educationtwo

We need nothing short of a revolution in education to
repair the damage done by decades of dogma.
We would get rid of the disastrous National Curriculum.
Unfortunately the curriculum as it stands, as well as all the
teaching guidelines and instructions, are worse than useless, being
formed of a disastrous mixture of bureaucracy, wishful thinking,
jargon and rank stupidity. A far more flexible curriculum would
have to be designed by educationists of an entirely different stamp
to those who have predominated for the past decades.

Our curriculum would be formed out of the subjects themselves,
not out of selected fragments of half-understood or half proved
pedagogical theories, as it is now. The morass of muddled
thinking, jargon and other strange ingredients, including Maoist
dogma, which has formed the National Curriculum is so confused
as to be virtually unintelligible to anyone who can remember what
knowledge and education really mean. We would scrap it entirely,
and remove from our education system the notions which formed
such an edifice of nonsense.

The National Curriculum almost entirely neglects actual
content and is concerned mainly with finding a form of learning
"acceptable" to modern pupils (as its authors imagine them to be)
In fact it reads like a handbook for neurotic and scared middle
class women, in how to grovel to working class youth, whom they
are clearly terrified of. They seek to hide their fear and the
humiliation it doubtless makes them feel, by creating a fantasy of
the pupil as victim; this enables the middle class teachers to feel
sorry for their pupils instead of afraid of them, a far more
comfortable arrangement for them, but one which involves a
spectacular distortion of the truth, and which deprives pupils of
any chance of a decent schooling.

Too often now the curriculum, even at primary schools, tries so
hard to simplify and deconstruct the subjects and topics in hand,
that children, especially those of lower ability are totally confused.
Children sit in the middle of a dogmatic nightmare of new phrases
and weird concepts. They often have no real idea what they are
supposed to be doing; At the same time, they are treated, by the
extraordinary new system imposed upon teachers, as if they are
supersensitive psychopaths likely to explode into a murderous
rage at any minute. We are in danger of creating a generation of
whom that description may become true; a generation who talk of
"rights" thinking it means the right to be as rude and aggressive as
they like. At best, the result, aside form the children being bored,
is that such children are left to learn to passively recite the
phrases of jargon thrown at them, as the only way to get through
each lesson, or task

Recent directives are now urging teachers to abandon subjects
altogether, and replace them with "themes".

This is what is actually going on in our schools, and it is all hidden
under a canopy of statistics and targets and reports and
JARGON, which describes itself in the most glowing,and most
complicated sounding, terms. The truth is a young population of
pitifully ignorant children, with nothing but a handful of phrases,
and a pathetically overblown sense of their abilities and the value
of their "opinions"; (or more likely; prejudices), with which to face
their futures.We are sowing the seeds of a bleak future. If this
process is not reversed, the economic and intellectual life of the
nation will be threatened. Besides anything else, we cannot
compete in the world if our education system is more concerned
with satisfying its own strange dogmas, than actually imparting
knowledge. In the end it will not help how well we have convinced
ourselves of our self worth, if we fall short of the rest of the world.
Soon we are in danger of not providing a workforce capable of
operating the country. If that happens Britain will sink.

Jargon will have no place in the new syllabuses, which will be
formed to promote learning in arts, sciences and technical
disciplines at the highest levels. Schools ought to give a
thorough grounding to all pupils in the subjects likely to form a well
balanced and well informed individual and citizen; The emphasis
will be on traditional subjects. Also, teaching will be reformed to
once again allow for real teaching to take place. (The new
directives of our current government seek to eradicate teaching
itself from the classroom. Teachers are not supposed to talk for
longer than 10 minutes! )We will shift the emphasis back from the
mindless obsession with so called "self expression" and return to
the situation where the teacher imparts knowledge to the pupils, in
the most direct, interesting and sensible way. Rather than
parroting phrases of jargon to reflect political doctrine, pupils will
be expected to learn and to understand subjects such as history ,
philosophy , religion and law, constitution , economics and politics;
they will be expected to become skilled in crafts and trades, in
construction and engineering, electronics and physics and
computer technology. No longer will real knowledge and ability be
the preserve of the elite ; instead each pupil, no matter what their
class, will be helped to participate in the world of practical
knowledge as well as the deepest theoretical understanding,

each according to the very best of their personal ability.
The aim of teachers will be to help each pupil reach its highest
potential.

