Friday, March 11, 2022

EXCELLENCE HAS A DAY OFF

 

In which your anonymous author imagines the unimaginable – a wee break from the classroom stress and educational garbage that accompanies the Scottish national curriculum.


Excellence Has a Day Off


 It starts with the register,

children’s names being substituted

for picnic items, fizzy drinks,

sandwich fillings and continental cheeses.

They are not fazed by the switch.

 

One maths lesson taught with

no reference to targets

children apparently fail to notice

its absence – perhaps they don’t care?

Those who finish early are tricked by,

 

not extra work, but extra free choice!

Playtime extended by ten minutes.

Milk and story time doubled.

Language lesson, no trick this time,

just a promise; finish early and play.

 

Lunch over, we go a walk in the woods

build a hut, then race back, Last’s a silly sausage ….. 

Next, Shakespeare verses parsed

from say, Romeo and Juliet,

Act out the same, for a laugh.

 

With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls,

for stony limits cannot hold love out.


Project proceeds without children

debating their own protocols, nor

stating Q I outcomes, they know already!

Teacher just teaches, flying the lesson

on experience. Somehow it lands okay.

 

The day passes with no reference

to the conveyer belt of pedagogic

balderdash that clichés our lessons.

No fires, no police, no children lost,

Excellence ends the day with a Beaujolais.    

                                                                         

You know what, Boys and Girls, let’s do it again. But don’t tell the head-teacher.

 

Talk about setting yourself up for a failure: The hubris of Scotland’s national curriculum, The Curriculum for Excellence, begs for divine correction. And, in a way, this is what has happened; with the educational system discredited, the profession demoralised and the pupils stressed and failed. The entire shekel plunder that is public education is deserving of mockery. And here I do my bit.

I have it on good authority that the sheer lack of common modesty (and not least the hubristic challenge) of The Curriculum for Excellence title was pointed out to the various government ministers, educational ‘experts’ and tax farmers responsible for its introduction, but you will not be surprised to know that these assorted imbeciles and dystopians followed their own advice.

PS. This poem is from my Relentless: The Death March to Educational Excellence. This genuinely excellent (honestly) book is a multi-media approach to the well-deserved mockery of our state schools. Here is a picture of the front cover. It is available if you click the Big Ride link at top right. 



Saturday, February 19, 2022

Viewing The Spectrum

 

The Spectrum:

If only it was an evil organisation, perhaps the Pupil Eco Committee could combat it.

However, and alas, 'the spectrum' describes the new pupil reality that finds a significant proportion of pupils credited to this shady group and apparently working for it as professional-level class disrupters, a task at which most excel. Why so many children, and especially boys, are arriving as basically psychiatric cases sporting a veritable alphabet of autist-like descriptive labels, ADD, ADHD, ODD, etc, and in need of various types of extra support (and funding), is a question that can be discretely asked (noting that walls have ears in school!), but cannot be honestly answered. Identifying the various environmental toxics, device radiation, late motherhood, broken families, intentionally single parents, phoney pedagogy, classroom stressors like BBC Newsround, the IT/TV existence and the whole panoply of a garbage lifestyle lived indoors, would not be permitted. And, not least, metabolic poisoning obtained by eating and drinking basically sugar. This is why I make no reference to these factors here.

(To those who propose genetic collapse as a factor, I present, as a contribution to the debate, the current batch of Scottish MPs.)

Precisely how many of these children are genuinely handicapped, as opposed to just some variety of strange that would be fixable by the simple remedy of fresh air, sunlight, exercise, proper food, sleep and discipline is a question that an old school teacher could answer, but would be more safely left nowadays to top dollar funded experts.

Of course, I do not wish to deny children support they need, but still wonder how much the diagnoses are linked to a feedback loop wherein artfully constructed (or disingenuous) definitions access funding and encourage a swarming class of professional beneficiaries allied to concerned, confused or (honestly) victimhood-seeking parents, each driving the other to create more of the same and hence further justify itself. The motivation and behaviour of any one actor (be they parent, teacher or health professional) within this loop may be entirely rational, even while the loop itself may be irrational– except if viewed as yet another manifestation of the society-destroying processes which shape our modern lives.

What think ye?


ADDENDUM

This reflection was inspired by a recent article that described the dramatic rise in autism diagnosed over the last generation as, in fact, mainly a rise in its reporting.

