Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Your Country Needs You...

....to send your kids to a lousy school.

This bizarre confusion about who's serving who is par for the course where educrats go, but I note two related pathologies in that article.

One is the bonkers view of just how normal people live in this country. Consider the average middle-class income versus typical school fees: really, no one is sending their kids private just out of one-upmanship. After all, buying his'n'her Beemers would be cheaper and more fun. No wonder these people think they can keep bleeding the middle classes dry with endless taxes if they really think the average family has north of £10K pa to spend just to impress the neighbours.

But that's not the best of it. Consider the other Deep Thought underpinning this article. The implication is that the middle classes should send their kids to Hell Street Comp otherwise.... What, exactly? We'll be left with schools dominated by the working class? Gott in Himmel! How will our nation survive?

Hey, not to go all Laban, but back in the day our nation had a whole network of working class orientated educational bodies and, spookily enough, none of them were nearly as awful as the average comp. Seems to me that it was the education of the working class falling under the control of people like Professor Woods that marked the beginning of the death spiral in the first place.

I'll guess we'll have to wait to find out just *why* educational institutions serving predominately working class kids is a bad thing. That goes double for finding out by what loony toon calculus middle-class parents who scrimp and save to provide their kids with a good education are the bad guys.

Actually, as they used to say on Blankety Blank, the clue is in the question. Parents send their kids private precisely so as to avoid an education system dominated by hard-left loons ranting about the evil middle-class (most of whom probably earn a lot less than Woods does). Hey, it's not 'prejudice' when they really are a bunch of loons.

4 comments:

Squander Two said...

I like the way he writes it off as prejudice. Has it really not occurred to him that most of these parents went to comprehensives themselves? It's not prejudice; it's memory.


Fiona Millar, a state school campaigner [said] "The children of aspirant, supportive and graduate parents can easily flourish in their local state school if it is good enough."

What exactly is "good enough"? I went to what was at the time one of the top five comprehensives in Inner London, and I didn't fucking flourish. It was five years of hell, and I got bored beyond belief by the lack of education. So good enough would have to be considerably better than that. But places in such a prestigious institution are limited, so the overwhelming majority of kids in my area went to far worse schools.

Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' School, if anyone's interested. Perfectly happy to name the place on the Web and recommend to everyone near it that they ignore the hype and don't send their kids there unless they hate them.

JuliaM said...

"...and, spookily enough, none of them were nearly as awful as the average comp. "

Ah. But that was back in the day when we had...

*whisper it*

...discipline.

Given that even standing them in the dunce's corner is now on a par with bastinado as far as the educationalists are concerned, it's a wonder any of them function at all.

North Northwester said...

"Despite what you hear from the chattering classes – by which I mean the dinner parties of Islington.. "
# Either this chump is admitting that the largest geographical concentration of 'progressive education's' counter-Darwinian survival has gone over to the Dark Side (discipline, selection, uniforms, whole class teaching, academic subjects), or he is plain stupid enough to think that the Landrover and Chiantishire set are the main ones sending their kids to fee paying schools. In which case, his analysis of the way our society works vis a vis private education is just a little less accurate and up to date than, well, Viz's.

# "London's state secondary schools are doing very well. Almost a quarter have been judged outstanding."
So in any scale which shows a hierarchy of achievement, he's exploiting the inevitable existence of a top end to that scale to imply that they are in fact doing well. Normal people are likely to look at his statement an think: 'So, something has to float on top, but that doesn't mean it isn't a sewer.'

"There has been a dramatic improvement in the proportion of comprehensive pupils obtaining five good GCSE grades and the number of comprehensives labelled as "failing" dropped from about half in 1997 to one in 10 now."

# Five good GCSE grades also equates to about 1 HNC level 2 -(or as I recently learned about 8 hours' work in a crowded office.) Woo.

# Congratulations, Labour Party. Only ten percent of your religiously-educated dole-fodder Londoners are automatically sent down the Toilet. The rest are getting to struggle a bit before they go down.

Mr Grumpy said...

"There has been a dramatic improvement in the proportion of comprehensive pupils obtaining five good GCSE grades and the number of comprehensives labelled as "failing" dropped from about half in 1997 to one in 10 now."

Thou art the giver of
All that thy creatures love,
Full belly twice a day, clean straw to roll upon;
Every beast great or small
Sleeps at peace in his stall,
Thou watchest over all,
Comrade Napoleon!