Not only is Michael Gove's time at the Education department beginning to pay off, but the improvements are set to continue with even more investment in the nation's intellectual capital stock and measures to force drippy 'all shall have prizes' educationalists to reintroduce discipline to unruly children.
Labour of course are furious. Under Labour, the People's schools were designed to keep the working class, particularly the northern working class, of whom Labour is terrified, in their place - with little ability for a financial independence from the Socialist slave-state. Dear God, start educating the working classes, Labour capos believe, and they might even start voting the wrong way ...
Unfortunately, the British people are seeing clearly the contempt in which they are held by Labour. They may not like Boris much, but they loath Corbyn as much as Lord Starmer and Lady Nugee. Farage and TBP still have a vital role to play in keeping Boris on course. A much-needed election will not only clear all the shite from the Commons - including the collaborators, turncoats and Quislings from the Tory Party - but restore in some measure democracy to voters from whom it has been tricked and subverted by an anti-democratic political class.
My voting finger is itching.
21 comments:
Yes, Gove's education reforms were badly needed. Shame he is such a dis- likeable little creep who knifed Boris in 2016 which led directly to 3 years of misery with Treason May and a Surrender Treaty which only a nation beaten in war would accept.
I don't dislike Boris, but I loathe the treacherous CON Party almost as much now as Labour and the LibDems. Changing the Leader means nothing, when most of the Party are Remainers who do not want an independent, self-governing UK.
It's obvious Boris aiming to amend/strip out the NI backstop and then re-submit the Surrender Treaty to Parliament for a 4th time; getting it through with the votes of Labour MPs if necessary just as Heath did back in 1972 when he took us into the EEC with no mandate.
My voting finger is itching too. I will be voting for the only trustworthy party in the UK: the Brexit Party.
I fear voting chaos, with TBP and the Tories splitting their vote and natural Labour voters in a quandary. All this because of a lack of decisive action in 2016 post the Referendum.
The Comprehensive system was intended by Labour to parallel the French lycée, lyceum, system - which leaves the UK far behind. That is, all children should attend grammar-standard schools.
It was the Thatcher governments, which ran them down to secondary-modern levels.
However, we must dispel the damaging myth, that people are, as a rule, born with their fixed intelligence or lack of it, and that this defines and limits their academic aptitude. Stupidity is largely taught by feckless disengaged parents, and intelligence itself, the thinking skills which make it, can be learnt to a large degree too. However, if a girl is taught at home that knowing Katie Price's baby's name matters more than her very own grammar, and boys that remembering who scored last Saturday is more important than numeracy for instance, then there's little that teachers can do.
The UK, particularly England, has a cultural problem too.
JPM touches on an important factor - the home. A language-rich environment there gives the child a ten-yard start when the race begins:
https://www.developmentalscience.com/blog/2013/04/18/how-to-raise-your-childs-intelligence-before-kindergarten
I also read in the 1970s a book on the notion that education could reduce social differences in achievement. Sorry I can't remember the title. But it found that children who entered education with the advantage of an education-supportive home came out even further ahead of their peers than when they started.
I remember the changeover from O level / CSE to GCSE - covering that spread of ability was too much of a stretch. Also extraordinary that it was in the 80s that school assemblies phased out hymns and prayers - what exactly do Tories stand for?
It is odd to think that Labour used to be the party for education, that is real education of the working classes. It is they who brought in grammar schools that raised so many from humble beginnings. They have tasted power and joined the elites, and where so many of their supporters reside, counting amongst them as they do the media. the uncivil service and academia. Now that they have "arrived" so to speak they look down their noses at us, great unwashed plebeian oiks in the same way the tories used to, and still do. Don't try and kid me Radders that Grieve, Heseltine and their ilk look at us in any other way.