This allegedly based on two related phenomena; the social trend of shifting spectrum children, who would have formerly attended a specialist institution, into mainstream schools (aka, mainstreaming) with this development making such children more visible and leading in turn to concomitant changes in reporting protocols; and (as noted above) the politicisation and monetisation of definitions and diagnoses.  

While I find myself  in broad agreement with part of the author’s thesis, my Spidey sense tells me that she is more wrong than right; in that there is indeed a true rise in the numbers of such children for at least some of the reasons already referred to. The comments accompanying the article demonstrate how politicised (weaponised even?) such science has become with the protagonists seemingly unable to approach evidence free from partisan proselytising of their preferred societal agenda. One cannot ‘trust the science’ here. And it is for this very reason that I have abandoned to oblivion all such studies, where they pertain to education, as sources of either information or policy; preferring instead the scientific evidence of my own eyes and ears. 

Regardless, no useful ‘expert’ conclusion will ever be reached about this issue as autistic and related type pupils are among the many passengers locked aboard the runaway train to hell.

(The focus of the article was the USA, but its descriptions probably apply to anywhere in the West.)


Sunday, January 16, 2022

THE GTCS: TEACHERS CHAINED TO A LUNATIC

 Education system in shock as top teacher resigns from the GTCS

If one is a trained teacher and wishes to work within the state education system, one is required to be registered with the General Teaching Council of Scotland (GTCS). Depending on circumstances, the annual fee is paid by the registrant themselves or their employer.

Obviously, there should be regulation of entry to the profession and some oversight of teacher development and conduct; however, in common with most (all?) of our institutions charged with representing and protecting us, they now do the opposite. The why, how and who of this development is increasingly coming to the fore of our minds.

But what to do? Hence, my resignation:


With respect to your query regarding my decision to not renew my annual GTCS subscription:

I am responding to your request as a courtesy, but mainly for the sake of my conscience and partly as a reassurance to others who may read this, that they may know that they are not alone in their concerns.

I note with alarm the conversion of the GTCS from an administrative body usefully managing the list of those deemed qualified to teach to a globalist front promoting worthless science and destructive pedagogy. Through bureaucratic bloat, and leadership devoid of wisdom and moral courage, it has become the conduit for all the deceitful narratives and useless ideas that discharge into the classroom, making the very stress and dysfunction it absurdly reports on.  It is thusly a major contributor to the creation of a school culture at odds with reality and hence dependent on propaganda to carry its claims and policies.

I note with disappointment, but not surprise, that the GTCS in its pronouncements and comments on educational topics has not noticed any patterns behind the relentless fakery and Utopian deceptions. Apparently sees no issue with the ever more intrusive digital solutions proffered by our IT overlords. Nor noticed the countless millions spent on tomorrow’s educational garbage, or that every fix further embeds the problem. Endless waste, meaningless clichés and inevitable failure, all at top dollar, describes its Curriculum for Excellence mission.

No other generation of teachers has had to endure the infiltration and subversion of their workplace to the extent that ours has. And no other generation of pupils has had to endure such psychological manipulation in the deliberate politicisation and sexualisation of their worldview. Of this, far from opposing, or even questioning, the agenda behind this power, the GTCS cheerleads us ever forward into dystopia.

By fronting pieties for the multicultural cult and refusing to even mention the interests of Scotland’s native stock population, whether pupil, parent or teacher, the GTCS is a traitor to our country.

In short, in its major mission to Scottish education it is an enemy of our profession and our children. It has no legitimacy amongst teachers, as evidenced by the return rates for the election of its officers.

I deeply resented the money spent on the registration fee, and only did so by compulsion.

Now that I no longer have to, I won’t.


POSTSCRIPT: I invited the newly installed GTCS apparatchik-placeman (CEO), Dr Pauline Stephen, to comment on the points I made in my resignation. The reader is sure to know already the nature of her response.


Sunday, December 26, 2021

THE SCHOOL CHRISTMAS SERVICE

 

The Meaning of the Nativity

The Christmas service being the only guaranteed point of contact between the school and the church proper, it is important that the modern Christian message is maximised: guilt for our sins against the rest of the world and a plate collection predicated on this.

