Teachers, for the most part, are left-wing. Teachers in the state sector are all the more so. My blogger neighbours keep telling me that right-wingers aren't inherently selfish. They merely want a world which works efficiently, creating opportunity for all. Funny then that I rarely come across right-wing teachers, social workers or nurses. Those professions which are not well-paid but are concerned with 'helping others' are jam-packed with lefties. It is the Left, not the Right, which wants to save the world. If only the Left had the means to do so.In inner-city London schools, one cannot admit to being a Conservative. One might be skinned alive, or worse, given the most challenging class in the school to teach. The Right is the enemy. The Conservatives are evil. The Left is the saviour of all that is good. We chant it every morning in assembly. We say it in our prayers. And we bond, as a family might, knowing that our values, our principles and our souls sing from the same hymn sheet.
That isn't to say that teachers are happy with the status quo. They're not. They're very unhappy with the behaviour problems, the chaos, the workload and the lack of leadership. What is interesting is where they choose to lay the blame. Generally, teachers blame senior management. Whatever goes wrong, it is senior management who don't know what they're doing. In a similar way, senior management blame teachers. Whatever isn't working, it is because all the staff aren't being consistent. And round it goes.
Does anyone ever look beyond the walls of the school for explanations for the problems? No. Does anyone ever think to question the policies handed down from up above? No. Does anyone ever question leftist ideology? No. They'll disagree with Ofsted, being judged by results and league tables. Sure. These inventions come from the Right. But what of the leftist madness which is swimming in our schools?
Praising everyone all of the time
Not excluding
Inclusion
Discouraging competition
Never posting up results
Being more forgiving of bad behaviour because of the child's background
Blaming the teacher when the children are not engaged
Giving away textbook after textbook and never getting them back
Paying for trips for some children
Having 'support' instead of detention
Bribing children to learn or behave with sweets
This is just some of the madness which clearly comes from the Left. It isn't 'just the way that it is', which I hear so often from teachers. It wasn't always this way. These changes were brought in with one goal in mind: to help the poor. The Left, driven as it usually is, by well-meaning idiotic sentiment, thinks that doing the above closes the achievement gap.
The truth of the matter is that it makes life much worse for the poor and widens the achievement gap. It also makes life unbearable for the teacher. But can teachers criticise the Left? No. So they blame each other.
Those of you who have been reading me for some time, will know that I am critical of policies which I think harm our children, whether they are from the left, or the right. And when I do this in the open square at school, as soon as I begin to criticise the government for spending too much money on some ridiculous initiative, the other teachers close ranks. They will not criticise the Left, even though their lives depend on it.
We teachers are free to rise up and demand change. But we are divided. We cannot see where the true enemy is hiding. So the teachers run to their unions to complain about their Head, and the Head takes his teachers through competency procedures. LOOK OUT OF THE FUCKING CAGE!! JUST STOP FOR GOD'S SAKE!! Just stop, for a moment, and think.
I know it is hard to criticise the Left when being on the Left is partly what defines you. It is especially hard to stand on one's own, to accept that perhaps one is right-wing, to essentially align oneself with the enemy. I struggle with this everyday. The choice is a difficult one. But we must make it. We must choose freedom.
Leftist idealism has won. Can't we see this? We've been fighting the establishment for so long, we cannot see that we have become the establishment. And our policies are not doing anyone any good.
LOOK OUT OF THE FUCKING CAGE. Choose. And set our children free.
22 comments:
Ms S. This is the lesson from the PC debate on R4 that I mentioned a little while ago and you said you were thinking about blogging about.
PC has won. We dont use the N word. We stopped calling the developmentally challenged spazes(sp?). By and large, I see this as a good thing. Words shape the world, not wholly, but they give meaning. By challenging the words and the attitudes, the world has probably become a better place. The PC establishment won.
But, now its in place, the various bureaucracies that challenge the 'isms, are busy making the lives of people worse rather than better. They demand inclusion of the badly behaved with no consideration given to others. They see racism/sexism/exclusivism everwhere. For where you have policemen, you find crime.
