Education, education, education!
With a postscript:
The One Party, and New Old Labour
People of a certain age will remember Tony Bliars famous slogan when he became "leader":
"Education, education, education!" he said.
Did he really mean that? Is that what we got?
Well, no and no.
Instead we got:
Privatised academies, and
Private Finance Initiative new school buildings, and
Standardised testing as part of a central government National Curriculum, and
School league tables as part of a central government education control system, and
Diminished local input, and control, of local education
Did any of this lead to a better education for the masses?
What do you think? Of course it didn't.
But it did lead to a continuing lower, and lower, standard of actual education for the pupils. Educational standards have been declining for decades now, regardless of what they would have you believe with their central government statistics. "Lies, damned lies and statistics" was the once popular phrase.
Educational standards have been declining ever since the introduction of "Comprehensive" education in 1970's in fact. This "reform" was introduced by Bliar's predecessors in the Labour Party. And it started the dumbing down process.
The subsequent introduction of multiple choice exam answers accelerated that decline because logical reasoning is not required in a multiple choice system.
The teaching of critical thinking has certainly reduced; many people are not taught to think logically for themselves; or to work things out from first principles.
All this has resulted in far too many, poorly educated, and therefore less aware, people.
People who seemingly can't think things through for themselves.
People with a very short attention span.
People who seem happy to be told what to think by the flickering screen on the wall.
People who believe almost every piece of obvious propaganda that the Powers That Shouldn't Be [PTSB] show them via their carefully controlled media.
Was this dumbing down by design then?
It certainly seems so. They don't want, or need, an educated workforce population anymore. The NeoLiberal PTSB sent all the jobs to China and other places in the East. Leaving behind the service economy, charities, food and drugs, aerospace/military, the banksters and other finance, and not very much else in terms of big employment.
And Big Brother & Nanny State of course. Now the biggest employer in the UK by far. Certainly so if you include local government, central government, the NHS, the military and all the "charities" that depend on Big State funding to survive. Total 1.9 million employees, excluding the charities. The next biggest is Tesco with 520k employees. The NHS alone is the fifth largest employer in the world after US military, China military, Walmart & McDonalds.
So there is now less of a requirement for critical, logical, thinkers than there used to be. Because there are far fewer real productive jobs that require such skills.
And probably also because it is so much easier to control, and manage, dumbasses rather than smart people.
All this is certainly much further advanced in the US than it is here in UK. But not for much longer. The PTSB here are doing their level best to catch up with the US dumbing down agenda.
The US experience is explained by Joseph in the following extract:
[My emphasis is in bold. A series of ............. indicates a section that I left out. The link to Joseph's article is at the end]
"Many of our regular readers in the United Kingdom sent me this story, and I need to pass it along. The reason is that Britons are waking up to the dangers of standardized testing, and to the government's plans to expand its usage................
Notice what's occurring here, for it's a pattern that Americans are well familiar with, for the pattern was used to destroy American education: (1) the government wants more "rigor" in schools, and wants to hold students to a "higher standard" for academic achievement and performance. (2) It has therefore extended the use of national standardized tests to an earlier age to measure whether or not that "rigor" has been met.
The assumption here is that standardized tests can measure that - or any other - academic requirement at all. Here the chief issue is what it has always been: no one is allowed to present their process of reasoning for their answers, i.e. no one is allowed, or required, to argue and demonstrate their answers. .................
The result is that standardized tests can not only conceivably punish the "finer mind," but the "finer school," which then will appear, a la the "scientific and objective" results of the standardized tests themselves, to be failing. At this point, the familiar "American pattern" takes hold, repeats itself ad infinitum, and the result is a gutted and worthless educational system: as schools start to "fail," teachers are blamed. This will be "fixed" by arguing that teachers spend even more time learning "education"(whatever that is), and less time learning the actual discipline they want to teach. ..............
This means they'll teach less and less in depth in their subject disciplines, and the system gradually declines, until:
you wind up with a general population as stupid (and, I might add, barbarous, narcississtic, and shallow) as the general American population.
