Education - the last dying gasp

I've moaned often enough about educational entropy (you remember - each generation of teachers knowing a little less than the last), but I made a mistake.  I thought teachers still taught subjects (though why I should have thought that I don't know - the contrary evidence is blatant and ubiquitous.)  Some may try to, but the odds are stacked against them.  Education is no longer the province of teachers but of loonies, and I was going to say 'MPs AND loony bureaucrats' but loonies does a very good job of of embracing the lot of 'em.  Unlike teachers, loonies have a lot of time on their hands, and there's nothing they like more than appearing to be busy doing something in case someone notices that they're getting paid for twiddling their thumbs.  So when the latest crackpot notion comes down from the amateur social reformers in Parliament all the loonies in Whitehall,  quangos and town halls creak into action to generate  their latest batch of ukases.  That they are boring yet another hole below the waterline of a sinking ship doesn't seem to bother them.

The recent government review of the primary curriculum brought calls to reduce subject content in favour of personal and emotional development. The Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers tells teachers not to be “dinosaurs” about their subjects because they can “deliver an enormous array of other outcomes”.

Instead of teaching about a world outside “me”, the hollowing out of subjects requires teachers with expertise in “nurturing”, “engaging”, “mentoring” and “facilitating” a long list of formal targets for emotional attributes, dispositions and attitudes.

Turning these into “personal and social skills” requires teachers to plan emotional and social objectives before subject ones. They must negotiate with a growing array of para-professionals, such as pupil support officers and mentors. A history teacher has had to change his discipline strategies because a mentor thought they were not appropriate. A colleague in an FE college says that students walk out of difficult lessons to see their “anger management counsellor”. Children become adept at playing off teachers against these emotional supporters.


And no, those last three paragraphs are not me ranting.  They are taken from an article  in yesterday's Times by Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education and Social Inclusion at the University of Birmingham and co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education.


The full text is here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7071764.ece






PS


If you want to read a lot more guff about the new primary curriculum, have a look at


http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/new-primary-curriculum/


It's all in very simple language, with only a few grammatical howlers, and if you're a teacher with reading difficulties, don't worry, there's a very nice series of moving pictures in which a nice man tells you what to do.

Olive Ate the Cavalry at Knotty End

(this article will probably not be appearing in the April issue of the parish magazine)

When the Boss worked as a senior medical receptionist the word ‘fraught’ cropped up frequently in the sort of anecdotes you tell at dinner parties, because she was once asked how to spell it by a novice at the job.

”F,R,A,U,G,H,T”, the Boss explained, helpfully.  There was a frown and much biting of pencil.  “It don’t look right”, said the novice, after a few minutes’ judicious thought.  “I mean fraught, as in ‘sore fraught’, like what this lady on the phone are got.”

And fraught is what Bring-and-Sing events are. When you invite all and sundry there is always the possibility of alligators, and tonight’s do (Sat 6 March) was no exception.  It started off innocuously enough, with a rehearsal belt-through of Mr Maunder’s timeless Victorian masterpiece of  church schmaltz, Olivet to Calvary, but at a very early stage rioting nearly broke out.  A visiting lady of imposing presence, who was obviously far more knowledgeable about music and singing than any of the rest of us, complained to the soprano in front of her that she was too tall to see over, and when said soprano obliging moved behind her the complaints continued – now she was singing too loudly.  The only possible riposte in such circumstances is of course to draw up the shoulders haughtily, peer through the lorgnette, and say, in the frostiest voice one can manage:  “Madam.  It is not I that am singing too loudly, but you that are singing not loudly enough”, but who thinks of withering ripostes in the face of such breathtaking rudeness unless they be Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw? (or even Mae West or Dorothy Parker?)

