HebrideanUltraTerfHecate on Nostr: Schools closing and class sizes rising, jobs lost, families disrupted, SEND pupils ...

https://thecritic.co.uk/educashun-educashun-educashun/

Schools closing and class sizes rising, jobs lost, families disrupted, SEND pupils left in limbo, court cases pending, such actions are both punitive and inept, almost as if the Secretary of State doesn’t know what she’s doing and doesn’t care about the consequences. And in some government departments such a hapless state of affairs would be containable, but education, like health, is different because, quite obviously, at the end of these various blunders are vulnerable people. The Secretary of State has, ultimately, a duty of care to all children who attend schools in England. Given that she has never visited an independent school, or a free school, it is clear where her priorities lie.

A new book which no doubt resonates with Philiipson’s and Francis’s view of education is “Equity in Education: levelling the playing field of learning, by Lee Elliott Major and Emily Briant”. It’s worth reading if you are interested in what an “equity-based” education looks like.

At the beginning of the third chapter the authors write a telling line about how they see the role of teachers: predictably it is not, principally, to impart a deep love of an academic subject, or to learn and be excited by the acquisition of that knowledge. No, teachers entered the profession “to achieve the noble aim of social justice.” That one, short statement encapsulates much of what has gone wrong (and continues to go wrong) with teaching in many developed countries during the last ten years: too many teachers, and those who train them during their Initial Teacher Training programme, see the role as a means of bending society to a liberal, “progressive” version of their own world view.

They see it as a “noble” cause, a process of instigating lasting change where it really matters: in the minds of the young people they teach. They describe this desire as “fierce”. “Suddenly”, they write, “the learners in front of you are yours”. The classes “belong to you”. These “learners” do not sound like individuals with a diversity of opinions but, rather, a homogenous group that can be remoulded in the likeness of the teacher. There are plenty of stages where the culture wars are fought, but nowhere is it more depressing to see it played out in front of those rows of desks in a classroom which should be insulated from a teacher’s political sympathies.