Enough already. It's not right wing to want to challenge PC. It's not left wing to challenge rail privatisation. One can find fellow travellers of both persuasions in the argument - the awful BNP in the fight against PC and awful Bob Crow in the argument against rail privatisation. The fact that we agree that privatisation was a bad idea doesnt make me a lefty.
Part of the reason that you don't get many right wing people in those professions is that people just get fed up with the pointless bureaucracy, do gooding and Unions, whilst they key point of the role becomes secondary.
For example I used to work in a local government element of public transport. One day the Diversity Equality and Social Exclusion Officer phones up and says that she wants to organise a free trip
on the trains for Muslim women. Would I speak to the Train Operating Company about it. Now if I phone up the TOC they will think I have gone mad when their are all the problems of punctuality and cleanliness to be resolved. See my view is that a clean, reliable and safe rail service benefits everybody regardless of race. So what did I do? I just sat on the issue and then I moved on, in the same way teachers can not implement or frustrate policies that they do not agree with. I think Miss Snuffy ignores the National Curriculum because it would not work with some of he children, whilst elsewhere it is not challenging enough.
Other examples are insuring pool cars for 17 years old at great cost, to avoid liability for age discrimination by not providing the same opportunities to everyone. Only problem the organisation does not employ anyone under 21 anyway. Still what is to stand in the way of wasting £8000 in the name of equality.
The website has 10 languages, not Spanish German French or Italian why help foreign Europeans they can speak English anyway (although you need English to use Google to get there) and all the publications are translated only to be pulped because the excluded minorities are surprisingly not interested in the merits of the 20 year plan! Meanwhile no facility exists to sell tickets online.
I would say to anyone, look at the general level of customer service that a public sector organisation provides against what you get from the private sector and ask yourself which is best. For example why can you not go to your Doctor's surgery online and select the available appointments instead of getting the constant engaged tone. At the Bank they smile and say good morning, Ok it may be faux but go to the Post Office or Council and you just get surliness.
Only this morning my Grandmother got a letter regarding benefits that said if you do not hear from us within 8 weeks please contact us. My question why 8 weeks to deal with the problem and why are they not confident that they will not forget about you?
No the left dominated public sector as Miss Snuffy points out has become so obsessed with equality that quality has gone out of the window. I remember working with a guy who worked in the old Labour Exchanges in the 70's (Job Centre plus), when they had someone who they thought was trying it on they actually had them in and for want of better description gave them a talking to (not quite how he put it). Imagine that today!
IME as a self-admitted rightie, lefties invariably use the "not enough" excuse. So whatever the policy of inclusion or whatever is, we didn't spend enough money, allocate enough time, etc etc etc and if we did it would all have worked absolutely brilliantly.
This suits, because of course one can never reach a wall where you can't spend a bit more money, or whatever.
You can see this most clearly in the totally failed leftie behavioural approach. After at least 19 years of increasing chaos (dating CA1989), there is the repeated idiocy that with the badly behaved given just a bit more time, resources, support, money, bribes, whatever, it will absolutely definitely work.
It doesn't, and it won't.
(This is also used to excuse the failure of the Brown/Blair years as "they weren't left wing enough").
"No. They'll disagree with Ofsted, being judged by results and league tables. Sure. These inventions come from the Right."
Their usage comes from the left. The endless micromanaging, naming and shaming etc etc, usage of statistics to lie about the situation (parodied, accurately, as the equivalent of Stalin on tractor production and created in the same ways).
This is classic left-think ; thinking the state can pull off a wonder master scheme in which everything will be wonderful (why the tax regime has doubled in compexity since 1997) ; also the left get out "you didn't follow the scheme accurately".
OFSTED are like KS2 tests. There's nothing actually wrong with them or the ideas behind them.
It's the way they are used and abused makes them such a disaster.
but the lefties aren't left. They are just self-indulgent idiots.
In years gone by, people turned to left-wing politics to liberate themselves from the strait-jacket of class determining their life chances. The left was working class people acting in their own self-interest.
But the modern "left" is not the workers acting in their own interests. Its the middle classes acting in someone else's interests. And that isn't politics, its charity. And its a form of charity that reinforces dependency.
So Snuffy don't feel upset about attacking lefties because you consider yoursel on the left. Its your left too! Keep going - there's lots of people who agree with you.
