Bel is thinking

I don’t even want to comment on this because a part of me believes it couldn’t possibly be true:

Children should be taught “life skills” instead of facts and figures because they can look up all they need to know on the Internet, teachers’ leaders claim today.

…

[Association of Teachers and Lecturers] acting deputy general secretary said youngsters could learn to walk in a variety of ways, including techniques needed for catching trains and exploring cliffs.

Martin Johnson said:

“There’s a lot to learn about how to walk. If you were going out for a Sunday afternoon stroll you might walk in one way.

“If you’re trying to catch the train you might walk in another way and if you are doing a day’s cliff walk you might walk in another way.

“If you are carrying a pack, there’s a technique in that.

“We need a nation of people who understand their bodies and can use their bodies effectively.

“Since in a green world people will be walking more than western societies are currently doing, it would be as well that we spent an hour or so of compulsory education in teaching young people how to walk efficiently - and the joy of walking.”

He said physical and manual skills should have greater prominence in the school curriculum which should no longer prescribe facts and figures and specific subjects.

Hilarious. And he goes on:

“For the state to suggest that some knowledge should be privileged over other knowledge is a bit totalitarian in a 21st century environment.

“We are arguing that knowledge which traditionally has got high status should not be privileged over other kinds of knowledge.”

Where does one start?

If true, the worst part is that he probably means every word of it.

I agree with him in only one thing. I don’t think the State should be prescribing what we teach our children, anyway. This is because I don’t believe in a National Curriculum, certainly not in the form it takes in the UK.

As to the rest of the article, like one of the critics interviewed by the Daily Mail, I wondered whether it was April Fools Day already. I am willing to believe that Mr Johnson either was misquoted, or is the victim of a cynical trickster.

According to the Telegraph:

Lecturers at some of the new universities are calling for a public debate on standards because they say functionally illiterate students are being passed so they do not drop out of courses.

Yes, yes. But why the need for a ‘public debate’? Have we now reached the point in this country where standards have to be debated? Should it not be an open-and-shut case if standards are not good enough?

A comprehensive school has been fined for sneakily selecting clever pupils:

Pupils applying for places were assessed on a points system which awarded marks for such things as primary school references, the child’s attendance record and punctuality, and the extent of parental support.

The children were also asked to write a description of themselves and their family lives which Mr Redmond said was very likely to have favoured the more articulate family and more able child.

Selecting in this way? How very dare they.

Tessa Jowell is getting tough. She has set her sights on television phone-in shows, warning them that they face being shut down and prosecuted if they ‘operate as lotteries’.

In order not to be classed as a lottery, a phone-in show must offer free internet entry for those who choose not to call the premium rate line.

Tessa will be watching, hawk-like, for any television phone-in shows that fail to do this.

So a television phone-in show, drawing its audience from adults, all of whom have the choice whether or not to take part, dare not act as a lottery. On the other hand, a local education authority may decide, with Government approval, to allocate school places by precisely that method.

Wonderful.

A Government-commissioned review is recommending that primary school pupils be given compulsory foreign language lessons. They hope that this will ensure that interest in those languages survives up to GCSE level.

Good idea, and while they’re at it, some proper English grammar lessons for the little darlings would also be desirable.

The Telegraph reports on the following results of a survey of 1,500 pupils:

• a third felt that people who read a lot were boring;
• only half agreed that reading was a good way to spend time; and
• less than half thought that libraries were interesting places.

While I accept that not every child must like books, I think that the problem lies much deeper than that. It is not so much a disinclination to read, but a distaste for learning. In this country, I have very often encountered the belief amongst many that education in itself has no value at all.

In all my time living and working all over Africa, I came across many students who did not like reading (or even school, for that matter), and indeed, many who could not afford to go to school. However, whether they liked school or not, they were all very clear on one thing: that education had value, and that there was a direct relationship between a good relationship and wellbeing in almost every area of life. There was therefore a sense that, whatever one’s feelings on the matter, education was a necessary thing.

Not so in the United Kingdom. The relationship between education and self-advancement has been downplayed to the point that education is of little worth in the eyes of many. It obviously means nothing to this Government, under whose watch we have seen its value fall, through (for example), the inflation of exam grades, the proposed allocation of school places through lottery systems, and the so-called ‘widening of access’ to university by giving greater weight to factors other than merit.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about Carol Horne, a mother who was fined for turning a blind eye while her daughter played truant. Declaring herself unrepentant, Horne stated that she did not see the point of education, anyway, as getting a job was ‘a matter of luck, not exam results’.

Outrageous? Not at all. Ask any employer who has had the misfortune to interview any of the half-baked A-starred products of our education system. Ask any university lecturer who has had to offer such students remedial lessons in English grammar and spelling. Carol Horne may not be aware of the ins and outs of the education system, but her words ring with wisdom. Education has no value in today’s Britain, and this latest survey simply confirms that fact.

A self-styled former liberal writes an article in the Daily Mail. It is entitled ‘The night my daughter was stabbed - and my liberal instincts died’.

