Michael Gove: Poor listening skills are education department`s core problem…

June 12, 2013 by

Dan Walsh  

So our education secretary has unveiled his tremendous plan to repair British education. He believes in more rigour. I’m with you Mr Gove. Driving up standards? Yes with you there too. But your utter inability to listen to what people are saying means your policies have the opposite effect from that which you allegedly intended. The man has a very legitimate point when he talks about grade inflation and so forth. British exam results have been colossally high for a long time yet our standards of literacy, numeracy and other key skills lag behind much of the rest of Europe. This is a direct result of a curriculum and statistic obsessed approach which means children are taught to pass exams rather than to learn. Exams have become almost a glorified memory test which doesn’t necessarily equate to a well rounded and capable person. I say this without remotely intending to belittle the great efforts many students undoubtedly make at school and I’m not suggesting that exams are simply ‘easy’ but schools strategically teaching to boost their league table results is not the approach that should be taken to educate a child. I’m not completely blaming the schools – politicians looking to make cheap political points are the root cause of this educational problem. If the prime minister can stand at the dispatch box and say ‘results are up by such and such a percentage’ it sounds good even if it overlooks the fact that our actual standards comparable to Europe are not so good. Read more of this post

Filed under Children and families, Conservatives, Culture, Education Tagged with , , , , ,

BIG BROTHER’S PASSION FOR HISTORY AND WHAT IT REVEALS ABOUT US

June 3, 2013 by

Katherine Edwards

Image © Simon Harriyott

The 25th of June this year is the 110th anniversary of the birth of the creator of that most darkly compelling and well known of all dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Like all such speculative fiction Orwell’s dystopia holds up a distorting mirror to reality.  It subjects some of its distinguishing features to extremes of enlargement and extrapolation, to explore them and warn of their implications.  Such flights of imagination stand or fall by their plausibility, their emotional power and what they reveal about reality by recasting it in a different and distorted form. Orwell would not engage his readers if his dystopia didn’t communicate something significant about the human condition. One aspect of his message, I will argue, has particular current significance. Read more of this post

Filed under Culture, Democracy, Education Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Ireland, the land of scholars…

May 20, 2013 by

Left Central interview Professor Louise Ryan

Image © Alegri, Romania.

In the years since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy there has been a significant increase in Irish migration to Britain. However, little is known about the experiences of these ‘post-Celtic tiger’, ‘post-Peace Agreement’ migrants.  How might their experiences differ from earlier waves of Irish migrants to Britain?  There is some anecdotal evidence that more Irish people are arriving in Britain to take up professional occupations.

In an attempt to gain a deeper insight into the experiences of migrants who have arrived since 2008 a study is to be carried out by the Social Policy Research Centre, at Middlesex University, in partnership with the Federation of the Irish Societies. This study will focus on teachers. Irish teachers in Britain are an under-researched group but there is some anecdotal evidence that their numbers are increasing (Irish Post newspaper, 26.02.13).

Through an on-line survey, in-depth interviews and a focus group this project aims:

To examine the needs, attitudes and experiences of this group – in particular their sense of Irishness, connections to Ireland, involvement in Irish networks and/ or organisations in Britain including cultural engagement, their migration trajectories, career aspiration, family strategies and future plans for settlement or return

The findings of the study will be published in a report and other academic papers and will be used to inform the policy initiatives and funding applications of the Federation of Irish Societies.

The project has been given ethical approval by the Middlesex University Ethics Committee.  All participants will be anonymized and all materials will be stored on a password protected computer to safeguard confidentiality. In order to gain further information about this study Professor Ryan kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the forthcoming study. Read more of this post

Filed under Education Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dreaming of One Nation – Labour, multiculturalism and race

May 16, 2013 by

Image © Alexander Kachkaev

Robin Richardson

Review of The British Dream: successes and failures of post-war immigration by David Goodhart, Atlantic Books 2013, 381 pp, £20

David Goodhart hopes there will be a Labour government, or a Labour-led coalition, from 2015 onwards. He himself belongs, he says, to the ‘political tribe of north London liberals’ and is ‘a journalist of leftish sympathies’. His subject-matter in this book is immigration policy, and the extent to which Britain can be a multicultural One Nation. It is possible to imagine Britain, he mentions, ‘little by little becoming a less civil, ever more unequal and ethnically divided country – as harsh and violent as the United States’. In such a Britain the welfare state will have largely withered away, for white British people will be increasingly unwilling to pay taxes to support people who belong to (one of Goodhart’s favourite (phrases) ‘visible minorities’. He sees his book as a wake-up call to prevent such a dystopia. Read more of this post

Filed under America, Book Club, Culture, Democracy, Education, Labour, Religion Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

EQUALITY AND THE DRAFT HISTORY CURRICULUM

April 27, 2013 by

Katherine Edwards 

Image© John Addison, Print, Government Office, East India Co St Helena

At the recent memorial service to mark the twentieth anniversary of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Prime Minister spoke of Stephen’s death as having brought ‘monumental change’ to British society.  Those of us concerned about the implications for equality and multiculturalism in the proposed new history curriculum found the irony of this comment hard to take.