Nothing numinous spoils this prostration, God’s presence in the Christmas service is as a sort of reparations tribunal judge. And so the pupils listen to a sermon as if written by Madonna (not the Madre de Dios, but the so-named billionaire idiot screecher and African baby snatcher ), emphasizing how much ‘we’ still must do for Third World female equality, thirsty jungle denizens, and aspiring, but non-swimming, future UK welfare recipients. ‘Do’ here meaning pay up and suffer anguish.

As told by the officiating minister, this is the current meaning (apparently) of Jesus’s birth: Guilt for the White children*, here cast in the role of modern day Romans; and righteous indignation for the darker-hued ethnic others, here cast as the meek who are deserving of inheriting the Earth – or, at least, the European portion. This guilt is, of course, presumed to be a well-deserved consequence of colonialism, endemic racism and unearned privilege. And, so the argument goes, this White privilege (as the practical expression of all the vileness that swarms around the White genotype) must be destroyed if society is to make progress. This progress is not defined, indeed it is important to the message that it is left as a hazy destination on the horizon; however, although the child is not able to comprehend the nature of progress’s destination, the adult reading here is sure to understand some of its the less attractive aspects.

You may wonder, as I do, how much of this sermon the children understand? Perhaps not a lot, at least in the literal sense. But the intended message of guilt and retribution is planted deep and then conflated with progress. The message planted deep is the whole point of the sermon, and for this they do not need to correctly understand it. It grows within them as they grow. And when we consider that we and our children are surrounded by this self-same message coming at us from every direction, the idea that our children are being prepared for another world to come is not at all far-fetched. Is this targeting of our children in this vulnerable, candle-lit setting an example of the predictive programming we hear either proffered or derided?

Certainly, as an adult and would-be protector of our children’s mental well-being, many thoughts join the hymns and homilies in speeding up to the rafters and beyond. But these, alas!, are incongruous to the season of goodwill; and so, in the spirit of which I’ll only list the simplest question about the spiritually free, but social justice dense, new meaning of Christmas: Justify this truth!

 Conspiracy?; absolutely! – Theory?; you decide!

Of course, we need not accept the neuro-linguistic programming and shallow pieties of the globalist Newspeak sock puppets that pass as current custodians of the empty churches. We have our own saints to speak of spiritual truths, saints who have our temporal as well as eternal well-being at heart. After the politicised nonsense of the Christmas service, let us direct our children’s attention to them. Indeed, we could turn to them for succour. And actually we should. 

Omnes sancti orate pro nobis

 What think ye?

 

*  In a subtle little epiphany created for their future (perhaps), the listening boys are cast in the role of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, but without the opportunity to reply to the slanders to their sex.


PS. I wish my reader (thank you for your perseverance, …………. ) a merry Christmas and aa the best for the new year.


Monday, November 29, 2021

AN INSPECTOR CALLS. PART 2

 Continuing our series celebrating the work of HM Inspectors of Education and the joy their presence invariably brings to a school.


…and in my dream methinks I saw the world as it was firstly ordained.



 The inspectors lined up before the assembled teaching staff. Their leader, the Kommissar Kapitan of Education, spoke: We are going to show you how we’ve earned our stripes. Me and my officers are going to come into your classes at random and show yous how it’s done. People ask us on what authority do we swoop down on you like fiery archangels? Well, you see this (and he indicated a black cross hanging from a red silk ribbon around his throat), this tells you that I’ve earned the right to lead by example and am not afraid of non-compliant pupils, idiotic policies or box-ticking monkeys in management. Like yourselves, the pupils will understand that I am motivated by love of learning and informed by experience and common sense. 

 He continued: We’ll deliver to your classes pacey, engaging and light-hearted lessons, properly differentiated and with effective use of technology. You’ll see difficult pupils effectively managed and led to instruction by subtle psychology. You’ll see the pedagogic overload and clichés discarded and replaced with intuition and experience. The rubbish bin will be bursting with the once fashionable nonsense of learning intentions, growth mindset, success criteria, self-assessment, revisiting strategic goals, time to reflect on their target, the chaos of active learning, etcetera, etcetera, blah, blah, blah and blah! The children will start the lesson but lightly burdened, and end it just the same.

 All you need do is watch. Take notes as you wish. Be not afraid of our example, as we in turn are not afraid of your judgement.


I me thought, ‘Now wouldn’t that be something – an inspector that builds rather than destroys, has craft rather than guile, has integrity rather than a checksheet.’


And then a voice said: ‘I have sent this phantasie through airy realms to shew ye by means of ironic whimsy the nature and scale of your trial in inspection-land. And too, how great shall be thine reward for conquest over this enemy. 