There is a very long way to go vis-a-vis real improvements in education for the working classes, but even then, said working classes didn't need to be educated in any way to recognise when they were being taken for mugs, and nobody likes being taken for a mug. If they only had a strong inkling in 2016 then they bloody well know now that Labour has utterly betrayed them, not once but twice (once for abandoning them and once for Labours stance on the EU. In the coming election, Tories who voted leave will vote Tory, except in the North where they'll vote TBP, as will their Leave voting ex Labour brethren. Remain voting Tories on the other hand won't vote Tory, but will not quite be able to bring themselves to vote Labour, in the same way that aforesaid Labour leave voters won't vote tory either. So they'll vote Dim Libs instead.
Boris has to do two things. Remove sitting Remain Tories from their seats, as he'll lose crucial votes for those who would normally vote tory but won't vote for a Remainer and come to an accommodation with TBP in the North. This is THE one election where he really has to put country before party. The aim is to achieve a Parliament where the majority of MPs are Leavers of whatever party. Only then can he set about clearing out the swamp and restoring our institutions and our democracy.
The tories need to deselect all their remainer scum MPs before having an election.
That education system in France, with its non-selective high schools, stems from its Constitution, and that set of overriding rules is founded on Equality, on Liberty, and on Fraternity.
So, under Equality, every French student must have an equal right to a proper education. That means that unlike in the former British Grammar School system, four-fifths or more of them cannot be consigned to a second-rate one at age eleven.
In turn that means that the educational well-being of the French young cannot be used as a party-political plaything by either politicians or by their gutter media, along with health care and so on.
Their system has remained solidly in place since well before I was at Grammar School, and its results to this day leave the UK standing.
Alexander Johnson would do well to reflect on that.
French schools - maybe still better than ours, but cracks showing even there:
https://www.french-property.com/guides/france/public-services/school-education/operation/discipline-attendance
JPM makes a good point; backed up by Sackerson. My Dad used to say - and he was right to say - that we should teach our children to read *before* they start school. It isn't learning per se that wins the race, its the love of learning (i.e. they will continue to self educate through life) that will deliver the top slots in life. Another thing my Dad used to say was "in the land of the blind, one eye is king". Sadly, there are millions of very blind people in Britain today. Blind enough to vote for Corbyn!
JPM, forgive me but i have been looking for something to help you and I cannot find it: every list/survey/index/ranking for education puts the UK above France. I realise they must all be wrong and you clearly are a greater intellect than all this Internetty stuff so could you elaborate or post some proof. Ta.
@Cheerful
I'm sure there are things we could learn from the French education system. There are certainly things we could learn from the French health system.
If it's all "equality, liberty and fraternity" what about the enarques? Comparing the oxbridge "old boys network" to them is like comparing the salvation army to the waffen SS.
"Nowhere else in the world does the question of where you went to school so utterly determine your professional career - and the destiny of an entire nation" (one Peter Gumbel from his book "France's got talent". £6.50 kindle version. I'll get it. Anything that can help you get into the mind of the enemy!)
The enarques largely steered the creation of the EU. They thought they would be running it. Instead its eating France - and much of the rest of Europe - alive.
Leave the UK standing? That's what Brexit is all about as there won't be much left standing of the EU in a few years.
"Farage and TBP still have a vital role to play in keeping Boris on course."
Farage and TBP still have a vital role to play in replacing the treacherous CONservative party and all who sail in it.
The Tories don't seem (to me) to be afraid enough of TBP - almost as if they already have a plan in place to destroy their support.......
Seriously - what did they have on Farage at the South Thanet event? No one can possibly disabuse me of the thought that the was 'co-opted' to allow the result to fall another way. The exit polls and even the media had him winning 'all the way' until he disappears for hours, the ballot boxes were delayed and he eventually re-appears to stand, dejectedly, as the beaten candidate. Bollocks.
It was either Epstein-esque or matters-financial (fabricated or otherwise - the usual only two reasons anyone could be 'blackmailed') that got him to back down.
Since that time he has been, imho, 'worked' into the position he now holds and I wouldn't be surprised to see TBP utterly destroyed by some revelation that happens to pop up at the appropriate time of the establishments choosing.
