Well what an absolute surprise

Michael Winning

So we are to be told, now, to “put books in the home”… I wonder what we are to be told that the books ought to be about, then? Is not that the crux or nub? Bettre watch out you book-people, for your books may not measure up, all 20 of them.

If they are not about David Beckham or Cerril Coal and called “my life”, then they perhaps arent allowed. And what if you have more than 20? Are you a dangerous conservative?

You’d be forgiven for thinking the State knew all along about how to educate. Thats what they have always said anyway, is it not?

The death of Shakespeare

David Davis

….and one more of the roots of English culture goes with him. Take him out of the schools, and he’ll never return, and nor shall we.

Even as a libertarian, I do not disapprove of schools – merely the scumbags who have got hold of them by the windpipe.

UPDATE: There is a discussion going on on Facebook about this.

Green Paper

David Davis

This is a day of minor observations about small things. I feel I want to say things about education this afternoon.

This matter which I will relate was commonplace in the early 1960s. Even in “State” schools, whose teachers still thought they were there to pass knowledge on, or at least some of them did.

When I was a young teenager at school, if you did a piece of either homework (it was actually called “prep” then by us, and you did some between 6.15 and 7.30 pm at school, before going home if you were not a boarder, to do the rest before tomorrow am) or classwork that fell below your recognized usually-achievable standards – and you were /told/ what these would be as required-  you would be commanded to redo the work on “Green Paper”, perfectly, for resubmission to the relevant master. Otherwise, you would not be classed in your class ratings for the “Tri-Weeklies”. There were four of these per term. If you missed a “Tri-Weekly” in all subjects fully…..

“Green Paper”, which was of a particular shade and was lined and punched and of Foolscap size – so you could not buy it at Pullinger’s “the stationers” in the town – could only be collected, in individual sheets of the prescribed number for the work, from your Housemaster. He would note how many sheets you were commanded to ask for, which master it was for, and which subject, and by when (usually tomorrow) and would note your marks from the failed-piece. You had to sign for these sheets.

If you “got” three Green Papers (over all subjects) in one tri-weekly, you would then go on “Satis”. You might be beaten as well by the Housemaster or the House Tutor, at his or his discretion, especially if you were thought to be “intelligent and lazy”. (Boris Johnson types please note.) Potential officers in the Prussian Army would have jumped over the wall by this time and buggered off to their favourite peasant-girls, in disgust, at their views of this attempted humiliation. “

“Satis” meant that you had a brown _Blauschein_ thingy handed to you, with all the lessons you had to go to marked on it in a grid, for the next three weeks (tri-weekly) and each master (all of them, for all subjects) had to sign it to the effect that you had performed “satis”factorily in his lesson. Each time,  it made you late as you had to queue up to see him at the end-bell of each lesson, before moving on to another building: (The boys moved and the masters stayed put then.) It identified you to the other boys as a person who needed watching. Some would withdraw the hem of their garment from you, especially the clubbable popular convivial not-very-bright-but-politically-able-boys, whom everyone wanted as their friends.These boys, who are now in their 60s all very rich and relaxed in their old age, did not want to be associated visibly with other people’s failures: that is only right and natural. It was a lesson in life.

It bloody made you perform.

If your “Satis” card was in order at the end, and you had not acquired any more Green papers, then the record of the previous Green Papers you had obtained was expunged.

I am not suggesting that a libertarian education system – if that is not indeed a tautologial notion – would invoke such a thing as this system for making people remember things learned. But if there was a Free Market in Schooling, then some places might go for this method, as in a “That’ll Teach-’Em!” strategy. I fully expcet that the children of people like Tony Blair, the Milibands, Peter Mandelson (he has children, but he is just dissembling for the camerae) and Harriet Harman would go here.

The problem today of course is that there is no failure and no success. Everyone has to be equally “advantaged”, and as well the “curriculum” contains no content of actual factual use or relevance. So I suppose they don’t need Green papers then.

Toby Young and “Free Schools”: help needed here

David Davis

I am naturally interested in this idea, being a sort of amateur educator myself, and thought I’d pass it on to anyone who hasn’t seen his column today.