But not content with reducing the voice of one of the few really competent sopranos in the assembled multitude to a sod-you-then whisper, this lady then turned her imperious attention to another soprano in front of her, who she considered was paying insufficient attention to what the conductor was saying, and prodded her in the back with the sharp corner of her music score, a lèse-majesté unthinkable in civilised circles such as pertain at our church, where we don’t even poke curates in the small of the back with sharp instruments, let alone Canons, even when said Canons are in mufti and only there because they love the joy of singing in good company. This grande-dame of inappropriate behaviour didn’t know how lucky she was to emerge with her hair-do intact, considering that Sop 1 in this anecdote could easily wrestle a carthorse to the ground while simultaneously doing the washing-up, the ironing and helping her daughter with her homework, not even drawing breath the whiles, and Sop 2, after 35 years as a missionary in Africa, is regarded as definitely off-limits and off-menu by even the hungriest of lions and crocodiles in that far-off land, for they have seen what she can be like when she gets even the teeniest bit annoyed (a 40-minute sermon at the very least on faith, hope, charity, and not going round eating people up willy-nilly.)

The little-known Adams’s Law of Ego ( E ∝ 1/C ) states that ego is always in inverse proportion to competence, the living proof of which is that the world is stuffed to suffocation with bureaucrats and committees.  Them as do, do.  Them as don’t do form committees to tell them as do do how to do, even though they haven’t the faintest clue themselves about how to do what the people who do do do, and you try saying that three times quickly without losing the companionship of your teeth.

Incidentally (and to bring this month’s sprawling column to a close) - did you know that Herod the Great had at least ten wives (though not necessarily all at the same time), and that the first of them was called Doris?  I didn’t.  Isn’t it interesting?  


Oh all right then.  Be like that.

No yoghurt again at the Co-op? - 2

A friend with more political savvy than I (she has lived here all her life, and always applies the principle of Occam's Razor to any village goss) says it is obvious.  Spanish fisherman have infiltrated themselves into the crew of every boat that leaves Fleetwood, she says, and they are spiriting great crans of the silvery stuff back home at the dead of night.  But, homesick in the long months away from la casita, and anxious for news of the señoras and señoritas they have left behind in that land where hidalgos eat a lot of big fat sausagey things and slurp wholesome red wine at two pesetas (€0.000000001) a litre and then start getting naughty ideas, they thought they could slink over the river to buy their foreign newspapers and keep tabs on things without anybody noticing.

Ha!

If we act together as a community we can flush them out.  I suggest that a deputation of tough-looking gentlemen from the village assemble at the head of the jetty at 16:55 one evening when the wind in the north, and saunter down to the river saying in very loud voices "Gosh, Jeremy! It must be nearly five in the afternoon." (It sounds much better in Spanish, if everyone can manage it.)

If that doesn't work, we could next improvise provocative limericks about, for example, Lope de Vega or Federico García Lorca, and, in the last resort, make pointed observations about the probable sexual proclivities of professional football-punters from popular Spanish clubs  ("Sociedades Españolas de Futbol y Otras Actividades Interesantes, Nudgio-Nudgio"), not to mention  those of bullfighters (I mean, have you seen the way they stick their bottoms out?  Oo, ducky!)

Hordes of fishermen will eventually emerge on the opposite bank to find out what all the noise is about.  Ignore the ones in dirty blue T-shirts with half an inch of roll-up in their mouths and speaking a funny language. They are from Fleetwood.  Look for the bods from the bodegas -  huge waxed moustaches, voluminous pleated cravats, thigh-boots with floppy overhangs at the top, and funny looking hats.  If they are not from Pilling, despite all this circumstantial  evidence, then they are definitely Spanish.

One just hopes the Co-op manages to flog them those three copies of El País before we send them packing.  One is, after all, a card-carrying member of this worthy Society, and one must at all times keep a watchful eye on the divi.

No yoghurt again at the Co-op?

Bad news for the village (pop. 5314 at the last Census.)  The local Co-op has had a visit from the (wait for it, and listen in reverential silence) Area Manager and the staff are all of a flutter.  The Spar across the road is rubbing its little hands with glee, because the last time the Swat Team from HQ turned up at the Co-op Spar’s business increased dramatically, and it’s taken the Co-op, whose staff are local and very knowledgeable indeed about the sort of stuff villagers buy, a couple of years to woo customers back by stocking such exotic luxuries as plain yoghurt and Marigolds, in blatant defiance of Regulations.

I’m not quite sure where the Swat team emanates from, but I noticed in the Co-op today not one but three copies of El País, which as we all know is a newspaper published in Spain.

