Having recently retired from a 30 year teaching career in both mainstream, special and adult education fields, I left what was once a wonderful profession, which I felt so lucky to have been able to experience, but which is now becoming unrecognisable as a platform for nurturing and motivating studens’ academic and vocational 'strengtgs.
This is due to the woke ideology being forced upon them by lefty teachers who want to completely banish any critical thinking.
This is not only unprofessional but also dangerous, as evidenced by the sexualisation of children as young as five.
Teachers should not be allowed to politicise their teaching and shoukd be accountable.
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Much as I agree with you, the Marxist grip is probably stronger in education than anywhere else and getting rid of them might prove difficult. Part of the problem might be that universities seem to breed a special kind of entitlement among those who think that they are extremely intelligent (when they might actually just be reasonably bright) who feel that under a Marxist system they would get the recognition they deserve,
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As someone who has marked university exams for the past 5 years, I can promise you that they are not reasonably bright. Most of them are morons who can barely tie their shoelaces in the morning but do well because everyone else is as bad as they are. This might partially be the covid-effect tbh, but if you ever feel like you want to become depressed about the future, start marking uni exams.
The problem also starts in schools. Children aren’t taught to/expected to synthesise concepts to solve problems. Unless you do things like an AEA or STEP, school is very hand-holdy and children are given the answers and are taught not to think for themselves. Not only does this stunt their academic achievement, it also stunts their personal growth as they don’t learn to scrutinise their own thoughts and actions and that makes them bad at handling conflict. Most zoomers I have met think that someone disagreeing with them is a personal insult and won’t consider that they might be wrong.
I’m honestly not sure how you fix education in this country to be less hand-holdy and encourage greater academic independence and thought, but to me, that is the answer.
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You need specific policies though. How do you provide a way to complain about specific teachers who do this, though?
You can’t rely on a top down order “not to be woke any more”, as we saw under the Tories, this is a joke and just ignored by schools and teachers.
The best way of doing it would be an anonymous reporting system, where parents and students could report teachers engaged in political activism.
And it also can’t be that game they play where they say "encouraging open borders isn’t political because I didn’t say “VOTE LABOUR”. Political indoctrination includes any recommendation as to how society should be run. Events about “welcoming refugees” are political. Events about “empowering women” are political, etc.
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In my first draft I said that they were ‘idiots’ but as I don’t have a degree and my wife does, I changed it for reasons of domestic harmony.
In the summer of 1977 I spent a lot of time with two American academics who complained bitterly how unread and occassionally illiterate their students were. They said that this would be the way that the UK would go and I was sceptical to say the least. How wrong I was.
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Because you have a degree or are studying for one is not a sign of intelligence.
This has only just occurred to me and is worrying. When you said “Most of them are morons” I just naturally assumed that you were referring to those reading non-subjects such ‘gender studies’ or ‘film studies’ and that those reading STEM subjects would not be moronic. Then I read that you are a mathematician and I assume not marking papers on the merits of Casablanca as film noir but on STEM subjects, and that is frightening.
Yes. I was marking at a Russle Group university too (won’t say which as it would likely dox me), so students needed all A’s in A-level to get in.
The problem is two-fold. One, the international students (especially the Chinese) plagerise and collude like there is no tomorrow and get away with it because the University wants their money. This creates a system which encourages the home students to do the same, because otherwise they will be out-competed because they are playing by the rules and the internationals aren’t.
Two, most Universities have a grade curve that they expect all assignments to map onto. I remember one 3rd-year paper I once marked, only 2 people out of about 65 got above 50%, and we had 4 people write abosolute gobbledygook and score 0, after the piece-wise linear transformation, 40% of the module scored above 70%.
A large part of this is the TEF, because your TEF rating depends on where your graduate go, and them getting better grades helps them earn more, universities are encouraged to give higher grades. Similarly, students are more likely to go somewhere where they are more likely to get a first.
The Students’ Unions also do a lot of work campaigning against hard “unfair” exams, often pointing to students’ mental health.
In my honest opinion, we need to end most universities, end the student loan system as it is just a way for the government to hide government debt to be paid for in the future, and make universty free but limit places. If we let international students come, they pay the university pot as a whole, not just the institution. I would then replace exams with vivas, so to pass, students need to actually know what they are talking about and be able to explain the subject, instead of wrote learning the night before.
When reading about the recent cancelling of Norwood Primary’s Easter celebrations, allegedly …and yet again… in the name of inclusivity, one of the more disturbing elements to this was the notion that it wanted to become a ‘Certified School of Sanctuary’, which is Ofstead approved and comes with Grant support.