Wikipedia, the modern British Nazi-State, and children’s learning

David Davis

The internet helps to create the largest library in the history of the world, and then along comes “OFQUAL”.

“We’re the government: let’s find out what people want to know and how, and tell them it’s wrong….tell them to use the Met Office and Hansard instead!”

I am already fed to the back teeth with stories of teachers trumpeting “you musn’t use Wikipedia, because anybody can edit it”. This smells to me of British GramscoFabiaNazis being pissed off at the fact that their neoMarxist bedfellows can’t any longer control the content or flow of knowledge and information.

It’s no use giving essay-writing projects to average British State-(dis)Educated schoolchildren, not to say even University students, in this centuryas things stand. they have not been given, and I say this is on purpose, the thinking and thought-planning skills needed for constructing arguments and explanations in the first place.

For example, the entirety of the British-State-Primary school years are wasted. This is functionally from age 4 or 5 to about 11, when these particular skills, based on rigorous grammar and the meaning of words, should be put in. Designing and colouring posters about “healthy foods” and “slavery”, using keywords and zazzy pictures, is no good at all. they are reading about “Floppy” who is a dog that lives in a multicultural rural village community, and the child-owners of which dog are of indeterminate gender by name and by appearance. The dad wears a polo-neck a lot of the time, (like Carl Sagan in the 70s when this was respectable.)

Here is an illustration of what I think I could achieve…By age 11, and faced with the question /Was Haig the Butcher of the Somme? Use sources C to F to explain your view, in four paragraphs of six lines each/, they should be able to not type in to Google /was haig the butcher of the somme/ but these sample phrases I have crafted instead, in order, and have in fact tried on an intelligent 11-year-old after about two hours in total of instruction in how to think:-

(1) /Somme military “grand strategy” – [ = as in 'minus' or excluding the word] butcher/

(2) /Verdun relieve pressure French 1916 – [ as in minus] “General John French”/

(3) /Haig attrition “trench warfare” “modern industrial nation” + artillery/

(4) /New army kitchener “civilian soldiers” Accrington/ (or + “pals” as an additional search)

I ask readers who are old enough to come up with either confirmation or refutation of the idea that averagely bright State-educated children in Britain in the 1950s could have understood what the above engine-strings meant (on being told how Google works for about 5 minutes) and would have been able to effectively craft their own.

The enmity on the part of the State (dis)educationists is IMHO based on their full knowledge of what they themselves have been doing. They have on purpose hollowed out and degraded (and corrupted what was left of) the the body of knowledge which ought to be part of everybody’s folk-inheritance – as Brian Micklethwait often says – “IN A GOOD WAY”. They have replaced it with a set of beliefs which the structure of learning of which they approve compels one to conform to, as there are no other answers allowed. To me, this is Nazism applied to education, as described by William Shirer in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, in his fairly-early-on chapter about the subversion of the schools and universities there.

Obviously, it would be clumsy and gauche of a student to simply copy and paste a tract from somewhere, without even bothering to format it correctly to his/her document style. Even I am not this bad here on the blog, as that! The poor bastards only do that because, as they explain sorrowfully to me often, they “DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START”…That to me and you says they have not been shown how to think about how to ask for, then to sift, data. Perhpas they even have no data… (and who’s fault is that then?)

Instead of one-dimensionally-punishing untrained pupils (for that is what they are – untrained – and whose fault is that then?) for this, simply explain that it is _/OK/_ to get stuff from other sources, _/IF/_ you (a) say where from, and (b) you understand the content of what you have put up. (Oh, and we will test you on it next week to make sure you do understand it!)

Ken Clarke rubbishes Harriet Harmperson rubbishing George Osbore

Michale Winning

You couldn’t make it up if you tried.

I’m holding the frot today for the Boss who is doing chores he has to do sometimes.

The trouble with Labour’s reversion to “class war” in the coming election campaign is that it WILL work as a strategy. People are brought up under the school system to believe all that tosh.That’s why Labour are playing the class card because they know it will get them lots of votes.

