Blog

http://goo.gl/roiBd From Times Educational Supplement 24 February 2012 on page 16 “Teased and bullied, but SEN pupils’s suffering is ignored” Kerra Maddern, and on page 12 “What keeps me awake at night – I am ashamed to be a teacher … the system I am a part of is failing many thousands of children.”

http://goo.gl/EVkvH BBC News 24 February 2012 “Special needs system ‘shocking’”

Your Comments

If you haven’t watched my introduction already, please click http://goo.gl/CoVvY before you begin.

I have a new toy – a webcam. I am still trying to get to know it, and get it to know me. The first one I used hummed to itself while I spoke to it and, when I bought myself a separate microphone, it took umbrage and didn’t want to repeat what I was saying at all.

I got my money back and tried another. This, too, has a mind of its own and, from time to time, tells me it isn’t listening to me, like some people I know or, rather, isn’t recording me. Same thing.

The other thing I have to get used to is its constant staring accusing eye that it fixes on me from the top of my printer. “Are you expressing yourself with total clarity so that people can fully understand what you are saying?” I thought that the first time I recorded myself.

I am now up to the sixth.

So why this new toy?

I sense that you need a signpost to show you around my new website www.deathofanightingale.com, and I should provide it. A webcam allied to YouTube gives me that opportunity. The spoken word can now supplement the written word of this Blog.

On the other hand there is a limit to the time people will give to listen, so the two need to work together.

I now open up a new thought that I call “The Fly in the Ointment”.

Why do we lurch from one mess-up to another, each one worse than the one before? Why? SEN is a small mess-up. Understanding how and why this happened may help you to understand bigger ones, especially in education.

I know that many people blame inequality. It is much more obvious now than it ever was, and very unfair. They then feel that they have to promote the idea of Equality.

However, as I argue elsewhere – visit ispy – promoting Equality is very divisive, pitching “have nots” who want more against “haves” who do not want to have less.

It has a terrible provenance which many totally forget. After Liberté, égalité, fraternité of the French Revolution came the bloody “Terror” with the guillotine. After the Russian Revolution came the Gulag, purges and the massacre of millions. And after that, anyone who owned anything in Germany ran scared of a Russia style revolution in their counry and embraced Nazism, National Socialism, with its own racially perverted version of Equality.

Orwell saw the problem, of course. All people are equal but some are always “more equal than others.” Correspondingly there will always be people far less equal than others.

Fair play is much less divisive and much more realistic; Britain at its very best when it asserts it, Continental Europe stained with blood and vomit at its hideous worst every time it rejected it.

The other trouble with Equality is that we spend far, far too much time trying to make people equal when they are all very different . In the name of “equality of opportunity” we make creating an opportunity to get into Oxbridge the litmus test for good schooling! Baloney!

As Margaret Williamson, the head teacher in Death of a Nightingale, says “People prattle on about equality of opportunity,  but what our kids need is just opportunity, and a helping hand from us to find it.” And not just kids with special needs.

Equality and Diversity are presented as two sides of the same coin. But where is that coin?

That was where my thinking was up to.

Then I had another thought. Mankind could be its own best friend or its own worst enemy in a breath of time. It wasn’t inequality that fucked things up. It was our fallibility, our frailty, the fault lines in human behaviour that turned our dreams into nightmares, some you couldn’t wake up from.

Kindness or bullying, wisdom or folly, excellence or mediocrity, honesty or lies, principles or corruption, loyalty or betrayal, courage or cowardice, caring or indifference. There is no shortage of antonyms. I have seen them all. I would guess that you have too and, maybe, can add a few more of your own.

Experience one and let your spirit soar. Witness the other, and weep for the fallen.

There are some minds WIFI’d into the challenges of the new millennium and others still mired in the last. There are some who use money and power well and others who abuse it. (Money and power are the twin engines that drive our world whether you like it or not, but it is amazing just how irresponsible some people can be in handling money that is not their own and power that has come, one way or another, into their hands); and for every humane act there is another that lacks all humanity.

Read history, and mourn the dead.

I remind some politicians, some in academia, some “human rights lawyers”, some would-be social engineers,  all of whom have a way of driving blind, what I heard a wise speaker once say to his audience “Point an accusing finger at someone , but look where the other three fingers are pointing.” They should try it!

It is where wisdom begins.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the State or with the Market, or with Faith for that matter, just as long as you take into account human fallibility. You must always remember that they are in the hands of people who are not perfect, sometimes very imperfect, people who always have their own agenda that may or may not coincide with your own.

Death of a Nightingale opens a small window on all this. See and understand one little mess – SEN, see and understand others, not least in the world of education.

And how do you deal with this once you have seen it? Not by ignoring it, and just hoping for the best. The least worst may be preferable.