The School itself doesn’t get a great Ofstead rating, so would probably welcome all monies it can lay its hands on. However, although much was briefly said in disgust about the School Head, little (if anything), was said about the coercive nature of the agenda driven Org’s essentially bribing schools towards the diversity path?
I fully agree that seeking to reform the entire education system would be quite a nettle to grasp, but shutting down Ofstead, scrapping DEI and auditing (if not banning) all non-government agenda-pushing funding bodies, would cut off a lot of the oxygen the Left within education thrives upon and surely offers a first step.
I think you would still have a problem with the teachers themselves. Many of the sorta of people who become teachers inherently believe in this stuff, and when a field gets captured, we on the right don’t tend to try and retake it from within. Not to say that all of this is not the right thing to do, it absolutely is correct.
I do, however, slightly worry that what happens next is that instead of giving the money as grants, these organisations then start “renting” school spaces to host events at exorbitant prices to get around the rule.
I’m not sure that an organisation hiring rooms or school facilities out of hours would have the same coercive influence over policy direction as grants (or bribes) do, for which there are always activity qualifiers.
Of course, I appreciate that certain organisations might suggest they’d only hire facilities if they were allowed influence educational narrative, but then surely rules could be put in place to vet all hiring such facilities for suitability anyway.
Yes, I was thinking about paying the same grants as now, but doing it a different way to get around the rules. Legitimising the grants once grants are not allowed if you will.
Maybe we only deal with this if there is an actual problem though… Because vetting every single person who hires out a school hall is insane.
Considering we’re talking about schools, I would hope that all wanting to access such facilities would be vetted for suitability even now? Worrying if not.
There should be no DEI in eduction, my grandson was forced to visit a mosque he has not visit a church?
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Truly wild, isn’t it.
Also, just because we are on about family members in education, have you heard of the Trivium? If not, it was taught back in the Victorian age and helped children to use numerous different methods to increase critical thinking skills. A doctor has brought back it in a test environment of a school in the UK and it made it so that all the kids that participated didn’t get anything lower than a C grade with impressive results in a comparison test. The Podcast for Lotus Eaters are trying to bring it to the public, it is on their website under Courses.
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The Trivium is beyond Victorian! It originated with (before?) Plato. It was the education to create effective leaders out of the aristocratic elites, compared to the modern education system which encourages compliance and unthinkingness (the qualities that most employers look for these days).
A slight health warning for people following this news mind, because grading if done on a piecewise linear scale in the UK, if everyone does the Trivium, you won’t notice a grade improvement. Instead you should expect a general improvement in the quality of people holding each grade.
It is worth doing, though. It helps to teach one how to think, not what to think.
Would less reliance on the internet and AI lead to academic improvement? Surely the use of a brain is required and it seems to me that the thought process has been removed.
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Yes and no… As far as I can tell, the problem is the education itself.
Whilst there is a worrying trend of people using AI to tell them what to think and believe, and “nanny iPhone” is causing so many children to become addicted to constant stimulation, there is also the problem that primary and secondary education is too hand-holdy and is too focused on teaching children to pass exams.
Teachers don’t (and perhaps don’t have the time to) teach students to be independent and learn by themselves. Instead, they are taught to pass the exam. This means that many have the tools to do well, but haven’t a clue how to use them. For instance, when faced with a problem that is something akin to what they have done before, they struggle instead of thinking creatively to solve it.
You also find a lot that anyone under the age of 21, and many over that age too, struggle with being challenged or told that they are wrong, for instance, and take it as a personal insult when it happens. This is because schools don’t encourage debate or discussion.
The question becomes how you solve this, then. Decoupling teacher/school attainment in exams from rewards might help. Improving the quality of teachers certainly would (teachers should be encouraging debate in the classroom and not see school as a place to lecture), but that is hard given that we apparently don’t have enough.
To me, the best thing we could do would be to replace all written exams with a viva (oral exam). You could be asked questions in weird/awkward ways and the way in which you think and the logic that you use is marked as much as your ability to regurgitate information.
Spot on. I have friends who recently retired as teachers, and this mirrors their experience. A profession they originally loved, that they came to hate. Maybe teachers are allowed to do too much now? Before, any straying from the subject, pure and simple, would have been frowned upon, with a demand that students behave or be thrown out. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I learned best when I was vaguely terrified of my teachers!
Senior school teachers should have a 2nd cass degees in the subjects they teach. My son has a 1st class honours degree in physics and teaches physic. He say many teachers do not have a degree in their subjects.
