Another Lion-Feeding Frenzy

Another day, another story about State-sponsored Christian-bashing.

I saw this one in the Daily Mail when I was at the gym and I didn't believe it. Partly because it was in the Daily Mail, and partly because I just didn't want to believe that my country has come to this. When I got home I did a Google and I saw that it's quite widely covered, so now I'm thinking it must be true. After all, the BBC has it, and if even they've got an anti-Christian story then there must be something in it.

So, the facts as they appear to be:
....a five-year old girl tells her classmate that if you don't believe in God then you're going to Hell;
....the girl is admonished by a teacher and is told that it's "not OK to say that, but it is OK to discuss what you believe with others" (what on earth is a five-year-old supposed to make of that ?);
....having first comforted her highly upset daughter, the mother, who works at the school, sends a private email to a group of friends describing what had happened and asking for her friends' prayers;
....she is then hauled before the headteacher, to be told that she was to be placed under investigation in suspicion of professional misconduct because she had been "making allegations about the school and staff".

........................""You can't write an email like that, love"

Hells' bells, where to start ?

Well, let's try the child. She's five. She's reciting the stuff her mum and dad have told her. Things are black-and-white at that age anyway; kids call it as they see it, and good on 'em. Apparently the child she was talking to was didn't like it, and it was her mother who complained.

It's probably a good job I'm not a headteacher. Because if any parent came into my office complaining that their offspring had been upset by another child telling them they might go to Hell, they'd get pretty short shrift from me. Something along the lines of:

"Your child will hear far worse than that before they've finished school. I will not wrap kids up in cotton wool and isolate them from hearing completely legitimate theological views. I will not deny them access to free debate, and I will not admonish a five-year-old pupil for expressing a religious opinion. If you don't like it, you can bloody well take your spoilt little brat somewhere else. Now stop wasting my time, I've got hundreds of kids to teach how to read, write and add up in the face of relentless opposition from the government and the education establishment".

I can well remember giving my best friend at primary school the hump by telling him that God didn't exist. The resulting bottom-lip display and cold shoulder treatment lasted around two hours. After that we were mates again. Kids are far more resillient than many give them credit for. They give and receive different points of view all the time. Or at least, they should do. By putting them in the naughty corner for expressing opinion we deny them the ability to learn how to debate and we extend the ever-expanding notion that they have an inalienable right not to be offended.

Secondly, the mother. So, one of her so-called friends leaked her private email and grassed her up to the headteacher. Some bloody friend. But for the headteacher to call her into the office and put her on some sort of charge is nothing short of outrageous. Where's this going to end ? If I have a bad day at work and a row with the boss I might go home and tell Mrs Womble On Tour all about it. Am I to assume that if details of that private conversation get back to my workplace then my boss can discipline me ? Or can that only happen if I'm a Christian and I ask for someone's prayers ? Either way, I should be allowed to express a point of view in a private email without my boss poking his nose in.

Just for completeness, we'll briefly apply the Test of Islam. If a Muslim child says, for instance, that he would sooner befriend a fellow-Muslim than a non-beleiver, as encouraged by the Koran, would that child be similarly admonished ? No need to answer that.

What happens to Jennie Cain remains to be seen. But let me tell you this. This comes hot on the heels of Geert Wilders being kicked out of our country, the Caroline Pertrie case and a host of others in which free expression, religious or otherwise, is being treated as a crime by the State. One day something's going to snap. We are a quiet, tolerant nation. We have let our government walk all over us for a long time, first diminshing and more latterly destroying our freedoms. But it will not go on forever. At some point, there will be a backlash. Something, or some cause, will trigger a point of no return. I don't know when it will happen, but it will. One day that State will take on one free-speaker too many. And then there will be hell to pay.

I just hope I'm still around to see it.

Sign Of The Times No 1

On Radio 4's PM programme this evening I heard something which I found so profoundly depressing I really started to wonder, for the first time, what kind of nation Britain has now become.

Apparently a number of schools in Bristol are teaching children how to treat stab wounds. In a city which is far from the being the worst affected by the rise in knife crime, pupils are being taught how to stem blood loss and bandage a wound. The lessons are being given to children as young as 12.