One or two suggestions to show what I mean.

End the culture of the “cover up”; instead use the Internet to ensure that people are accountable for their actions in the glare of public opinion. Piggies won’t like it, but the prospect of that would be a check on their overeating. A “no-no” to self regulation. Piggies just love the opportunity to control their own diet. Extend the role of the Ombudsman and remove his deliberately restrictive shackles. Visit ispy page 83 Another Bite into a Wormy Apple.

Now, follow this through. Here is a challenge for all those who truly wish to advance democratic values against State Capitalism, Chinese style, that may seem to have some attractions when times are good, but unlikely to be quite so attractive when they are bad.

In short, start swatting flies.

In the Mad Hatters Committee Meeting, a short piece of satirical writing you will find in my book and on this website, I close with a line that sums up what I am saying. As night follows day and day night, if you don’t take account of human fallibility “the fly will suddenly turn into a wasp and sting you right on the tip of your nose.”

That is what these “flies” do, always have done ever since Adam and Eve were given notice to quit the Garden of Eden.

Now little webcam, you can tell me whether I have expressed myself with total clarity here.

BUY Death Of A Nightingale With ispy edited By Jan Woolf Direct FROM THE PUBLISHERS http://goo.gl/vbcDO Your Comments

…. Even when it stares them in the face

It ain’t necessarily so
It ain’t necessarily so
The t’ings dat yo’ li’ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain’t necessarily so.

I am sorry if the lyric from Porgy & Bess offends you if you believe otherwise. I am not actually writing here about the Bible. I am making a general point. There are lots of places where things that yo’ li’ble to read ain’t necessarily so.

I had an unexpected illustration of this when I met up with Peter Batty, he slightly older than me, but the age differential relevant when we were pupils at Bede Grammar School in Sunderland before finding our way to Oxford. I knew his name. I didn’t know him. There were still plenty of things to talk about when we providentially met on holiday in the Balkans.

I had just visited Tito’s Mausoleum in Belgrade that confirmed to me that Tito and his partisans had served the Allies well in World War II, had stood out against Stalin and kept Yugoslavia one country during his lifetime. Wikipedia elaborates this at length.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so, and students of politics should buy Peter Batty’s recently published book Hoodwinking Churchill – Tito’s Great Confidence Trick, a good read and very well researched while he was producing and writing episodes in the internationally -praised TV series The World at War. This is truly a tragic horror story of duplicity and inhumanity, compounded by the naivete of the liberal “left” as well as by the cynicism of the reactionary “right”, invariably a toxic mix.

The comparison between Wikipedia and Peter’s book is not so much a lesson in living as a lesson in learning.

There is so much disinformation about and it can cast a long shadow. Here disinformation about Tito’s role in World War II and afterwards colours what we read today. It is not necessarily telling porkies. It is encapsulated in the Latin tag – suppressio veri, suggestio falsi. I am sure you do not need me to translate that.

I had another illustration of that just last week, another small sin of omission.

Special Educational Needs – Hiding the Truth

Figures released for the first time showed that three-quarters of pupils who make a slow start in the three-Rs fail to catch up in the last four years of primary school – leaving them poorly equipped for the demands of secondary education.

All sorts of reasons were given for this – socio-economic backgrounds, targeting, teachers concentrating on middle-ability pupils &c. Some said these facts didn’t matter anyway.

Nowhere did I see any suggestion that this could be part of the price of “Inclusion”, including most children with special needs in mainstream primary schools, in many cases to their disadvantage .Yes, they can survive there, but will they thrive there in the hands of classroom assistants instead of highly trained, dedicated teachers giving them all the time that they need? Does one size fit all? No-one wants to ask that.

Official league tables also showed four-in-10 pupils seen as high-fliers at the age of seven are struggling to reach their potential by the time they sit end-of-school tests at 11.

This is another consequence of the same policy, the Holy Grail of Equality and Inclusion, the “Wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-land” that ideologues of the Left find so appealing.I call it “Never-never-land”. For me, in a global very diverse world, the Holy Grail is Fair Play. Very different, much better, and much more realistic. Read ispy.

Chris McGovern, a former headmaster and chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, describes the present situation: “It is a disastrous state of affairs and a terrible waste of talent.”

Of course if you are one of those who believe in Equality this will cause you no great concern. If you believe in Opportunity, on the other hand, it should worry you a lot. Are we doing our very best to help the future “winners” in our world succeed? No-one wants to ask that either.

If you are fighting to get a good special education for your child, not just the run of the mill stuff, Notes & Quotes in this website will give you more facts for your fight, facts you might not otherwise come across if you depend on the media to supply them. Some people, you see, never want to know.

This is my Christmas or my Chanukah present to you. Take your pick.

Your Comments