Michael Gove's latest wheeze for slapping Britain's students into shape is to militarise schools. After all it never did him any harm. Take a drill-sergeant who has terrified his last Orrible Little Man, give him some basic training, and put him in front of a class of rowdy teenagers and see how they like that!
Of course he is right. Convicted murderers who have served their sentence would make great teachers, with suitable training. Their broad experience of life, and the insight into society they might gain from being detached from it would be invaluable in making a subject like History come alive, to name just one. Their lives would give them a certain presence in class. So why not soldiers?
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
6/03/2009
Choice for Idiots
At its forthcoming conference, the B.M.A. is to debate the motion that children who have not been vaccinated against measles should not be allowed to attend schools and risk the lives of other children. No jab, no school.
This has naturally provoked the rearguard of the anti-MMR lobby, but also raised the predictable outcry that this sanction would limit something called 'parental choice'.
The moral choice facing the parent is depicted as being one of individual freedom versus subservience to the 'greater good' - to which all vaccinated children are offered as a statistical sacrifice. This is an entirely fake distinction. A polarisation contructed to paralyse collective instincts and blind us to the fact that they generally act in the interest of the individual, not some abstract impersonal entity called the state.
The actual choice facing parents is whether to send their children unprotected into an environment in which it could contract a possibly deady disease. Statistically, an unvaccinated child is far more likely to be permanently harmed by a measles epidemic than by the MMR vaccine. And the more children who go unvaccinated, the more likely such an epidemic becomes. So for the responsible intelligent parent, there is no choice. It is not a choice between the good of The State and the good of the child, but only of the good of the child. An objectively selfish decision, as most co-operative decisions tend to be.
'Choice', as in so many misuses of the word, is purely for idiots. And as idiots, their statistical children would possibly not benefit from any schooling they would be forced to miss.
This has naturally provoked the rearguard of the anti-MMR lobby, but also raised the predictable outcry that this sanction would limit something called 'parental choice'.
The moral choice facing the parent is depicted as being one of individual freedom versus subservience to the 'greater good' - to which all vaccinated children are offered as a statistical sacrifice. This is an entirely fake distinction. A polarisation contructed to paralyse collective instincts and blind us to the fact that they generally act in the interest of the individual, not some abstract impersonal entity called the state.
The actual choice facing parents is whether to send their children unprotected into an environment in which it could contract a possibly deady disease. Statistically, an unvaccinated child is far more likely to be permanently harmed by a measles epidemic than by the MMR vaccine. And the more children who go unvaccinated, the more likely such an epidemic becomes. So for the responsible intelligent parent, there is no choice. It is not a choice between the good of The State and the good of the child, but only of the good of the child. An objectively selfish decision, as most co-operative decisions tend to be.
'Choice', as in so many misuses of the word, is purely for idiots. And as idiots, their statistical children would possibly not benefit from any schooling they would be forced to miss.
10/27/2008
Fell-Runners Dimming Down
After a test this weekend, hard evidence has emerged that people who get pleasure from running up and down mountains in the freezing rain are becoming less intelligent.
The 'high-level thinking' skills of fell runners are now on a par with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, when no massive military operations had to be mounted to save the lives of thousands of them. It has been found that then, most of them chose instead to stay at home or go to the pub on the worst weekend of the winter so far.
Various explanations have been offered for these findings, including computer games, and the SATs regime brought in by the government, which has tended to create a generation only capable of dealing with the test itself, and less able to make any spontaneous, intelligent choices. A generation of students who will pass the exam with flying colours, but cannot be trusted to put on their trousers or come in out of the rain, or not to put their hand in the fire. A generation so confused about pain and pleasure by the demand to win-win-WIN! and whose brains are robbed of 'self-control, inhibition and attention' that they are prepared to risk their lives in order to try to retain a scrap of individual identity and status as defined by our current sado-masochistic, no-pain-no-gain hero-culture.
Confused? Who wouldn't be?
The 'high-level thinking' skills of fell runners are now on a par with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, when no massive military operations had to be mounted to save the lives of thousands of them. It has been found that then, most of them chose instead to stay at home or go to the pub on the worst weekend of the winter so far.
Various explanations have been offered for these findings, including computer games, and the SATs regime brought in by the government, which has tended to create a generation only capable of dealing with the test itself, and less able to make any spontaneous, intelligent choices. A generation of students who will pass the exam with flying colours, but cannot be trusted to put on their trousers or come in out of the rain, or not to put their hand in the fire. A generation so confused about pain and pleasure by the demand to win-win-WIN! and whose brains are robbed of 'self-control, inhibition and attention' that they are prepared to risk their lives in order to try to retain a scrap of individual identity and status as defined by our current sado-masochistic, no-pain-no-gain hero-culture.
Confused? Who wouldn't be?
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