You have to believe it’s deliberate. Just one look at what the poor blighters in schools, the childrenm of my farming colleagues, have to learn for English GCSEs and exams, tells you what theyre supposed to come out believeing. In two ticks you can persuade people educated like this that the Tories and toffs and Labour are “on the side of working people”. All that twaddle.

There’, Ive tried to write an intellectual essay. I hope its worked!

Parks of terror: how to nationalize land by stealth, through crying “beauty”

David Davis

The “South Downs” has just joined the Litany of Lands nationalised in the name of “jobs”, “local people”, and “ramblers”.

The idea of the “rambler” was created by Jim Hegel, (or it might have been Rickie “the people’s person” Engels”) as we all know, as a proposed form of entertainment for his friend Marx, for the times when Marx was not fathering boys on his wife’s serving-maid, in North London.

Nobody who lives there will from now on be able to do anything at all, except supplicate to “Natural England” about the particular shade of white paint to do his windows and doors in. They’ll also have to host thousands and thousands and thousands of parties of comprehensive-school “learners”, doing “Geography Projects” about “Are the South Downs a Honeypot?” and “What is the effect of traffic congestion on the South Downs?”

Tories, education and schools: this is all very well, but…

…if I was them, then I would not have started from here.

David Davis

“Sink schools” exist because the GramscoFabiaNazis have brought them into being on purpose. The justification to create them was the pressing and fast need to de-educate an entire civilisation. Therefore, the punishments for bringing them into being, and which will be retributed from the perpetrators, will be exemplary. I will not say what here: it will be revealed in due course. But the Enemy Class’s surrender will be unconditional, and we have no peace terms at all, to offer for discussion.

The perpetrators of these “sink schools” are not the current “heads”, nor even probably most of the present or absent teachers, or even the poor robbed children – subjected as they are to the planned secondary assault by “popular culture”. The guilty ones (of which there will an excitingly large number) among these Enemy-Class-minor operatives will merely become people without any job or any future income of any kind whatever until their death. No. The War-Criminals are the “educationist” GFNs themselves, and their lackeys and running-dogs of the Enemy-Class, who deliberately planned for the generation of, and required for their success in domination and tyranny, a populace of uncurious helots to be elected as the New People brought into being.

Why do we think that Kenneth Tynan said “f***” on live Tele Vision exactly when he did? Why was sex invented precisely in 1963? It is because the GFNs were ready with the next, the first-occupation-wave, of the assault.

A whole nation’s schools have been used as machinery for the attempted, and largely successful, de-civilising of that entire nation, for the first time in recorded history. In the 1930s, the NSDAP, while “righting” knowledge to make a similar but craftier “people”, was merely tinkering at the edges: they had a global war to win, and “National Socialist Mathematics” was not going to cut the mustard with people like Stalin and the like, as was borne out by uncomfortable fact. Even with my A-level physics teacher on board for the Allies, it was an effing close-run thing.

It will not do to “close sink schools”: there is not time to resurrect proper ones to take the slack, and the damage will continue to be piled up against us if we do not drain the swamp, cleansing out the Augean Stables of wicked doctrine and “unfit thoughts” on day one.The “Nationalised Curriculum” will go, and knowledge and truth will be substituted.

These schools will have to be operated. But the terms will be initially harsh. The first people to get the point of it – after about Day Three – will be the students, who will be our first adherents and supporters in the plan.

There is such a thing as “political correctness”: and it is not what the Enemy Class says it is. It means being right. And they are wrong, they know it, have done it on purpose, and will have to pay.

How West-stalinist governments destroy education and deliberately de-civilise – part 2942A/-3. Bullying in schools

David Davis

I chanced on this just now.

This government is not content with forcibly occupying schools in the Austro-Serbian-1914 manner. Nor indeed in the manner of that of R3 in post-1933.

