From the NASUWT:
This man is a danger to children, education and truth.
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I left teaching when Labour brought in their version of a ‘payment by results’ policy. It meant filling out a form with exam statistics. The school i was at ‘hired’ a bloke to help us all fill out this form so that we could all get this enhanced pay! I resigned soon after. I knew I was a decent teacher, the kids knew I was – we know , intuitively, when a teacher is good. Gove’s notion of what constitutes ‘aspiration’ is highly flawed and questionable. We need inspired ‘mavericks’ in education not the smart suited automata that Gove wants. His idea that knowledge is a tick list of great names is utterly spiritless. The 80% demoralisation figure is truly shocking and i fear for my son’s education. As I witnessed, there will be plenty of good teachers rising above this.
Simon, I left full-time teaching way back in 1979 – too early for me to say that Thatcher drove me out. I left to pursue other career options, in O&M with STC and then went to the Bar after being made redundant in 1993. However, I’m sure I could easily have followed you in my despair over “Nu Labour”, and it’s Blair-inspired antics (for Blair WAS the driving force behind it. The late Michael Wicks spoke of how the whole “academy” idiocy was sprung on the Education Committee as a very late add-on, I think to the Framework Bill).
The truth is that education, just like the NHS and Welfare, has been buggered about endlessly by ignorant (Kenneth Baker) or malign (Baker, Stephen Byers) or misguided (Blunkett) or roll-over and tickle my tummy (Kelly) politicians for 25 years, ever since GERBIL (the Great Education Reform Bill), and always to a hidden neo-liberal agenda of making “education” an adjunct of business (when it was our businessmen who could have learned how to be successful from our excellent universities, now reduced to sausage factories).
The ONLY one who showed any real vision and awareness – and I only came to see that later – was Estelle Morris, who resigned, probably in despair, just because she saw how education was being replaced by force-feeding of a “Brave New World” nature. She was the only one who reached the top and retained the vision of education as being about freedom (inner intellectual and psychological freedom, and not the pale “homo economicus” freedom of neo-liberalism)and pursuit of knowledge and excellence for its own sake.)
How I yearn for the vision of Caroline Benn, for example, or for anyone who can encourage an education system that recognises the worth and dignity and skills and values and hopes and dreams of EVERY child, and young person, and adult, and old person, with education truly encompassing life-long learning, and not the dead Gradgrind ideas of Gove, who is Blair’s nephew, and Baker’s and Thatcher’s grandson, none of whom would know education if it bit them on the bum, and all of whom shun education policy based on research and evidence, using prejudice and “common sense” to drive and shape policy.
I have the good fortune to have a Czech wife, and Eastern Europeans, having lived for a generation and a half under Communism, have well-developed “bull-shit detectors”. My wife announced, a mere three weeks after the 1997 landslide, that “nothing’s going to change!” I was furious with her, but by the end of the year came to agree, and so resigned from the Labour Party in 2001 – Blair won Elections, but lost, or threw in the towel at, or actively sided with the opposition in important battles for a caring, civilized society, while simultaneously hollowing out the Labour Party.
Can you imagine him echoing Harold Wilson’s words that “The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it’s nothing”? Alas, the Party became “nothing”.
You are so right to say education has been reduced to a business adjunct
My wife and I have so much difficulty with secondary education for our sons as a result
No one wants to make them think
They’re just products on a line
The man is an utter liar and fraudster. This is all about allowing his “chums” in the private sector loot state assets. Nothing more, nothing less!
That is so true. The spending in both education & the NHS is too great an amount for the jackals in the private sector to ignore. They look at how much Defence spending goes to private companies, and reason that Education & Health are the next targets for their looting. It’s a very logical thought process for those that believe markets solve everything. It’s just a shame they kept their heads down when G4S failed to grab part of the £9,300,000,000m but rather we had to call (public sector) armed forces in to help.
How different life today would be, if John Smith had lived longer as Labour Party leader and subsequent PM!
Mark, I have to agree on this about John Smith, who was both a Christian Socialist, being both a real Christian and a real Socialist. And if those two terms rub you up the wrong way, well, we can agree that he was truly a man of principle, and really believed in the common good, defined as the good of all in a truly democratic society. I had the good fortune to meet him once, and also to hear his 1993 Tawney Lecture at the CSM AGM. Yes – very different.
And Richard, I want to pick up on your reply to my posting on education, and the way they don’t want pupils and students to think, deriding and mocking everything that isn’t “practical”, by which they mean “income generating”. The great American education theorist, John Dewey once said that theory is the most practical of things. Why? Because it’s theory that allows you to frame a model of reality and test that reality against experience. Teach people just facts = ODTAA (One damned thing after another!), and you have no mechanism for testing those facts, which those who observe them consequently experience as random epiphenomena, with no underlying meaning. In other words, teaching just facts enslaves the learner, who can generate no insights of his or her own, but has constantly to return to the “master” for new “facts”. This is, of course, a totalitarian model of education, and despite one of those posting here objecting to the use of the Pastor Niemoller parallel, there can be little doubt that Gove wants unthinking obedience and toeing of his Party line, an NOT real freedom of thought – FAR too dangerous, as we might notice the Emperor has no clothes!
Agreed, again
I haven’t seen Gove in action as I don’t have a TV and it’s bad enough seeing photos.
His body language is astonishing – standard ‘shifty person with something to hide’ eye and body movements. How on earth does anyone trust him?
I suppose the answer is they don’t need to so long as he delivers privatisation.