I attended a state grammar school until 1964, a system which has since been largely done away with by socialist govts because it funded more money to bright children and thus discriminated against the less bright – potential labour voters no doubt. Its funny because at the time nobody told me I was a privileged child but I now wish they had done because if I had known I was being especially favoured then I would have tried much harder.
I’ve sometimes wondered what has been going on with free education in state schools and if the article below is anything to go by, then it is indeed in a state.
“English education – a project to culturally cleanse the English” from Robert Henderson’s England calling blog.
When the second Wilson government was elected in 1974, progressive education had gone a fair way to achieving the stranglehold it has today and to developing from an educational theory into a political doctrine.
‘Progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ educational theories have a long history. The idea that the child should not be actively (and to the progressive mind oppressively) educated by adults but be provided with the opportunity to learn as its nature drives it to learn, is not in itself an ignoble idea and people throughout history have expressed concern about the stultifying of children through too strict a regime.
However all ideas, once they harden into an ideology, have a nasty habit of being driven to extremes, becoming both fundamentally unreasonable and impracticable.
Rousseau made what we now called child-centred education unreasonable in the 18th century by taking it to the extremes of believing that children would ‘naturally’ find their true nature and intellectual level if placed in the right circumstances. He claimed that it was European society that corrupted the individual, and from this mentality the Romantic fantasy of the ‘noble savage‘ emerged. It is as good an example of an intellectual construction unrelated to reality as one could find.
That the vast majority of children do not respond positively to undirected education and a general lack of adult authority is clear to anyone who has had anything to do with children, let alone having been responsible for their formal education – a process, incidentally, which is primarily concerned with teaching children things they would not naturally learn or even come into contact with if left to their own devices.
Rousseau’s intellectual descendents followed consciously or unconsciously in his mistaken wake. Those in Britain in the nineteen sixties and seventies were both extreme in their progressive beliefs and politically motivated. They not only believed that children should not be actively instructed, but also that the power relationship between teachers and pupils should become one of equality. …
Whole class teaching with the teacher at the front of the class gradually gave way to groups of children clustered around tables and enjoying only sporadic contact with their teacher. Children hearing their teachers spouting progressive mantras about non-oppressive teaching and the evil of exams responded in an absolutely predictable way: they became ill-disciplined and utterly disinclined to learn.
These traits were reinforced by the growing failure of the comprehensive system to even equip many of them with the basic tools to learn: literacy and numeracy and a general lack of intellectual challenge. A child who has spent his or her years before the age of 14 (when the 16-year-old school exam courses begin) being asked to do nothing demanding is inevitably going to be daunted if they are suddenly faced with a Shakespeare text or Newton’s laws of motion.
This lack of intellectual challenge arose because educational progressives saw it as their duty to socially engineer class differences out of society. Academically, this desire translated itself into a tendency towards ensuring a general mediocrity of performance throughout the comprehensive schools rather than an attempt to raise the academic horizons of children from poor homes.
Not only were exams frowned upon but competition of any sort was deemed to be harmful. Children were, the progressives said, damaged by failure and consequently opportunities for demonstrable failure must be removed.
When it came to the content of the academic curricula, the progressives attacked on two fronts. One was what might be broadly called the ‘I hate everything about Britain’ policy, which overtly despised and denigrated everything that Britain had ever done or was. The other was to promote social egalitarianism. Nowhere was this seen more perniciously than in the teaching of history. Complaints about an over concentration on ‘kings and queens’ history had long existed, but no one in the mainstream academic world seriously suggested that such history was unimportant. Now it was to be considered worthless because it was not ‘relevant’ to the lives of the pupils. Facts and chronology were replaced by ‘historical empathy’ and investigative skills. Where once pupils would have learnt of Henry V, Wellingtonand the Great Reform Bill, they now were asked to imagine that they were a peasant in 14th-century England or an African slave on a slave ship, going to market in the New World. The results of such ’empathy’ were not judged in relation to the historical record, but as exercises in their own right. Whatever this is, it is not historical understanding.
Other disciplines were contaminated by the same mentality. A subject was judged by its ‘relevance’ to the pupil or the difficulty the average pupil had in mastering it. Shakespeare was deemed too difficult and remote for working class children and traditional maths was largely replaced by ‘modern maths’, which instead of teaching children how to complete a calculation or demonstrate a theorem, attempted, with precious little success, to teach esoterica such as set theory and the theory of numbers.
When teaching is largely removed from facts, the assessment of the work of those taught becomes nothing more than the opinion of the teacher. This inevitably resulted in the prejudices of the teacher being reflected in their pupils’ work and the teacher’s marking. … this means political correctness wins the day. History teaching, and the teaching of other subjects such as geography which can be given a PC colouring, has become little better than propaganda. This would be unfortunate if the propaganda promoted British history and culture uncritically. But to have anti-British propaganda in British schools and universities is positively suicidal. That it is state policy is barely credible.