Saturday, March 22, 2008

[teachers] imparting which values


Off topic but methodologically, this girl needs to be taken to one side and taught that:

1. the teacher has time to do all the board work before the lesson [which she may well have here], that shoddy board work is an invitation for children's shoddy work;

2. one never turns one's back on the class - if you need to write on the board, then you turn side on and keep the class in view through the 180 degree vision you've developed. This is as fundamental to teaching as to the acting profession.

This is also why OH projectors and powerpoints were developed but that's another matter.

However, that is not the point of the post of this post. There were some interesting statements made here:

[Megablogger] Welshcakes Limoncello posted:

"Yes, but if the teachers feel that the flag is being paraded for racist reasons, don't they have a point?"

I disagreed with this and you stated further,

"Anon, I have a right to express my opinion, just as you do. Despite a a life spent in education, I'm afraid I don't know any "pc communist maniac" teachers. I wish I did, as they might be rather refreshing!"

Teachers do not have a right to do anything other than teach what they are supposed to teach. If everyone did as they pleased what would result? Of course teachers often do not stick to their remit, i.e. they "innocently" throw in comments about English "racists" and the English empire (It was the British empire. That includes Scotland, Wales and Ireland too).

Teachers are NOT guardians of England's children. Teachers have no right to tell parents what to do either!

Seriously, your view that teachers "have a point", i.e. you mean the right to take action, if they "feel" that the cross of St George is being paraded for racist reasons is fascist! Why can't I also "take action" if I feel certain groups are not acting appropriately? Come on lets have a free for all.

So, in nutshell, Anon says that the teacher has no right to impart "values", an argument I feel he's just being devil's advocate for. On the other hand Welshcake's never having seen a Marxist teacher" - well one has to smile as she's surrounded with them at secondary level and this constitutes the majority political view of virtually all teacher training, from the selection of set texts to recommended booklists.

When I read Economics Politics, the required texts included Tawney, Sorel, Shaw and so on - evolutionists and revolutionist. The whole thrust was humanist/atheistic. Thus we have the keynote address [April 1972] to the Association for Childhood Education International, by Chester M. Pierce, Professor of Education and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University, proclaiming:

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being. It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future."

... or the quote [Feb. 10, 1973], by Catherine Barrett, former president of the National Education Association, who writes that:

"dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling. We will need to recognize that the so-called 'basic skills,' which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one-quarter of the present school day. When this happens - and it's near - the teacher can rise to his true calling. More than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher. We will be agents of change."

These sorts of people are the ones who define the cognitive aspects of CurrR&D - the think tanks behind the textbooks and have you ever considere who the authors of these books, such as Headway, Cutting Edge and so on are?

Of course values are transmitted by teachers and of course it's all done politically with the naive girl in the pic above not even aware most of the time just how political she actually is being. As a former paid up Fabian, I can add to the body of opinion which recognizes the school curriculum as a key area in society for the propagation of "values".

They've always been the battleground for ideologies, schools. Here are some references supporting the notion that the dumbing down of education is a very real thing. But for what purpose?

‘There are really not enough words to describe the absurdity of so-called "liberal" educational theories that this blogger came across during his teacher training: false dichotomies between different forms of learning that I would expect one of my brighter senior pupils to spot within about four minutes; the ludicrous notion that telling a pupil they're wrong represents an "authoritarian theory of knowledge" - are just a couple of the symptoms of the other-worldly disconnection with reality that so disfigures our educational system.’

Portals for further reading here and here.

Which still leaves us with the question on whether values should be imparted at all in schools. Well, rather ask the question: "Is there any way values cannot be imparted or can be prevented form being imparted?"

So the issue then becomes which values? Well, the values of the deeply committed and organized, of course. As U.S. Senator William Jenner of Indiana, took to the Senate Floor, to speak in support of the Bricker Amendment [February 23, 1954], he addressed the nature of these people:

"The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization. It is a dynamic, aggressive, elite corps, forcing its way through every opening, to make a breach for a collectivist one-party state. It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government without our suspecting the change is under way... It conducts tactical retreats but only the more surely to advance its own goal."

Ron Paul estimated [August 2003] that there were about 25 000 of them in key positions in the U.S. alone. [O/T but interesting then that the neocons decry Ron Paul who is actually on the side of True Conservatism and Truth. :)

And as for pressure groups in and out of education, the great Tom Paine [blogger] once said:

Before their political and economic projects failed, by means of their iron grip on our educational institutions, the Left in Britain managed to socialise two or three generations to defer to certain allegedly oppressed groups. Just as our ancestors would have instinctively have tugged their forelocks at the aristocrats of old, so now do we at these new ones.