What struck me the hardest as I listened wasn't the fact itself that a local education authority thinks that the war on crime has been lost to such a spectacular extent; it was the reaction of the kids themselves, taking in the lessons seemingly without question or any sense of shock - almost as if learning how to deal with the impact of appalling violence was as normal as any other lesson. Then I thought of my own kids, 12 last October, and the fact if our education authority follows Bristol's lead then they too will face this sickening reflection of the reality that is being a young person on Britain's streets today. And I thought "My God, what sort of country are they growing up in ?"

I didn't think that I had an over-romanticised view of my children's development into adolescence and adulthood. We haven't tried to shelter them, or to pretend that the world they're entering is some rose-tinted utopia. I can cope with them learning about STDs. I've been with them to the sessions on drugs. We keep on eye on what they do online. But this ? Dealing with their mates' stab wounds ? This I am quite definitely not prepared for.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, so New Labour told us to sycophantic acclaim from the Establishment's liberal intelligentsia a decade-and-a-half ago. So tough, it seems, we now have to teach 12 year-old kids how to stop their best friend's blood seaping out across the pavement.

This country is in crisis.

Graham Stringer - Wow !

It's not often that an MP nails his colours to the mast quite like this.

For a Labour MP to come out and deny the existence of dyslexia, labelling it as an invention of the education establishment to cover up bad teaching, is quite extraordinary. Not least of all because the establishment to which he apportions the blame is itself the product of a socialist ethos through which poor levels of achievement are often dressed up as something else.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in his area - I've not studied it and I haven't got experience of it in my immediate family. Stringer claims the "condition" has been wiped out in West Dunbartonshire, where they've been using a system of synthetic phonics to teach reading. He also claims the dyslexia doesn't exist in nations as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea, suggesting that it is an "environmental" rather than a medical phenomenon. He may well be right for I know.

What I do know is that educationalists go to quite amazing lengths to protect the feelings of pupils and to ensure that no one is seen as "thick". Spelling and grammatical mistakes are routinely ignored completely, and only last week another Labour MP was lamenting the idea that teachers might be banned from marking work in red pen, lest some pupils find it dispiriting. Education in Britain today absolutely reeks of an acceptance of mediocrity as the norm, and there being no such thing as failure.

In this context, the idea that reading difficulties could be treated as something far more complex than they really are does at least fit in. It would make sense for poor teaching and low attainment to be dressed up as a medical condition. I have long wondered whether dyslexia is "real", and it's fascinating than an MP should say so clearly that it isn't. Even more so given his political persuasion.

I can't help feeling that if a Conservative MP had said what Stringer has said, he'd be taken apart, both by the education establishment and the liberal intelligentsia in the media. But as a Labour MP, he might just be ignored; his comments swept under the carpet as being the misguided mutterings of a maverick.

Either way, I'll be following this story with great interest.

Truth Hurts

Damian Green knows that telling the truth can get you arrested.

And a primary school teacher in Lancashire now knows that it can seriously affect your job prospects.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the employment tribunal...

Adverse Weather Conditions - Not

My children's school was closed today. Because of the "snow".

I was surprised about this, not least because I'd been kept awake half the night by the sound of rain hammering on the roof. Still, we thought we'd venture out and have a look at all this "snow", and record it all for my readers, courtesy of WombleCam TM.

Not much outside the house.....

...hardly blizzard conditions on the surrounding roads....

...and, hey presto, next to nothing at the school.

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.

.

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Hoping to salvage some educational morsel from the State's big "no-show", we decided to visit the local library, which was.........shut. Because of the weather.

So despite there not being enough snow to disrupt a game of cricket, Womble On Tour is stuck at home with two bored kids.

And it set me wondering how many other wealth creators (i.e. people who work for private companies) are prevented from working today just because the Public Sector fancied a day in bed. Lazy bastards.

Maybe we deserve to be in recession.

Fingerprints Taken...At 12

Apparently my kids' school is introducing thumb-print readers in the dinner queue, as a means of checking who's entitled to a dinner and who isn't. The deal is that you send a cheque up front to pay for your children's dinners, and the school takes your child's thumb print. Wrong thumb print --> no dinner.

