I AM 61 YEARS-OLD and when I was eight or nine, I committed some nefarious act at my junior school that caused my teacher to haul me out in front of my class for punishment. I do not know whether today’s children are familiar with a board ruler, but in 1958 British schoolchildren definitely were.
It was some three feet long and three inches in width. I was told to bend over and received three rather mild taps on my bottom. I sat down, humiliated by the experience in front of my classmates; which was the very point my teacher intended to make. It was the spectacle rather than any pain induced by the board ruler, that hurt the most.
Today, such a circumstance would leave the teacher facing a possible jail sentence and dismissal from his or her profession. Such are the times we now live in, that the child has almost total clout over the teacher, and the children know this and behave accordingly.
In the 1950s and 1960s, from junior school upward, the ultimate physical deterrent was the cane; although, once at secondary modern, the slipper was a favoured intermediary between detention and the ultimate deterrent.
Today all forms of physical correction are no longer tolerated. Today, the good kids are forced to live side by side with the bad. The teachers cannot lay a hand on their pupils for fear of legal retribution. So, in many, but by no means all of our classrooms, anarchy has replaced any kind of pedagogic activity.
Children require discipline. Yes it is an old concept. But the modern one of progressive teaching, that has been the model since the birth of comprehensive education in the 1970s is now far more old fashioned and has been proven worthless to the education of our children.
Yet our teachers still support it despite the fact that in many schools the bullies are not in the playground but the classroom; and their victims are the teachers themselves.
IN TODAY’S DAILY MAIL, the true scale of the problems facing our teachers is disclosed.
1,000 pupils, some as young as five, are excluded every day for abusing and assaulting teachers, who have become nothing more than the punch bags for whatever the child feels he or she has to do to vent their anger.
Last year 45 teachers were taken to hospital due to such treatment administered by their pupils; while one in four teachers were the victims of false allegations by their pupils, which ranged from verbal to sexual abuse. One in six teachers has had a false allegation made against them by a member of a child’s family; while in one incident a teacher was raped by a 15 year-old: while another primary teacher suffered a stabbing in the chest with a pencil during her class.
Teachers from South Wales have compiled a dossier in which they lists the unteachables, including a 14 year-old who attacked a teacher and indecently assaulted an assistant.
So, do the old values seem so archaic after this? The progressives that have steered and controlled our educational system since the late 1960s seem to me to be those that are outmoded and out of touch with reality.
These people will no doubt do what they always do; they will ignore these statistics unless they are printed in the Guardian. They most certainly will not heed the columns of the Daily Mail.
THIS COUNTRY has a system of state education that falls well short of what is required to produce an educated population, able to meet the requirements needed by the business community in the 21st century. Over the decades criticism after criticism has followed the August exam figures… not for their failure, but for their somewhat overgenerous rates of success in terms of results: and if cynics dared mention lowering standards, they were and still are immediately shot down by the politicians, or the parents who would not tolerate such an accusation, insisting upon their children’s comprehensive and exhaustive use of the laptop.
Standards have been allowed to drop in order to boost the A-level results which the government sees as a marker determining the success of their educational policies.
In this sense, our children have been let down by the politicians who have used them to influence the way in which their parents vote – it being dependent upon the success of their children’s achievement at exam time.
All the while our business community complains about the educational quality of pupil’s leaving school or university. But to be fair with our universities, they themselves, like our employers, have had cause to deplore the level of academic competence of (especially in the subject of maths) the students sent to them via the state system.
A NATION’S WEALTH, and its ability to create it, depends upon the quality of skills, whether academic or technical, of its people.
When I was at school, the 11-plus was the one exam that probably secured the tenure of its successful applicants amongst the middle classes. It was at the time an unfair system and remained so until the introduction of the comprehensive system by a Labour government under the guidance of Shirley Williams.
Today such a system would not only be fair, but would also meet the requirements of both our employers and our universities.
But, from the late 1960s onwards, the spirit of egalitarianism was afoot in the land; and this meant that not only a new system of state education was to be introduced; but also a new way of teaching that forbade the laying of hands on any pupil.
As this rolling credo gathered more moss the deeper this country’s educational set-up fell into the arms of the progressives.
THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IS IN A MESS. So much so that our business people are complaining to David Cameron that if he further restricts immigration into this country, they will not be able to find those best qualified to do the job from within this country’s educational system.
It may not seem obvious to a liberal but the behaviour of our pupils in the classroom is tied to the failure of our exam system. This is because both elements have been established by liberalism which discounts competition and any kind of physical punishment. So it is little wonder that our state education system falls well short of the requirements of our nation.
Our teachers are treated appallingly in many cases, by their pupils. But those teachers have themselves been indoctrinated at university into the niceties of a progressive education, and, despite their deprived authority among their pupils; will nevertheless remain true to the progressive educational creed, whatever they may face personally in the future.
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