Therefore, those who would reassert the values of G-d, Queen and country need to get off their collective butts and counter the hatchet job done on us all in the last four decades alone, before absolutely everything has gone.

No small task.

[Post dedicated to Welshcakes Limoncello and Lord Nazh]

12 comments:

  1. Well I don't dare make any comment on some of these statements, but my daughter who is now a high school teacher in the great Democratic state of New York, had a PhD and taught for 9 years in university before she ever took a course in Education. So I don't think she was overly influenced by anything she read for it and later courses she was forced to take for her certification and frankly she could have taught most of the courses herself. She and all her fellow teachers are appalled at the dumbing down of the curriculum in the high schools and are constantly fighting it. It's the no child left behind policy which is causing so many problems.

    I don't get the blackboard thing. You can't do the board work if the classroom is in use until two minutes before you arrive and not every room is fitted with OH projectors and powerpoint projectors. Besides things spontaneously arise in classroom that need to be written on the board. Also it doesn't work for the sciences or mathematics where often things have to be derived on the board as you go along. Oh maybe you are talking high school only.

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  2. Yes, JMB but there is a technique, of turning side on and even of having the board adjacent, not in front of the class.

    As for the "2 minutes", this is not so - I lecture and there are always minimum 15 minutes between sessions to do the preparation. What we're really talking here is teacher's sloppiness and unwillingness to go in and actually do the work - most I observe rush in 2 minutes late! :)

    Thanks for your comments here.

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  3. Never been to a school that had 15 minutes between classes :)

    Not sure what part of your post was 'dedicated' to me, but it's funny that you link me with neocon while praising the 'only man who can save America' in all his hypocritical protectionist self.

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  4. The part you read, Verlin and the ovrall view of the marxists.

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  5. Your quote re the new aristocracy is right. I calle them the "ragged-arsed aristocrats" - mothers on welfare, children taxied in (courtesy of So Security); teachers required to say "please" and "thank you" and never "shut up", children replying (and I have this daily) "f*ck off", "shut up" and "I don't care".

    I have to keep remembering the hymn line, "Love to the loveless shown that they may lovelier be." - http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/m/m187.html - not, of course, that hymns are allowed in most schools, thanks to 30 years of the educational equivalent of the Baader-Meinhoff gang.

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  6. Thanks for the dedication. I would argue that a Marrxist teacher is not necessarily a communist one and of course many of us were / are left of centre and believed in education for all and making a difference. We did NOT go into it to try to inflict these ideas on others! In fact , when the stupid "peace studies" and other factors of what Ted Wragg called "mad curriculum disease" came in, I was thoroughly against the idea, as if history and literature are being taught inspiringly then "values" should come from that. If you are not teaching students to think, then what the hell are you doing? It hurts me deeply when I get "branded" by TP and anon [npot that the former has been personal] because all I ever wanted to do was inspire a love of language and literature and maybe make a difference that way. What worries me these days is the undervaluing of the arts.

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  7. I calle them the "ragged-arsed aristocrats" - mothers on welfare, children taxied in (courtesy of So Security);

    Does the same apply to fathers on welfare?

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  8. Father's on welfare? What's that? I've heard of fathers on alimony though.

    Speaking for myself only - how could a person exist on welfare? Surely you must ahve a job ad they're not that hard to come by or so it seems to me.

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  9. It isnt just mothers who are on welfare James, am sure you are aware of that. Not all single parents are mothers and there are a lot of families with both parents who are on welfare.

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  10. How about whole families on welfare:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=541598&in_page_id=1770

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  11. Nunyaa: wasn't meant to be a sexist denigration of women - it's just that many of the most troubled children I've taught don't have a dad at home, and mum's making do on next to nothing if she hasn't got a job. In many of the other cases, dad's on drugs or in jail. It's the feckless men I blame - and the increasingly jobless environment that encourages them to give up - plus, often, abuse their kids and stepkids.

    My wife used to register their children - mum no coat or handbag, fags and benefit book clutched in one hand. The women quite often came into the office alone and wouldn't give father's details for the birth registration, because it might affect the man's benefit or bring the Child Support people down on him. Then So Security does all, because not to means letting them slide into even worse misery. What a trap - but what consequences for the next generation, too.

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