INSTITUTIONALISING IGNORANCE
Firstly my apologies to anyone who might have thought yesterday’s item on ‘Flying Penguins’ was genuine! Sadly, it was only an April Fools Day spoof. It was well done though wasn’t it?!
[Do please read the comments posted about this article as they show that we have some very 'imaginative' readers!]
But back to more serious matters. In particular the political indoctrination of our children by the woefully misnamed, ’state education system’. Below is a report written by a man who has been a school governor for many, many years. It is as savage an indictment of state education in Britain today as you’re ever likely to read.
INSTITUTIONALISNG IGNORANCE
It must be twenty years ago that I was appointed governor of an infants’ school, as a representative of local business. It was the school which our children had attended and the headmistress was a teacher of the old school. She was soon due to retire and knew that things were going wrong. In those days, the results of reading tests were far more secret than anything guarded by MI5 or MI6. Certainly governors were not allowed to know but she did confide in me that scores were declining. She put it down to “videos” and children being allowed to stay up late and being too tired for school in the morning. She may have been partly right but I suspected that the real “driver” (as they say nowadays) of the trend was the replacement of teachers of her generation by younger ones, schooled in “progressive” educational theories.
Whilst lip-service was paid to “using a variety of methods”, these teachers regarded such basic activities as teaching children to sound the letters of the alphabet (”phonics”) or making them learn multiplication tables as equivalent to sending them up chimneys. One older teacher (rather daringly) told me that she still used “times tables” but the children had to do it quietly to avoid notice. Because the school was in what could be called an “inner city” area and a sufficient proportion of children qualified for free school dinners, the school received an award of extra money to “enrich the curriculum”. It wasn’t much but the headmistress (whoops! head teacher) had to work out how she would spend the money and then obtain approval from the Area Education Office.
She squeezed every penny of value she could out of the grant. The children would get to hear classical music of a suitable sort (like the “William Tell Overture”), get some real poetry which rhymed and scanned and they could understand, some prints of well-known masterpieces which they could also understand and music for singing as well as listening to. When she took it to the apparatchiks, it was thrown back in her face. She was given to understand that It was not her business to impose her culture on these children. They should be taught through experiences which they knew and could understand. SHe asked what they meant and was told that going to the chip shop or getting a video were culturally valid experiences! The sole immigrant children in the school at that time were two Chinese children.
Even Lady Bountiful was less determined than these supposed socialists to keep working class children in their proper places and not to allow them to get ideas abover their station! I formed the view over the next few years that it was an unstated objective of state education to turn out a good proportion of illiterates and innumerates who were intelligent and would therefore know that they had been short-changed, so that there would always be a disaffected “Welfariat”, unable to work or contribute to a “knowledge-based economy” but provided with ample “self esteem” and access to “caring professionals”. I understand that there are now families where three generations have never worked.
At a late school function, we looked at captioned pictures which the children had drawn of different people at work. One lad had titled his picture “A Fireman”. The teacher had crossed this out and substituted the politically correct “Firefighter”. The rest of the boy’s explanation was full of spelling and grammatical mistakes which had not been corrected. I asked about this and was told it would be “too discouraging”. Children’s achievements (even when they were mistakes) had to be “celebrated” – but not if they sinned against PC.
When so-called “Local Management of Schools” came in and governors were supposed to become more powerful, I suddenly noticed that a paper called a “Curriculum Development Statement” had turned up amongst our voluminous papers. It had not been debated. I raised this in the meeting, saying that I thought this was a matter for the governors alone. Yes, I was told but this was a “model” which the Local Education Authority (Councy Council) had sent to “help” us.
Amongst a great deal of guff was the pearl “It is the school’s policy to make students responsible for their own learning”. Please bear in mind, this was an infants’ school (5 – 7 year olds). So I told the new headmistress (whoops! head teacher) that the children were just too little to do her job for her. Nobody even smiled – not even the two supposed representatives of the Conservative party who were on the board. Out of all the county’s schools, only half a dozen rebelled against this solemn nonsense. It was like a North Korean General Election. (Come to think of it, the Leader of the county council, Mr Bookbinder, did spend much time in North Korea).
We now have to face the fact that the children who went through this system are are in their mid twenties to thirties and some of them will be school teachers. ENDS
Are you seething at the way in which the children of the ordinary man in the street have been willfully disadvantaged by those we trusted with their formal education? Let’s hope so!
But, before you get too outraged, ask yourself, what am I going to do about it – now!
For let’s not forget that we who have been parents with children at school, at any time during the past thirty or so years, have also played our part, by acquiescing to the dumbing down that has taken place.
Or to be more accurate, most of us have not played our part in preventing this dumbing down.
Whether through, a sense of deference, (the teacher must know best syndrome ) left over from the days when a ‘teacher’ really was someone you looked up to, a pillar of the community, or even a lack of awareness of what was going on, we have, collectively, allowed the educational philistines to take control.
Certainly, when the BNP has control of the school curriculum things will change. But until then, what will you do?
Will you speak to your friends and neighbours, and organise an action group to demand that teachers in schools attended by your children stop the indoctrinate your youngsters?
Will you join parent/teacher groups and become a strident critic of any and all attacks on our culture and history?
Will you form a lobbying group to focus on the local educational authority and your local councillors to demand that they return classrooms to places of learning, not indoctrination. Demanding that reading and writing is taught by phonics, the only system that really works?
The BNP will help you, so help the BNP, by voting for our candidates wherever and whenever possible, and by getting involved locally.
Yet to be realistic, until enough of you give us your support you are still very much on your own. So get organising amongst yourselves – ‘united you stand, divided you fall.
After all, it’s your children’s future, and the future of Britain that is at stake.
You love your kids – so fight back on their behalf – doing nothing is not an option! Don’t for a moment think you can’t do anything to change the status quo for you can. Everything worth doing begins with a first step, take that step today!