Don't believe me? Well, I've been saying for years that the result of all this "educational success" in the USSA has been a political class, an elite, that is itself profoundly stupid and self-absorbed, disconnected from the people and therefore incapable of offering any solutions for the good of the nation: just look at the current American presidential (s)election and you'll see what I mean. Bernie, Hillary, Donald... this is the result of American education: and the "solutions" you heard them advocating are actually the level at which they, and the voting population, thinks (or rather, exhibits the facsimile of thinking)................
The bottom line for me is what it has always been: standardized testing is an overall failure, and needs to be abolished - along with the whole certification system - completely. No amount of money, or tinkering, will fix what has been a lengthy and failed experiment. As one reader of this website reminded me, the educational system is a complex system, and complex systems cannot be fixed by tinkering with this or that part; they must be completely set aside. Of course, getting rid of all of this sounds impractical, unachievable....................
Of course, the secret here is that eventually someone will form an educational corporation basically advocating the "old methods", trivium, quadrivium, and teachers who've positively avoided "certification" and "education" and "method" and "pedagogy" classes. Then they can go to corrupt politicians with a "new program" (which is really a very old one), and offer competition to the Mon(ster)santos of education: the testing and textbook corporations."
http://gizadeathstar.com/2016/05/protests-boycotts-united-kingdom-issue-standardized-tests/
Unfortunately Bliar's successors are well advanced into the process of replicating all the US mistakes here in the UK . If they are not stopped then, as Joseph explains, it will certainly result in an even dumber population than we've got now.
I do hope that Joseph is right and that public education can go back to the old, and well proven, methods. But, given the similar very low quality of our current "leaders" here in UK, and their very, very, low motivation to do what is best for ordinary people, then I am not holding my breath.
The NeoLiberal dogma rules. You want a decent education? Then show me the muneeeee........
The Trivium [grammar, logic and rhetoric], the base for all learning:
"
The Trivium is a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In the medieval university, the trivium was the lower division of the seven liberal arts, and comprised grammar, logic, and rhetoric (input, process, and output)"
The Quadrivium [arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy], the understanding of number:
It is the higher division of the seven liberal arts.
Arithmetic is pure number
Geometry is number in space
Music is number in time
Astronomy is number in space and time
I was lucky enough to be taught most of the Trivium and Quadrivium by public education. This was when the public education system sought to actually properly educate ordinary people like me.
But I missed out badly on the music. Primarily because of a lack of aptitude, but also because of an incredibly shit teacher, who was better at receiving pupils punches than teaching music.
The quality of the teachers in public secondary education teaching was a bit of a lottery even in 1960's. It must be a nightmare now given that so many of today's teachers are products of our current, mostly low grade, public education system.
But, in my experience, such useless teachers as my music teacher, Mr Peartree, were in a small minority then. Probably because I was lucky enough to go to a Grammar School which is undoubtedly where the better teachers were in those days [other than the so called "Public Schools", which are actually private, of course].
Postscript:
One of the single most important causes of this 40+ years of dumbing down of education is that Britain has been governed, for nearly 40 years, by a single political party:
The Conservative and Unionist New Labour Party
This One Party has won all the elections since 1979.
This One Party has had three, largely undeclared, but very obvious, fundamental guiding philosophies:
NeoLiberal economic policy [show me the muneeee]
NeoConservative foreign policy [bomb baby, bomb]
NeoMarxist social policy [political correctness and mindfuck central]
This One Party has had a, virtually unchallenged, political hegemony in the UK.
When the instigating puppet of this One Party State, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, was asked to name her legacy, she unhesitatingly said:
"Tony Bliar and New Labour".
That says it all really.
So anyone who thinks that the current One Party puppets, and their unseen puppeteers, will allow Jezza Corbyn to institute a new party, New Old Labour, win a General Election, and therefore depose this One Party State, is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Hell will freeze over before that happens under the current "democratic" system. Because the puppeteers own all the media, all of it. Including their very effective political control, if not technical actual ownership, of the BBC.