Buenas tardes, amigos.

Trinity Hospice, etc - 2

The BBC's 6:30 NW regional news programme did a nice whitewash job just now on behalf of the trustees and management of Trinity, with a lots of visuals to grab your emotions, but with a very telling parting shot - 'the pictures, bought last year, have already appreciated in value.'  Hm.  You could almost hear the 'so there.'  Well, if you're going to speculate with other people's money, I suppose 'art' is a slightly safer bet than the horses, but it is still a rather slippery argument which treats 'cost' and 'value' as though they meant the same thing. 


The point, surely, is that there are legitimate concerns about whether the hospice has acted ethically, for it has evidently not acted wisely, and there is certainly some evidence of hypocrisy in its defensive statements.  The 'chapel', for instance is 'non-religious', presumably as a sop to appease people of other faiths and those of no faith, but the artist is a Christian; the pictures were unveiled by the Dean of Blackburn Cathedral, which houses more of the same artist's work; and the hospice maintains a chaplaincy.  It really cannot have it both ways.


You can see more of Penny Warden's paintings on her website, and read about her method of working there.  It is quite astonishingly interesting.


More in the next post.

Trinity Hospice, Bispham, Engines, and Predestinate Grooves

You think, when you attend a fund-raising do for a hospice, that your contribution is going to be spent on equipment and essential nursing care.   We certainly thought so last Saturday when the do we were at raised £583 for Trinity Hospice in Bispham, Blackpool, where some of our friends have spent their last days.


What we didn't know was that two days earlier the hospice's trustees and management had unveiled seven pictures commissioned for the trifling sum of £50,000 to brighten up the chapel  (a chapel they describe as 'non-religious', which itself makes you raise your eyebrows a bit, for there ain't no such thing as a non-religious chapel.)


See today's Blackpool Gazette, and see also the Hospice's website for small pictures of the paintings.


The Gazette report notes that the artist spent a year working on this commission.  Even if she wasn't working on anything else, fifty grand isn't a bad return for a year's work, and I bet she's glad she switched professions when she came out of theological college and opted for the evidently far more lucrative job of painting in preference to parsoning, and for Heaven's sake, I hope no NSMs find out what she's getting or they'll be taking up the speculative brush as well.


The hospice has, I fear, landed itself with a PR disaster, because the reaction of the populist press was so obviously predictable, and the meeja has been handed a story on a plate (someone has already spotted the the ad on the Trinity website for a vacancy in the servants' quarters, at only a bit over £6 an hour.)


Only a few hours after the Gazette hit the streets there was a huge chorus of disapproval on the website, where comment is invited from readers, some of whom are even able to spell their own pseudonyms, and only a few defenders.  I waded through page after page of comments, and agreed with almost all of them, as one does when one does not wish to cause offence.  Then by chance I heard a bloke on a TV quiz show say, just as I was about to turn the wretched thing off, 'Once I've med up me mind, I never go back on it. 'Er were th'weakest link', and that, and the quality so far of the comment on the Gazette website, brought to mind Maurice Evan Hare's apt metaphor, this after all being Blackpool:

There once was a man who said, ‘Damn!

It is born upon me that I am

An engine that moves

In predestinate grooves - 

I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.'

Ah well. I am sure we get the press we deserve.

Boring music - 3

There were technical problems on R3 a couple of mornings ago (Rob Cowan had a puncture on his way to work, perhaps?), and it was wonderful.  Somebody with a deep gravelly voice introduced some Bach, and then let Bach get on with it, without being interrupted by trails or the insipid e-mails people issue when stuck in traffic jams.  It was a shame when 'normal' service was resumed, and we were back with Interactive Radio Three, ba-boom, Shazam.


What utter, utter crap the Third Programme has become.


And talking of utter crap, thank you to a few sane people who worked out my e-mail address and said 'thanks for the Schubert piece - it really is terrible, isn't it?'


Yes, it is.


Next time: more horrors from the 'it's classical, therefore it must be good' ethos - VW's sickly 'Serenade to Music', with a review by none other than St Cecilia herself.