A little vignette from my personal life:
During the indian summmer in September I was sitting out in a beer garden with my friends Miss Hopeful and Mr Banker.
Miss Hopeful is a primary school teacher (in Hackney, as it happens) and Mr Banker is in banks.
As dusk closed in Miss Hopeful became dejected. "Today," she told us "I discovered that I am still judgemental."
"How so?" I asked her.
"I realised that I think I'm better than some of the mothers I deal with," she said.
Miss Hopeful is better than me, so to try and cheer her up I said: "Without judgement there can surely be no mercy."
And Mr Banker said: "Jolly, you're starting to talk like Sarah Palin."
It's when the bankers think you're right wing that you really start to worry....
I can't get across how different all this is from my own experience in tough schools.
The whole atmosphere is utterly apolitical. I wouldn't have a clue how anyone, apart from my closest friends, would vote. Nobody is getting caught up in ideological thought because nobody is thinking at all. Nobody sees a political flavour to all the crap we get because it is the same crap whoever is in power. Changes in political party nationally or locally make no difference. Nobody is clearly of the left or the right in the school's politics. Nobody cares. The worst people, the ones who mouth the crap you say "comes from the left", are usually utterly apolitical robots believing in nothing but their own convenience, least of all a political cause. It is only on the internet that somebody might label me left or right wing for the views I express. In the school it simply wouldn't come up.
Old Andrew
You're right that no one ever says what they are politically. But if you have a sense of political leanings, it is clear that teachers believe in lefty 'stuff'. But by your own admission, you refuse to think in these terms, and so that's why you don't view your school as I view mine (or others). Your experiences are exactly the same as mine, except that when I bring politics into the conversation and attack the left, that's when teachers take a clear political stance. You never do this, so you don't have this experience.
But you are essentially saying what this post is saying. Teachers don't look outside the cage. They just complain about their lot - their classes, the madness and SMT.
And what I'm saying is that they SHOULD look outside the cage. That's where the solution lies.
It is the Left, not the Right, which wants to save the world.
But how can you know if you are helping to save (well, benefit) the world? All anyone can know is whether they believe they are helping to save the world.
Thats where it all falls down, of course.
I wonder if there is a certain amount of groupthink going on: "Everyone else says that they think that X is right: therefore this must be true."
Then it would not matter that people thought before they entered the group: they would end up with the same opinions.
Your experiences are exactly the same as mine, except that when I bring politics into the conversation and attack the left, that's when teachers take a clear political stance.
You are the one bringing politics into it then. I suppose if you sound off about how the left is to blame for everything then it will be left wing teachers who get most defensive.
But you are essentially saying what this post is saying. Teachers don't look outside the cage. They just complain about their lot - their classes, the madness and SMT.
And what I'm saying is that they SHOULD look outside the cage. That's where the solution lies.
Am lost now. Are we meant to be looking at left-wing teachers in schools as you seemed to be suggesting before? Or are we meant to be looking at a big picture of left-wing influence outside of schools constraining unwilling teachers?
It seems to me that you are suggesting that we look for left-wingers, any left-wingers, to blame regardless of who actually does what, and what their actual politics are.
Old Andrew
Well, I'm saying that most teachers don't like to criticise leftist politics (kind of like you...). And I'm not talking about particular 'left-wingers'. I'm talking about a mentality - a sea-change in our thinking over the last 50 years which has influenced educational policy. And that is what influences SMTs and makes them rubbish. It is also what holds school to ransom.
There are as many rubbish leaders as there are rubbish teachers. It is just that the leaders have a larger influence. And unfortunately, the government and LEAs etc fix things so that the policies which influence both SMTs and teachers do not make things better, but worse.
But you know this. Better for us all to take note of this, rather than blaming each other all of the time.
Anyway, school is approaching. I have a thousand books to mark. If I go quiet on you, don't take it personally...
Well, I'm saying that most teachers don't like to criticise leftist politics (kind of like you...)
And this contradicts my suggestion that teachers are apolitical, how exactly?
I suspect most teachers are as mystified as I am when people try and turn debates in education into wider "political" debates. It isn't that teachers don't like to criticise "leftist politics" it is that anybody who wants to blame 50 years of education policy, or even the latest idiocies from management, on "the left" is seen as an ideologue with a bee in their bonnet and best ignored.