So if Jezza gets as far as setting up New Old Labour, then it will undoubtedly be a minor party because all of the One Party people will leave. And then Jezza will be crucified by media in the time honoured fashion when a real opponent of the One Party State emerges, a la Michael Foot & Tony Benn. Their vilification was comprehensive and relentless, and of course completely unfair.
The unreformed, first past the post, utterly corrupt, One Party political system did the rest.
The UK political class is virtually united in self interest and against the interests of the rest of us.
Make no mistake, radical democratic, monetary and legal reform is essential if there is to be any real change. Nothing less will suffice.
There's a whole blogpost lurking in that postscript. For another day maybe.....
Update #1 - 1st September 2016
Finland has the right idea:
http://gizadeathstar.com/2016/09/tired-amairkuhn-edgykayshun-consider-moving-finland/
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Update #2 - 19th September 2016
Modern education is Pavlovian Conditioning
My emphasis in bold. My additions in [bold italics].
" In order to thus solve the “problem of education,” the question arises as to the entire system of public education itself, and it is my contention our overblown imperial state has no business in the raising of children to begin with. In our day, the population is becoming keenly aware of the outrageous corruption that has long nested in Washington D.C., [and Westminster too] and to think that these managerial kleptocrats are competent for the “fixing” of a “broken system” is merely to prolong the problem. What is necessary is to understand the academic system itself is a ponzi scheme to load students with masses of debt for an increasingly irrelevant piece of paper that qualifies them to become “social justice warriors,” the very icon of perfect conditioning.
What is does not do is teach sound philosophy and empower the individual student to learn on his own (as it should do) – in fact, it exists to break down morals and all traditional and existing worldviews. The solution is thus to remove oneself from this entire superstructure, encourage entrepreneurship, and begin to convince behind-the-times corporations to no longer require permission slips (degrees) from statist institutions, but rather to hire on the basis of abilities and skills actually possessed. In the meantime, we must simply avoid the academic social engineering juggernaut and utilize tools such as the Internet (which is already beginning to make them obsolete) to attain knowledge."
and
"Not only was the strategy to make state-mandated education a necessity imposed by law through truancy, the goal was all-encompassing, millennial and religious in character, inculcating in children from the intentional adoption by the state through kindergarten (also borrowed from Prussian Socialism), up to adulthood through the university system, the credal faith in the power of the apotheosized socialist “democratic” state. To add fuel to the fire, these educational lights convinced the nation’s leaders to pay for their own indoctrination through taxation, a hurt that is most powerfully felt today in the masses of student loan debt racked up for merely 4 years of “higher education.”
None of this was by accident, as the wealthiest families in the U.S. supported this socialization, and in particular the control of education through controlling education boards, tax-exempt foundations, and even the establishment of entire universities (such as the Rockefellers and The University of Chicago). This is exactly what the Reece Committee found in its 1952-4 investigations into tax-exempt foundations and their influence, and in particular in the Committee’s Dodd Report the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Endowments were discovered to be funding Columbia, Harvard, Chicago University and the University of California to implement social engineering and conditioning that would “promote oligarchical collectivism.” The foundations, however, were merely following suit in what the public school system had always been established to accomplish, inasmuch as fascism, socialism, communism and Marxism have always been tools of financial elites, according to Dr. Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, and Dr. Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. These entities are also linked to the escapades of the Frankfurt School Marxists and their critical theory."
and
"Arising from the ancient and medieval conception of the world as a unified whole under the providential governance of Reason and/or God, the birth of the university cultivated learning and the classical method of pedagogy that reflected that same belief in an ordered cosmos. From this idea arose the term “uni” – “versitas,” a unified whole (See Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University). Thus, a liberal arts education was grounded in the foundations of grammar, logic and rhetoric, being followed by the more advanced subjects that flow therefrom, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This was possible because all facts of man’s experience were interpreted and given meaning within an all-encompassing worldview that saw a Personal Deity (by the Middle Ages) as a unifying metaphysical principle that linked the disparate phenomena of human experience."
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