‘But now, the dawn beckons, and, alas, reality.’


NOTE: It is my contention that HM Inspectors of Education, as state enforcers of political dogma, endless admin and learning cliché, contribute less than zero to the actual improvement of schools.

The possibility of a visit by them hangs like a contagion over a school – the staff driven to distraction, or worse! Deceit forever surrounds their presence. I have never heard, nor head of, an inspection report that said anything genuinely useful, far less displaying wisdom. It’s just another boondoggle at top dollar. Better alternatives to HM inspections readily suggest themselves, not least employing real leaders as headteachers. 

It would be wonderful if just some the many inspectors who read this blog would take some time off from counting down to their retirement date and deign to defend their profession against this attack on their relevance, competence and integrity. I am sure that the reader understands not to hold their breath while awaiting this courtesy.


 


Thursday, November 4, 2021

H.M Inspector of Education

 Dedicated, with sympathy, to those teachers about to face Cthulhu. Here it speaks in advance of the heavy judgement its presence brings:


An Inspector Calls.

 

Prepare your folios, let me my comfort find

Hard words shall fly like dust before the wind

Teachers maun dae something for their meat

An so maun inspectors

 

Cry aa you want, your tears are wine tae me

Your Dinny kens I hear as music sweet

The judgement already fated, the report

Your punishment, my swinging club

 

And yet, I deserve your pity

For at that time when all are judged

We wha judge are judgit the harshest

The hypocrite’s H branded on the arse.

 

 

 

 They’ve evolved to be like this. Don’t be too hard on them, we’re all parasites on something.      

                      HM Stationary Office (Inspector of the HM Inspectors of Education )



Tuesday, September 28, 2021

EDUCATION'S FUTURE PURPOSE

 

Anti-racism; Scottish Education’s Number One Priority

Each year ‘Show Racism the Red Card Scotland’ holds a competition that sees young people, from Primary 1 to FE, coming up with creative ways to promote messages of anti-racism. 

But why? How did this become so important? Did those promoting this not see the implicit dark message, or notice the terrible potential with the transformation of the definitions of racism from what one does, to what one says, to what one thinks, to what one is assumed to think, to presence, to mere existence being a hate crime if you have the wrong opinion. Or the wrong colour; and here we arrive at ‘Whiteness’, the latest Talmudic sophistry which allows the attack on White interests and Whites as people under the justice trope of merely attacking a concept. Primary schools are not yet discussing ‘Whiteness’as a pathology to be eradicated and then this celebrated as a good for humanity. However, this morbid obsession is in the background to all the cultural choices made within school which have gradually undermined White cultural interests. For example, it's a now a near necessity that no Christian religious festival can be mentioned without an obsequious reference to some other religion’s apparently equivalent festival (e.g., Hanukkah and Christmas). This is a phenomenon that flows just one way.   

What is worrying about this particular aspect of our anti-racism priority is that, under the guise of due consideration to other cultural practices, the gradual erosion of White cultural references tacitly signals their irrelevance. The child not seeing or hearing of such references naturally assumes they don’t exist; and there is no mainstream or school-based source to disabuse them of this notion.

This requirement to promote others as equally valid reduces the preference the native culture is due by right and thus shows it disrespect. In doing this, the disrespect rebounds back on native Whites who cannot, or at least do not, defend and high honour their own cultural practices and icons. This is another example of the observation that in attempting to respect everything equally regardless of intrinsic merit, or to celebrate everything equally, is to respect and celebrate nothing in particular. This akin to not actually celebrating at all!

In this context to preference one thing is to disfavour something else. To honour a culture more than your own is to dishonour your own. To dishonour your own in front of ethnic others is to be a traitor. To always be seeking equivalences as appeasement, to always be apologising, to be always finding validity through the well-being of other groups, signals weakness. This cultural relativism further damages our native confidence in our own values as it bolsters the same effect in the field of ethics and morality; accepting all values as equal in truth and validity makes it impossible to defend your own. One thusly destroys one’s own authority and source of power. Only Whites do this. Teaching self-hate is our White intellectual patrimony!      

Without a doubt, there should indeed be a focus on anti-racism in Scottish primary schools. The reader is sure to understand the direction in which this should be encouraged to flow.

 

Race is not Everything, but Without it Everything is Nothing