I respectfully suggest that this government is determined to exclude from society, and if possible destroy physically even including the use of death, any children whose outlook and innate relpectiveness might prejudice the growth of a population of biddable pro-GramscoFabiaNazi helots.The (a)moral position is halfway achieved already, since today British children are, functionally, State Property.

Hence, “bullying”, a custom long in use by children (until they learn property rights and about liberty)  but hiterto controlled adequately by real schools, is allowed and promoted pro-actively. This is actively accomplished in schools by plans known as “anti-bullying policies”.

“Bullying” is probably a primordial hominid-survival-mechanism, useful perhaps 300,000 to 1 million years ago, and probably co-eval with the reise of language as a skill. It may have had a utility in ensuring that the most aggressive and the most “celebrity-clubbable” juveniles (of either sex but mainly males – and who would be popular on account of their size/outgoing-nature/use of growls to threaten predators/warped-sense-of-humour/…etc) survived better in the presence of scarce gatherable resources, to reproduce, at the expense of the more retiring and noncommunicative ones in a group environment. By either killing the “geeks” or driving them off into the bush to be eaten by Short-Arsed-Bears, the survival of the more clubbable and aggressive juveniles could be helped.

My hypothesis may imply that “bullies” could be quite “intelligent”. This is not a problem for me, for most bullies I have ever met were at least not very much more dim than most normal people, and probably had other useful qualities if only these could be exposed and/or channelled.

Regarding “Policies” …. I relate the story of the Bishop who, when asked what was his policy regarding SIN, replied “I’m against it”. Schools today in the UK, for the benefit of our overseas reader, all have to have “policies” tod eal with “bullying”. these are often highly comples and deliberately unintelligible documents (we don’t want parents detecting that the verbiage means sod-all now, do we) which talk about the appointment of “peer mentors” (which is to say other children) to whom one should go on being bullied. Or that “The School absolutely does not tolerate bullying of any kind, and works with the appropriate practitioners, carers and organisations towards a strategy of agreement on how to co-ordinate the relevant activities, measures and experts’ skills in order to  formulate a pastoral-care-pathway designed to eliminate the ….”...f***-it -  I could go on.

In my day in the 1950s and just after, there was indeed bullying. My parents firstly tried to help me combat it by saying to the bullies: “But I will go to University and you will not!” Poor buggers my parents: they simply didn’t understand the mind of the English young male post-war bully. But schools had a more robust attitude happily. After a little time I was encouraged by the teachers, mostly ex-WW2 RSMs and redundant ex-Imperial ADCs from upper-Jipoopooland, to take matters into my own hands. I was not strong or large, but there were sharp things such as my teeth, fountain pens and compass-points, which it seemed I was not … officially … discouraged from using. So I did.

Injured bullies leaking blood were generally chastised by the nearest teacher and sent to Matron to be sewn up again and given permanganate swabs, plus a stern note to their _Father_ . It stopped after a few weeks, and I was not thereafter troubled.

Bullying will stop if recipients or “bullees” are permitted to retaliate with force. I believe that there are no conditions under which it will stop if the existing “policies” (which expressly preclude absolutely any retaliation by bullees) are allowed to continue. Since the kinds of people targetted as “bullees” are generally either not the product of the Labour-spawned underclass, or else do not generally conform to TV-driven “cultural norms” such as chavs, thugs, hairless-male-youths-who-crash-W-reg-white-Vauxhall-Novas-full-of-girls, and celebs, then “policies” for “anti-bullying”  must be a deliberate attempt to wipe out, by self-harm, the young population of those reflective enough not to conform and agree.

I rest my case.

…sorry…the end of the poll-question should have said “The New Utopia”.

Beware: this is what the Enemy Class does to people…

…on the way to its hegemony. By deliberately fostering antifamilial and atomisational Trash-tv-mediated-policies and cultures, it turns ordinary, perfectible human beings into inchoate barnyard animals.

This is just down the road from here.