One of the recommendations of the 1999 Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence case was a ‘National Curriculum aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism, in order better to reflect the needs of a diverse society’. Yet although there are good grounds for thinking that this aim has been taken seriously in the education system up to now, we need to be clear about what a stark reversal the new draft national curriculum for history represents.  If it comes into force, it is very likely to set the recommendations of the Macpherson Report back by at least a generation.  Read more of this post

Filed under Children and families, Culture, Education, Liberty, Religion Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Robert Kee: History of Ireland Episode 4 FAMINE

April 14, 2013 by

Nora Connolly 

Image© illustrated London News, December 22, 1849

 It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry…

Robert Kee focuses on the emotive issue of the Irish Potato Famine from 1845 to 1849. Explaining why the population in the West and South West depended on this food for nutrition, outlining the organisation of land and tenancy arrangement`s. Other crops abundantly produced sold to pay rent, encapsulated by the following contemporaneous observation reported in Hansard, `not a bit of bread have I eaten since I was born, nor a bit of butter. We sell all the corn and the butter to give to the landlords [for rent] yet I have the largest farm in the district and am as well off as any man in the county`. The population which increased to eight million was linked to the peculiar organisation of land tenure in Ireland, `land was divided into smaller and smaller plots – the number of those depending on the potato grew larger and larger`. In Kee`s written history he demonstrates an in-depth understanding of issues i.e. the impact on agriculture post Napoleonic Wars such an analysis not always possible in a fifty minute television overview. Read more of this post

Filed under Culture, Democracy, Economy, Education, Europe, Religion Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Jack Johnson: Remember I was a man…

April 11, 2013 by

Image© Library of Congress

Legal Eagle

Of course some people pretend to object to Mr Johnson`s character but we have yet to hear in the case of White America that marital troubles have disqualified prize fighters or ball players or even statesmen. It comes down then after all to this unforgivable blackness…WB Dubois.

The campaign to posthumously pardon one of the all time greats of world boxing, Jack Johnson is gathering pace in the USA. Johnson was the first African-American to win the World Heavyweight Championship in 1908, a sporting victory of incredible social and cultural significance. Jack defeated Tommy Burns in Australia, Burns lured by a $30,000 pay day. Jack held the title until 1915, he was defeated in dubious circumstances in a contest which pitted him against Jess Willard, a gruelling fight held in the blazing heat of Cuba. Willard knocked Johnson down in the twenty-sixth round (when Johnson was ahead on points). It was later suggested that the fight was a fix (an opinion sanctioned by Johnson). This view granted credence when Johnson was famously photographed protecting his eyes from the sun as he lay on the canvas, awaiting the referee to count him out. Whatever the merits of this sporting event (the defeat probably genuine), it appears beyond doubt that Jack Johnson`s criminal conviction under the Mann Act, was a travesty of justice. It is this issue that has brought Johnson back into the news, allowing a review of his treatment at the hands of the Jim Crow criminal justice system. Read more of this post

Filed under America, Culture, Education Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PRIDE, GUILT AND POLITICS IN THE HISTORY CURRICULUM: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

April 10, 2013 by

Katherine Edwards 

Image© Department for Education

Should history be about encouraging national pride, or perhaps facing up to collective guilt?  The emotive nature of this question might explain some of the vehemence behind the current controversy over the new curriculum.  There are some who perceive that history lessons are currently ‘denigrating this country’, such as Chris McGovern, Chairman of The Campaign for Real Education.  One the other hand the idea of a curriculum designed to ‘celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world’ as Gove put it, has provoked outrage among many who feel that it is not the place of the history curriculum to encourage patriotism.  History teachers and academics have emerged from their classrooms, libraries and lecture rooms to enter the public debate in the press, online and on the airwaves as never before, and formed pressure groups such as Defend School History, the Facebook campaign Save School History and an e-petition to scrap the changes and ‘Keep the History Curriculum Politically Neutral’. Read more of this post

Filed under Children and families, Conservatives, Culture, Democracy, Education Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

They’re most of them Marxists, you know – Michael Gove’s views of education

March 28, 2013 by

Robin Richardson 

Image©Steve Punter

Many education officers and advisers in local authorities are Marxists. So are many teacher trainers in universities. That is why more and more schools must be removed from local authority control, and why teacher training must be increasingly taken out of the hands of universities. Also, the teacher unions are more interested in the rights of shop stewards than in the rights of children. That is why their influence in the education system must be curtailed. These people – local authority advisers and officers, university lecturers, union officials – do not want to see a rise in educational standards. On the contrary, they are enemies of promise, implacably opposed to excellence, revering jargon and Marxism. Read more of this post

Filed under Culture, Democracy, Education Tagged with , , , , , ,

Pointing The Finger – by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson

March 28, 2013 by

LeftCentral Book Review 

Image©Nevit Dilmen

 

…It takes the form of an attack on multiculturalism for which Muslims are held responsible and which is a coded word for them. It cuts across political and ideological divides, and is shared alike, albeit in different degrees by conservatives, fascists, liberals, socialists and communists` (Bhikhu Parekh quoted in Pointing The Finger…)

In April 1964 Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) left Detroit for Mecca, in the midst of an acrimonious split with the `Nation Of Islam`. Malcolm at this time was the USA`s foremost bogey-man, the unacceptable face of the civil rights movement. His position caricatured in the 1950s as `the hate that hate produced` – a view fitting the `orientalism` framework described by Edward Said. Whatever the merits of this documentary about the NOI, it does appear clear that Malcolm`s visit to Mecca changed him, his pilgrimage making him aware of the ethnic diversity of Islam. Recording in his diary, `it seems every nation and form of culture on earth is represented here…`. This revelation, as Manning Marble outlines encouraged Malcolm to alter his view on race. Malcolm reflecting at the time that, ‘I began to perceive that `white man`, as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily, primarily it describes attributes and actions`. Thus a metamorphosis resulted from advances in Malcolm`s `religious literacy` combined with his genius `critical literacy` (concepts outlined and explained in Pointing The Finger). Read more of this post

Filed under America, Culture, Democracy, Education, Liberty, Media, Middle East, Religion Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,282 other followers