What is education for? Education should prepare pupils to
eventually take up a place as an adult in the world of work, and as
a citizen of the country, and as an individual human being who is in
some way equipped to make decisions and to understand and be
able to think about life and society. It should help them to find a
trade or ability to prepare them for work, and enable them to
develop and increase their natural abilities wherever they might lie.

Education should leave pupils informed about the workings
of the political system they live in and are a part of, which
means they should understand democracy, its history and its
workings.They should know and understand their rights and
duties under the law, and , especially important for the
continuation of our democracy, they should appreciate the nature
of the legal system and the constitution and the workings of
parliament and the state.
Also, to understand these things, a pupil should have a basic
understanding of the economics which forms and influences our
politics, and which to a large extent forms their lives. They ought
to understand the capitalist system they form a part of, and to be
aware of the alternatives, and the problems likely to be faced in
the future.

A return to real subjects taught properly
Education should also give a proper understanding of basic
philosophy and religion. (not the festival-based trivia upon which
current R.E. is based) They should be able to appreciate and
criticise the qualities of the ideas behind various religions and
systems of thought. In teaching Religious Knowledge, the
emphasis will be on gaining a proper knowledge of the thinking
behind the religions of the world, their philosophies, histories and
beliefs.A good knowledge of the arts, history and literature should
be given to enable the individual to think about life itself and their
part in it, and their role in society, and the community of mankind.
The emphasis here will be on coming to know and experience
works of literature and history first hand, and not through the filter
of education text books which reduce the English canon to a tiny
series of exerpts . The Canon of English Literature will be
reinstated as the basis of English teaching in our schools.

In the present system our pupils are encouraged to form rash
opinions, under the clumsy guidance of teachers who in turn are
directed by the Maoist and doctrinaire curriculum. This rank
indoctrination is presented as independent thought, which is its
opposite.We believe that there is very much,of great usefulness
and beauty, for a young person to learn. Unlike the architects of
the current system, we do not believe that most of what children
should learn comes from the past 50 years of human existence.
The benefit of learning is the ability to think and to understand. The
current system generally tries to teach attitudes rather than
knowledge, such as confidence, forcefulness, even aggression, as
if these alone can lead to success or happiness, when all they
really bring is confusion and ignorance.

We will abolish the league tables and SATS. League tables
only help the middle classes find the best schools for their
children.The notion of choice between good schools and bad
schools as a basis for allocation of places is a strange one to
have in a society which does not otherwise openly accept
inequality of opportunity. Everyone knows that the present system
favours the rich, who can move to the catchment area of their
choice, and the middle classes who are better able to help their
children prepare for entrance exams. It is the duty of the
government to ensure that all schools are of the best quality.

The choice which matters is the right (described above in the
section on Schools) to chose between Grammar School and
Technical School, and that is a choice which would be available to
everyone, not just the well off. This choice has never existed
before.We find the endless testing of pupils needed to prepare
these league tables, far from keeping tabs on the schools, merely
disrupts the teaching and creates an atmoshpere where the
school's results matter more that the quality of the children's
lessons. Also, having league tables implies that it is acceptable
that some state schools are worse than others. Previous
revolutions in education sought to ensure that they would be
uniformly bad. Now we need to make them uniformly good

The Working Class Party

Education
(contd)

Dr Ken Boston,

Architect of the government's latest curriculum, (the one
which replaces Milton with Meera Sayal, and Churchill with
Olaudah Equiano, literary fraud and slave trader ) hails from
Victoria, Australia, where he gave them the education
system described as Maoist, by Julie Bishop the Federal
Education Minister; "we have gone from teaching Latin in
year 12 to teaching remedial English in first-year
university...We need to take school curriculum out of the
hands of the ideologues" she said."parents are right to be
concerned that students are deconstructing Big Brother"
rather than learning Shakespeare.