David Davis

Beware the Enemy Class, for this is the sort of thing that its activites being about, and which it likes to do on pupose. It does. Believe me, for I am the Director of Northern Affairs for its opposition, and I sometimes watch in horror. It sets out to cause individual humans, who would otherwise behave normally towards, say, new-born-babies, to just ditch them in the attic in a box, if it means having to not watch Big Brother or Top of the Pops instead. And the removal of anything worthwhile from school learning has only a majority-part in this and not the whole blame.

Sunday afternoon thoughts on male aggression, and socialism

David Davis

WE watched, as is usual when we have the time, the Belgian Formula 1 GP, which was slightly less unexciting than normal owing to a good pile-up on the first lap. Perhaps we subliminally enjoyed the implied violence? I do not know….

…There is something wrong with today’s car-racing tracks, which I will deal with in time. But in short, they are (1) too short, (2) have got too many really really sharp corners straight after the start, and (3) don’t allow driver/car-changes midstream if you prang or the driver gets killed, and (4) don’t allow you to jump into the spare car (and where is it then?) while the track is still covered with shrapnel. Peter Davis and I did a nice track nearly two years ago on here, about 26 miles long and rather interesting on Googleearth. We will come back to it. You can serch for it in the meantime.

But…..male aggression. It’s probably one of the things that made Homo sapiens sapiens as successful as (he) is, in the battle for survival against shithead short-arsed-bears bureaucrats, sabre-tooth tigers Soviets, and so on. I have been thinking about this for some time as I find that male students vary considerably in their ability to manage or mask or evince aggression as a statement of attitude, and it does seem to vary corelationally by school. (The Governmint might want to know that.)  Janet Daley today examines what she suggests the fascist PC-left have done to being about the explosion of gang culture and knife crime among young boys and young men. It’s worth a read, even though lots of libertarians don’t like her.

In “New Britain”, youth male aggression is not channelled, and so individual directionless crime is rife: why? Because:-

(1) There are no fathers, only “mums”. Girls are born to “mums”, but boys are born by parthenogenesis to “single partners”. “Fathers” are just devices which prodice the necessary gametes, seemingly on demand (I can’t figure out how or why.)

(2) Young boys have to have their heads shaved at three and watch football all day on the Wireless Tele Vision, and “hang out”.

(3) “Schools” have sold their football fields for the building of “affordable housing”, so there are no “competitive sports” which foster “elitism and “inequality” anyway, and so are bad.

(4) The Naitonalised Curriculum has been voided of content and also femiNazised, in order to render school (on purpose) seemingly useless to boys, so that they can be made to prefer streetgangs as a form of daytime outdoor relief.

Socialism (a fungus) of course needs this machinery to propagate within what is otherwise a highly-ordered civilisation, formed sort of accidentally under liberty.

Is socialism a fungus born out of evolution and natural selection, and which exploits a niche? DISCUSS

Truancy: and the reason is…

…that the “National Curriculum” totally outdoes even the Daily Mirror in the department of uttermost boring triviality, and unfitness to be termed a “knowledge-delivery-system”. It is a self-amplifying socialist outdoor-relief-system for increasing education bureaucracy and spending.

David Davis

If you remove all semblence of interesting knowledge – along with anything that helps one’s ability to marshall facts and opinions, let alone distinguish one from the other – from what schools teach, then you will get pupils deciding it’s less depressing for them if they just don’t turn up any more. Frankly, I don’t blame most of the poor little buggers. With of course 50 years of hindsight, I’d be turned off dead by most of what they have to “learn” today. It’s all dressed up as “child-centred” and “relevant” and “interactive”. But to pass the exams, you have to use the words in the Vulgate and tick the right boxes.

Sean Gabb had something to say about truancy a few momths ago, here.

MATHS: even more scary that a few hours ago

David Davis

So what about that then?

Children, by the age of seven – or eight at the very very latest – ought to be able to do long multiplication and long division. This is a simple hominid brain-skill which merely involves adding, takking away, multiplication, simple division, and “place-value” – which the Hindu philosophers invented fourteen centuries ago. None of this was beyond the wit of average, undernourished English boys and girls in the 1950s, such as myself, when sugar was on-ration and we all had Ricketts and Worms (so we must have been “eating healthily”) to do this thing, when we were starving and still bust. It was not even unavailable to people classified as “Dumb Children”, who were classed as “dumb” by their teachers, their schools and their own perfectly willing  parents, but who still tried hard, because they were given no option. Like D-Day landings, or Dunkirk, or Alamein, which some of their fathers (whom I of course knew as I played with their sons) had of course experienced without complaint.