THIS is why we don't hear much about the Tories 'fear' of TBP for, if the TRUTH of the matter was known, TBP would be capable of decimating the existing party structure and all the talk wouldn't be of a 'collective opposition to Boris's No Deal' but one directed entirely at TBP. TBP are as much a threat to the other parties as to the Tories and when it comes to self-preservation they will ALL work to stop TBP.
Something smells particularly nasty about all this.
Prediction:
1. Boris gets the backstop removed and little else
2. He presents it to Parliament who accept it
3. The Pols/MSM/BBC herald the result as a 'win'
4. There is ZERO discussion on the other aspects of the deal
5. The Pols/MSM/BBC hide the truth (again)
6. There's a GE when TBP is 'exposed' pre-election and 'destroyed'
7. Tories win
8. We're all back to square one and fucked.
Carry on.
The recent reports on Katharine Birbalsingh, Headmistress of Michaela school in Brent, North London, exemplify so much of what working class families expected from schools in past years.
Her regime of silence in corridors, punctuality, and - the one that I learnt early on - meeting the eyes of a teacher whilst conversing not only teach discipline but learning to value others as well as oneself.
Grammar schools were not really a just way of rescuing children from mediocrity (IIRC children aged 13 could change from secondary comps to grammar schools) but they did seem to provide easier access into the polytechs and teacher training.
The Technical Schools also guided our young people towards engineering.
One of the failures in our recent education set-up has been the insistence on setting targets for school leavers going to university: my industry fostered a culture of sending ex-apprentices into schools to recruit young would-be school leavers - only to be obstructed by schools looking to their university targets.
I am disgusted by a Labour Party that once believed in the education and training of our young people - Labour now put the recruitment of cheap foreign labour before the training of our own; and university education has become weaponised for political radicalisation.
We older ‘horny-handed sons of toil’ now see the damage done to our children’s futures, and have turned away from Labour in droves.
Comprehensive education was introduced by Labour in order to stop grammar school education giving working class children the chance to go to university and move upwards in social class and prosperity.
All political parties want to be in power. To do this you need to win a majority of votes. If you are the party which says you are for the “poor, unemployed and illiterate” then it is perfectly obvious that you will want there to be more poor, unemployed and illiterate voters, not fewer.
Once this is understood all Labour’s policies become completely transparent.
@ Dave_G 10:07
Agree your predictions 1 to 8 are all too terribly possible, and I don't like the way Boris keeps harping on about a deal.
With Farrage though, if they had stuff to compromise him, real or even made up, he could have just resigned and handed the baton to someone else. It would be a big loss, he's an important figure but I think TBP has enough impetus to carry on without him. So I don't think they have anything on him.
Span, it is not sufficient to look at the mere numbers passing exams at whatever grades.
You have to examine the absolute standards to which they are taught.
The French language has a far larger and more complex grammar than English, so similar grades in the speaker's languages mean quite different intellectual achievements in that alone.
"Steven Frank, the author of The Pen Commandments claims that English has 500,000 words with German having about 135,000 and French having fewer than 100,000"
Extraordinary that the Kermits have such linguistic complexity for a language with so few words.
No wonder English is taking the world by storm.
@Raedwald: I heard that statistic many years ago, and recall that it didn't include 400,000 technical terms. And then there's a world of slang.
Sackerson - indeed. I took the lowest figure available.
The UK also has 8 universities in the world's top 50 - 4 in the top 20. The French, with their 'superior education' have just one in the top 50 - at number 50, the Université PSL having just scraped in this year, and no e at all in top 20. Indeed, the entire EU27 doesn't have a single university in the global top 20 - which would tend to indicate that recent UK school improvements will feed through to even higher world rankings in a few years.
...and on top of all that I wasn't even talking about just the grades! There are a plethora of lists out there on many different bases.
Pauvre JPM, le troll s'est effondré
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