Why do I get the nasty feeling that this is the start of something really sinister, and a back-door way of getting everyone's dabs onto some sort of national database ? Why do I worry about the security of the data ? Why do I worry what else about my children the State will be demanding ?

Have I been livng too long under ZaNu Labour ?

SAT On The Fence ?

Womble On Tour Juniors I and II have done well in their SATs. They've both achieved the targets we set them and it's going to cost us £60 in rewards. We're pleased, they're relieved and we think that the grades they got were probably representative of what they're capable of. Now that it's all over for the next three years I've found myself reflecting on the whole experience.

Criticism is aimed at SATs on a wide variety of counts; they're stressful, they don't add value, they detract from actual education, they're the product of a target-driven culture. Which of these are fair ?

Stressful ? Well, my kids certainly worried about them. I've asked myself where the worry came from; did we contribute to it, perhaps by adding monetary incentive, or was it down to the school ? The latter, undoubtedly. They were worried before we offered them a prize for good performance. The school place great emphasis on SATs results, and I know that lots of other children worried too. I did wonder whether it was right that eleven-year-olds should be losing sleep over exams; OK, exams are a part of life but at what point should we expect kids to face them ? I understand why, but to my mind the school overdid the importance of these tests.

Add value ? Well yes, SATs do. they're an important measure of how well a school is performing. Whether it's the best measure, or whether someone could come up with better ones is another matter. But it has to be an improvement on the days when parents had no empitical evidence through which to measure how good a primary really was.

Do SATs detract from actual education ? Well yes, I'm afraid they do. undoutedly. Our kids were practicing SATs exams for weeks before the actual tests. Not learning anything new, particularly; just fine-tuning exam technique. I'm sure many of us have been on courses where the aim is less to learn the subject in hand than it is to pass the test. Well from roughly March onwards all my kids were learning in Maths, English and Science was how to pass a SAT. I wouldn't describe it as an out-and-out waste of time, but surely there are better things to do at that age...

Target-driven culture ? Well, yes, SATs are a part of that. In education it's no bad thing because we have to be able to measure how our schools are doing. Our children's school proudly trumpted their "best SATs results ever" yesterday and doubtless they'll continue to shout it from the rooftops. After all, I'd rather send my kids to a school with decent results. Some people in education don't like that idea; they'd rather parents didn't have the information or the choice, and they see SATs as promoting "elitism". That's tosh in my view, and I'd rather have the government running education than them (yes, even THIS government !).

All that aside, there are some other factors at play which I cannot help wonder about. Grade inflation, perhaps ? How many other schools have had their "best results ever", and how much of that might be down to the government trying to convince us that education is on the up ? I suppose we'll know more on that over the next few days, when the results at a national level become clearer. But is it not a tragedy when you cannot see improvements in results without being suspicious ?

And quite apart from the spectacular cock-up in marking and the inexcusable delays, you can't help wondering where all this takes us anyway when you see stories like this, from The Times (hat-tip Dizzy). When the hell are teachers and examiners going to take spelling, grammar and basic writing skills seriously again ?

Overall I applaud the idea of SATs. It's right that we should know how our kids are doing and it's equally right that schools should be measured. It the system perfect ? No, not by a long chalk. But it's better than what we had, and probably better than what many in the educational establishment would offer us, were it left entirely to them.

All that said, ask me what I think of SATs when my kids are 14...

Brown's Britain

A selection from today’s news stories…

It has emerged that eleven crime suspects whose DNA details went unchecked for over a year have offended in the UK. The data disk was sent over here by Dutch police, and is believed to have stayed in someone’s desk drawer while they were on sick leave.

Doctors’ leaders have claimed that the health and safety of prisoners is being jeopardised by putting them in ill-equipped cells at police stations and courts (bear in mind too that many of these prisoners will not have been found guilty of any crime at this point in their incarceration).

The Public Accounts Committee has found that since the government started spending £800m over the past five years trying to reduce the number of students who leave their university courses, the drop-out rate remains unchanged at 22%.