I don't want to put words into anybody's mouth here but the discussion between Miss and oldandrew is really interesting.
I agree with oldandrew: the 'crap' has been around for a long time and the political stripe of the government doesn't really change that.
I also agree with Miss: more teachers vote for Labour than for the Conservatives - even as they complain about the latest madness coming from a Labour Government- because their own 'worldview' corresponds more closely to what they see in the Labour Party.
Obviously it's not necessary to express that 'worldview' in party political terms: As oldandrew says its just not something which is discussed at school.
But be that as it may, that kind of 'worldview' is largely shared in schools even if it is not expressed in party political terms.
So why is Miss right to insist that we have to look outside the cage?
Because she wants to conserve what is under threat and has been under threat for several generations already. It has been threatened by political meddling from Right and Left but this has only been possible because of the cultural changes over the last 50 years.
We live in a Relativist Culture that is broader, deeper and certainly much more powerful than party politics.
We are now seeing that this culture is profoundly anti-humanist. This is not theoretical talk - it's become classroom reality.
It's destroying us because it undoes the notion of a real, objective 'good'. I don't just mean 'good' in moral terms but in absolute terms.
In moral terms it has become impossible to encourage respect, responsibility and commitment. But in absolute terms it has even become impossible to drum up simple enthusiasm for learning because 'everything's relative' and your 'good' isn't my 'good' so why should I be "boverred"?
Moreover - it has even been able to undo the idea that it is reasonable and necessary to speak about such things! It comes across as ideological grandstanding - a bee in one's bonnet. Crikey! It's one thing for the Communists to have tried brainwashing - it's quite another to have succeeded in presenting all rational argument as a form of brainwashing that is to be treated with suspicion.
For sure - Relativism has found its adherents within the Left because (as we shall see next week when Obama becomes President) there is a Utopianism which is at the heart of all Left Wing thought. This is what led to all the social experimentation of the last 40 years or so - Miss's lampoooning of those ridiculous 'learning villages' was an excruciating case in point.
But Relativism also has its adherents on the Right because it has its roots within the intellectual and social sources of English Conservatism itself: the Establishment - the Anglican Settlement, the Enlightenment, Oxbridge, the Freemasons, the Judiciary, the Police, the Army and The City.
Funny, isn't it?
It's a question of the Truth and the Good, afterall - and we no longer have the cultural, intellectual or political wherewithal to actually know what they mean nor how to attain them in practical terms - because we have been indoctrinated to be deeply suspicious of the ideological freight behind those ideas. The Abolition of Man....
Keep the Faith, Miss.
"We are only the undefeated because we have gone on trying."
Old Andrew
Yes - teachers don't like to recognise that when they are complaining, they are actually criticising leftist thinking. (Just like you)
It is bloody obvious that the desire not to exclude children for instance (because they have come from difficult backgrounds) is a leftist position. Now it may be that the Head who refuses to exclude is himself a Tory, but that doesn't mean that his thinking isn't to the left.
You think too much in boxes. Like the business about abolishing appeal panels is HUGE. Just because not many children are put back into schools at appeal, does not mean abolishing them won't make much difference. It will change the culture around exclusions. It will make heads less scared of excluding. It is definitely a move in the right direction.
This is a conversation that really should be had in person because we miss the subtleties this way. But you and I will never have this conversation in person because we are both too scared to admit to who we are in real life. And that says something terrible about the system - people like us can't even stand up and speak out.
But I'm interested Andrew, what then, do you think the solution is?
It is bloody obvious that the desire not to exclude children for instance (because they have come from difficult backgrounds) is a leftist position.
The willingness not to exclude, because it will only create expense for the taxpayer, and the only beneficiaries will be underclass children and lefty teachers, is a rightist position. In practice they are indistinguishable.
Like the business about abolishing appeal panels is HUGE. Just because not many children are put back into schools at appeal, does not mean abolishing them won't make much difference. It will change the culture around exclusions. It will make heads less scared of excluding.
Unless, of course, it leads to appeals taking place in the courts instead of in front of appeals panels.
But I'm interested Andrew, what then, do you think the solution is?
On discipline?
