause is the doctrine — which has been the education orthodoxy for at least four decades — of equality of outcomes, that no one must be seen to fail and that all must have prizes instead.
Paying lip-service to championing pupils from the wrong side of the tracks, this ruthlessly enforced orthodoxy could hardly be bettered as a system of keeping children at the bottom of the heap trapped in ignorance, illiteracy and disadvantage.
Assuming that such pupils were irredeemably stupid, it held that everything in the classroom had to be made to seem '
‘relevant’ to their own experience — thus ensuring that such children were never able to progress beyond the limitations of their own backgrounds.
When it came to history teaching, this orthodoxy ordained that teachers must not teach Britain’s national story. To do so was ‘racist’ and ‘imperialist’ — indeed, fashionable historians decided the very idea itself of the ‘nation’ was merely a manufactured, artificial and colonialist invention.
No surprise, then, that some of those historians who created this theory figured prominently among Mr Gove’s complainants.
Richard Evans, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, further condemned Mr Gove for planning to introduce ‘rote learning of patriotic stocking fillers so beloved of traditionalists’.
It wasn't clear which was the worst crime — rote learning, tradition or patriotism, by which he seemed to mean (heaven forfend) learning about Britain.
Others were terribly upset that children could be taught that one set of historical events may actually have contributed to a subsequent set of historical events.
One commentator frothed that chronological history was a ‘strangely messianic’ Conservative approach which went along with believing in ‘manifest absurdities such as national destiny and unimpeded sovereign power’.
Gulp. Who knew?
Well, actually, some of us have followed this madness for decades, watching the progressive dismantling of the story of Britain — which was all of a piece with dismantling the very identity of Britain through mass immigration, the erosion of self-government by the EU and its replacement by ‘universal’ values such as human rights.
At a deeper level still, the very idea of teaching was also being steadily dismantled. Instead, child-centred education became the rule, with the teacher taking a back seat on the grounds that the adult world can only constrain a child's innate creativity.
Now this has developed into a further fad, ‘child-led learning’. One primary school website announces accordingly that ‘children democratically choose their own learning topic each week’.
According to this head teacher, pupils would thus have ‘greater freedom to self-initiate (
sic) the way in which they could access literacy and numeracy learning opportunities’.
But, of course, there are many ‘learning opportunities’; children won’t know they might ‘access’
because they are children. They need teachers to guide them.
Yet Ofsted gave this school a glowing report, and seems to promote ‘child-led learning’ with enthusiasm.
Which all goes to show that the belief that Ofsted would guarantee teaching standards failed to recognise that Ofsted itself would be subject to exactly the same ‘bonkeroony’ mindset.
It is impossible to exaggerate the grip of this mindset, its depth and destructive power. It has not just undone teaching and education; it has not just perpetuated high levels of illiteracy and innumeracy among school leavers; it has also undone knowledge itself and the ability to think.
We can see the baleful results everywhere — the serial incompetence of public servants, the growing inability to process evidence in a rational manner, the vacuity and degradation of so much public debate.
Last year the Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw — who needs to look very hard at the quality of some of his own inspectors — said that 5,000 head teachers were not doing a good enough job.
Put that fact together with the heads’ whingeing that the Education Secretary was making their lives a misery and you may conclude, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said: ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they?’
The shocking decline in education standards has left many teachers and inspectors not knowing what it is they don’t know.
Attempts to remedy this have been repeatedly undermined because virtually the entire education establishment now dances to the same anti-education tune.
Overcoming that is the Herculean challenge Michael Gove has set himself. All who care about the future of Britain must hope against hope that he will succeed.