A murder inquiry has begun after a 16-year-old boy was found stabbed to death in Woolwich, becoming the fifth teenager to be killed in London this year.

Don’t you just love this government ?

I'm Pigging Sick Of This Kind Of Thing

Yesterday I found a "This just can't be right" story. Today it's just a "Oh, for God's sake !" one.

A children's story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down for an award, in part at least because its references to pigs may be offensive to Muslims.

The story comes on a CD-ROM (well, at least it doesn't contain the private information of 25 million people) and is in the form of an electronic pop-up book, aimed at primary school children.

It's called "Three Little Cowboy Builders". From what I can gather it tries to underline the importance of a good education, by casting the thee pigs as builders who try to build houses without knowing what they're doing. It's won a number of awards thus far, but when put in front of a government agency (of course) called Becta, it got the inevitable brush-off on the basis that the judges had "concerns about the Asian community and the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

If I still paid into my swear box this would have cost me serious money. The thing is, whenever I talk to Muslims about things like this, they say that they just find it embarrassing that people are trying to "protect" them in this way. I believe that whether it's trying to take the Christianity out of Christmas or abolishing references to pigs, most Muslims do not want to see people messing about with traditional English culture.

Two More Years Of Thought Control

I've been trying not to think about the government's plan to force children to stay in education until they're 18 because I find it so hugely depressing. However the Bill receives its second reading in the Commons today, so I supposed I'd better exit "denial" mode.

Under the Education and Skills Bill, by 2013 all pupils in England will have to stay in education or training until the end of the school year in which they turn 17. And by 2015, this leaving age will be raised to 18.

In a rare use of modern business practices, Gordon Brown labels this bill an educational "opportunity" ("opportunity" usually means "pain in the bum" in today's workplace) and says that this will help us achieve the stated aim of giving our young people world-class skills by 2020. If only.

The problem with world-class skills in that they require world-class education. Brown clearly thinks that if you subject all our young adults to another two years of the dross we're already giving them, that'll do the trick. Those of us who see the products of the education system now know different. He also believes that if someone drops out of a system voluntarily (perhaps because they perceive it to be no bloody good) then forcing them to stay in it against their will rather than fixing the underlying problems is the way forward.

Andy Powell, Chief Executive of the education charity Edge has a more realistic slant: "The bill will be condemned to failure unless the government tackles the reasons why young people drop out in the first place". Exactly.

As you'd expect from the authoritarian thugs who run our country, the bill includes a duty on young people to comply with the regulation, and - somewhat darkly - lumbers parents with a duty "to assist their children to participate". Cue images of parents whose children bunk off being whisked away to face "re-education" themselves in the New Labour equivalent of Outer Siberia (having first paid a few hundred quid in Truancy Tax, of course).

Socialists will love these measures because
..a) they allow the government to massage the unemployment figures;
..b) they increase the time during which people are "dependent" on the State;
..c) they allow the State another two years at indoctrinating our children with all their nannying and social engineering.

And I hate them for exactly the same reasons.

Write To Complain

Many of the country's leading authors have written to Gordon Brown asking him to do something about literacy in schools.

Writers aren't exactly renowned for having entrenched, pro-Conservative views, so you might think it something of an indictment that 545 of them feel the need, after ten years of a Labour government, to write to the Prime Minister urging him to act to resolve what they clearly believe is a growing problem. And you'd be right. Frankly though, it's hardly surprising.

Despite the protestations of the education establishment to the contrary, literacy is not treated as a priority in today's schools. Womble On Tour's two children, both aged 11, routinely come home with work marked but spelling and grammatical mistakes uncorrected. Spelling lists are handed out but there is rarely a theme to them, such as the clear concentration on particular rules. When I toured local secondary schools a couple of months ago I found poorly worded notices (written by teachers) with apostrophes in the wrong place.

It's little wonder that according to a recent study by the OECD our children had fallen from seventh place in an international literacy league table to 17th in the space of just six years.

I'd like to congratulate (and thank) the likes of Nick Hornby, Joanna Trollope, Kate Mosse, Jackie Collins and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion for trying to motivate this woeful government into providing our children with some basic education. I just get the feeling that nothing's going to change.