Take a look at these posts:
The First Law of Behaviour Management
The Second Law of Behaviour Management
The Third Law of Behaviour Management
The Fourth Law of Behaviour Management
But really I am looking for a philosophical change (I agree with pretty much everything "anonymous" said above). I just don't want that changed to be hijacked by the political right and used as an excuse for more middle class escape routes or a witch hunt of "leftists".
"The willingness not to exclude, because it will only create expense for the taxpayer, and the only beneficiaries will be underclass children and lefty teachers, is a rightist position. In practice they are indistinguishable."
Yes, that makes sense when you think about it.
I remember when Michael Howard was Home Secretary he closed down prisons and set free criminals because locking them up was an expense and punishing them just benefited the underclass.
Old Andrew
It isn't a witch hunt. It is simply calling a spade a spade and recognising as you say - what philosophical positions in society on the whole need to change.
As for courts, if it did get to that point, they would require the parent to have evidence of law-breaking. Very unlikely. Abolishing appeal panels is a very good step in the right direction.
I remember when Michael Howard was Home Secretary he closed down prisons and set free criminals because locking them up was an expense and punishing them just benefited the underclass.
No, but several of his Tory predecessors had. Prison population had been falling for years before he became home secretary. It was only when the Shadow Home Secretary (one Anthony Blair, whatever happened to him?) started hammering them on crime every week, particularly the disastrous system of sentencing that ignored previous convictions that had recently been introduced, that the policy reversed.
But let me guess "the left" are to blame for years of the Tories being soft on crime? But not for the higher sentences under Blair?
You see this "no matter who is in charge the left are to blame" thing is getting tired an predictable.
It isn't a witch hunt. It is simply calling a spade a spade and recognising as you say - what philosophical positions in society on the whole need to change.
Declaring everything to be the fault of the left, even what was done by Tory governments, is not recognising "philosophical positions in society" it is obscuring them.
As for courts, if it did get to that point, they would require the parent to have evidence of law-breaking.
Has there been a change to the basis of civil law? I'm not suggesting they would attempt a criminal prosecution of the school, just a legal challenge in the civil courts, or worse, a human rights case.
I consider myself to be left-wing, & I utterly despise this "culture" in which people aren't encouraged to strive to better themselves, instead to pour scorn on intellectual endeavour & hard work.
This celebrity idiocy spits in the face of my values & the values of the people I admire, such as Gladstone, Asquith, et al. & also the socialists.
Yet I blame all sections of society & successive governments. The right do not have a monopoly on talking about "dumbing down", & in fact by encouraging the Murdoch press & moronic commercialism & disdaining public libraries etc. they have been contributors to a great extent. (This is more visible in America, where the Republican contempt for science & learning is naked & repulsive, but it is very much present here).
People have got to realise that literacy is utterly essential. We will only be able to get your kids into proper jobs, & have a decent society, when we are able to attract decent jobs because we have a workforce that will work & is attractive to businesses.
People in this country do not read, which is the main & probably the sole reason why we underachieve educationally. I went to a very rough school & was never enormously interested in my lessons, but I achieved nonetheless because practice & encouragement at home gave me the ability to read & write.
Yet the reward for endeavours is to be called a "swot" & a "geek", & as an adult to be excluded from vapid conversations by people who won't stretch what minds they have. Even people of modest gifts can perform better than they are now, but they refuse to & society encourages this.
Other countries manage it, but we seem to be uniquely mired in shyte & I don't understand why. Of course, the question of how to get ourselves out is one that would set off a bit of aggro :)
Left and right wing are terms that are 200 years old.
Are they really that useful?
Especially as some right wing policies e.g support for Grammar schools were once left wing policies.
Personally I think that terms like fairness, democracy, good house keeping, respect for law are better ways of judging if something is a good idea or not.
I'm a liberal, there is nothing I believe in more than progressive taxation, redistribution and a large role for the Government in the provision of public goods and services, but I in no way agree with these policies and ideas you insinuate apply only to lefties. The problem surely you're highlighting isn't about lefties, it's about spineless pussies and a lack of accountability in the system. Not all us lefties are spineless pussies you know, it's just spineless pussies are probably more likely to be liberal than conservative.
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