In summary, his daughter had gone out one night to the shops in their affluent North-West London neighbourhood. On her way back, she was stabbed in the ribs by a hoodie who grabbed her bag and ran away. Mercifully, she survived, but her father has swiftly recanted his liberal ways. Hear him:

Nothing shatters one’s dearly-held liberal beliefs quite like a brutal clash with the reality of crime.

On our streets today it is the middle-class young people - the products of our liberal homes - who are being targeted.

That’s right, sir. Welcome to the real world.

Faced with what happened to his daughter, he states further:

So is there anybody out there who is accountable? The terrible fact is that, in these well-tended million-pound-plus houses with their state-of-the art security systems, people have long known what’s going on in the street outside.

But they have closed the blinds and simply turned away. And so have I.

…

We have put our heads in the sand for too long about this problem and have done nothing about the indifference of the authorities to much that is wrong in our society. We certainly backed the wrong policies on education - no one who could possibly avoid it would send a child to a comprehensive school around here.

Worse, we have done this at the expense of our own children, who now have to forge their lives in the bleak urban environment we have allowed to develop.

Well said, sir.

As you can imagine, the readers’ comments to this article in the Daily Mail, while sympathetic, have chided him for his past folly. Many have made the sound observation that it is liberals like him who have denounced ordinary citizens and even politicians for daring to speak out against the prevailing tolerant attitudes to crime and criminals.

I am glad he has acknowledged the damage done to society by the ideology he previously espoused. His redemption is (almost) complete. All he needs to do now is share the news of his conversion with his fellow liberals. I fail to see the point of him writing this article in the Daily Mail. Preaching to the converted, as it were. Better that he takes his message to the Guardian, and let us hope it falls there on good ground and yields lasting fruit.

I wrote some time ago about Alan Johnson’s harebrained scheme to allocate school places by picking names out of a hat. Today brings news that Labour-run Brighton and Hove council has chosen to implement this mad idea.

What the Government and this misguided council must realise is that the problem they are trying to address is entirely of the Government’s own making. This Government has gone out of its way to block access to good schools for clever, poor pupils. The abolition of the Assisted Places Scheme, the policy of open hostility to grammar schools, and the abolition of grant-maintained schools (which, incidentally, the Government is trying to reverse), are clear examples.

The answer to the problem is not to resort to random methods of allocating places. Rather, this is what the Government should do: sit at a table with all the education measures it has passed since 1997, and begin to reverse all the harmful changes it has made. Not sure where to start? Then hit the streets and start listening to parents for once. It is time to give substance to all that empty talk about ‘parental choice’.

In the meantime, concerned parents in Brighton and Hove are not taking the schools allocation lottery lying down. They are heading to court to challenge the council. Here’s wishing them all the best

The Daily Mail tells the story of Mrs Taylor, an unemployed mother of five, who had four of her children while receiving benefits. She has now been ordered to look for a job or have her benefits drastically reduced. Her husband is also unemployed.

Together the couple collect £501 a week in benefits – £179 child tax credit, £64 child benefit, £90 job seeker’s allowance, £126 housing benefit, £24 discretionary housing payment and £18 towards their council tax.

They also receive free school meals and around eight pints of milk a day, making an annual total of £26,052, or the equivalent of a £33,000-a-year salary before tax. [Emphasis mine]

There are two things at work here. The first is the so-called “benefits trap”. It is not Mrs Taylor’s fault that the Government has made it more advantageous in certain cases for people to claim benefits rather than work. She is simply taking advantage of the system in place. The second factor is down to Mrs Taylor herself. If she is in a position where the only work she can get would attract the minimum wage, that would most likely be because she lacks the relevant skills, training and experience to get a better paying job. For that, she should take some responsibility.

Anyway, what shocked me most was not even the size of the benefits payments,  but Mrs Taylor’s reaction to the ultimatum by the council:

“The world’s gone mad,” [she declared] “What’s the point of going to slave your guts out for 40 hours? What do you get for it? Absolutely nothing.”

Yes, darling, the world’s gone mad. Only not in the way you mean. It is a truly mad world which pays you more to sit at home than people with a lot more skill, learning and experience than yourself can hope to earn. These people traipse to work everyday, work as hard as they can, suffer heavy burdens of taxation, and make financial sacrifices. They do all this in order to deliver to you a lifestyle even more comfortable than that which they have. Yes, the world has gone mad. Isn’t it great that you have, up until now, been the beneficiary of such madness?

She is lobbying her local MP to help her make her case. As she lives in the Camborne, Cornwall area, I take it that her MP is the Lib Dem’s Treasury spokesman, Julia Goldsworthy. Perhaps Goldsworthy will deliver a few home truths to this deluded woman. Then again, judging by the Lib Dems’ general approach to public finance, perhaps not.

Not exactly a bad thing, the way I see it. That is exactly how it should work. The reality of tuition fees should make students think long and hard about whether they really want to go to university, and whether their chosen course of study is worthwhile in the long term.