Why they therefore can’t do it now must be down to the Universal Provider of the “skill-delivery-system” … which has to be  … “The State!” For most of them at least.

And, more worsely, the “Private sector” can afford to mark time and NOT teach cubic factorisation by the age of twelve, because it can still stay ahead even when not doing so.

It cannot be suitable to suggest that the children today are “more dumb” than 50/60 years ago. Therefore, “non-availability-of-skills” has to be down to “non-delivery-of-solutions”.

Instead, they spend seven years, – SEVEN YEARS – in “primary schooling” … and what do they do? They colour in posters about “healthy eating”, and they learn that “The Tudors” were responsible for “Pirates, Smoking and Slavery”, and that Henry the Eighth “had SEX WIVES!!!!”

So….two whole generations wasted… and the best part of a third. And all that time lost. Fred Bloggs, who very kindly sometimes writes for us, asked me the other day about what could be done to rescue the education system in the UK. I had to admit that if I was him, I would not have started from here. And it would take decades, and we probably had run out of time.

More State-tractor-production statistics this Thursday

David Davis

It’s the GCSEs this time.

I’ve found a useful Chemistry/Biology tutor for all you science students out there

David Davis

here he is doing stuff on his site about energy flows:-

energy-flow4

►

And here’s his main blog:-

http://chemicalguy.wordpress.com/

Jeff Randall on the cult of “celebrity” (more about A-levels too)

Read the whole caboodle here.

David Davis

I should perhaps add something here. Jeff Randall’s quotation of a bright young girl wanting “really” to do what he did for a living, but only to be “on” television and for no other purpose, compares interestingly with a Russian girl of 24 whom i met in Moscow in 1993. She was studying “International Journalism” at Moscow University (I forget which one). Over a dinner I asked her idly about her future career direction, as you, er,do.

She replied:

“Oh yes. Yes, the journalism (sic) is good career for me. I will like to meet famous men, I will be in the photograph, and I will make love with them”.

….But this is potentially much much worse…

David Davis

“Traditional” subjects are disappearing from the State end of the schools system.

And so will the GCSEs be even better…?

Same picture for three years running...duuuuuh

Libertarians generally don’t think the State ought to be allowed much to do with education, specially where content in concerned: this can be fatal to a civilisation as is now being shown:-

David Davis

As I predicted, there has been _yet another_ stright improvement in this year’s A-level results. Always, always, more and more tractors are produced than ever before: incidentally, whatever happened to all those tractors? Why was not the USSR and the Warsaw Pact the breadbasket of the planet?

Paradoxically, the better Universities are forced to ignore largely, the new “elite grade” A*: letting students in on this basis, and distinguishing the best from there merely competent, will lay them open to GramscoFabiaNazi lynchings and spinnings about “elitism”.

Next week, it’s the GCSEs’ turn. I fully expect 75% of everyone achieving A* to C, owing to lowering of the “grade boundaries”…..if the 11-y-o-”SATs” results are anything to go bym they’ll have had to.

Meanwhile, Johnny, the A-level results will be out on Thursday…

David Davis

…and, natch, on Thursday the spin-Doctor will say the following:-

“This year’s record results for A’s and A*’s, reflect the even more outstanding achievements of our dedicated teachers and astonishingly brainy young people, who are even more intelligent and have been working even harder than ever before in the history of the endangered planet, achieving mega grades in these really really hard exams which are the envy of the world.”

I will have more to say when the results actually come out.

Jeff Randall on ZanuLieBorg on Education

Here you go.

Not hard to see that the Enemy Class is setting itself up in a hereditary manner from now on.

“I’m all right, Jack, I’ll just pull up the ladder and never mind you!”

David Davis