The failure of ideology

startledcod

er, is that it or is there more to come?

Johnnydub

Hold on Rod, you're a dyed in the wool leftie...

Are you genuinely surprised that leftist wishful thinking and ideological pedantry trumps common sense and experience?

If you need another example I'll point you towards Harriet Harman et al's unceasing desire to see fathers removed from the family unit. How's that working out for us?

REPay

The ideology has triumphed! It has produced a poorly educated population which waits for the state to do things for it and to it - requiring a huge state apparatus of highly paid professionals and is therefore a "job creator". The ideology is also a worldbeater. It is pretty hard to produce so many illiterates given the huge resources deployed on education. I am sure no third world education system could compete with the UK on this. It furthers equality. It has also succeeded in getting rid of deference (manners) and our kids can really express themselves without being the timorous, forelock tuggers or yesteryear. (Look at the joyous, uninhibited street performances in shopping centres last week.) To achieve equality the system now also gives everyone pieces of paper saying they have an A...this enables universities to pick children based on social need. If you are a progressive (statist) then this system must be defended against politically motivated interference from the likes of Michael Gove and Rod Liddle.

Derek Pasquill

Substitute "community" for "ideology" and the title would be bang on.

Alexius

It was the same with collective farms in the Soviet Union. They saw fairly early on that they didn`t work, but decided that it was more imortant that they were run in an ideologically correct way, than that they actually fed the nation. And by then they`s shot the Kulaks anyway.

DeeJay

That would be an Academy then.

But I think you'll find, as with most progressive ideas, it failed because it was sabotaged by bourgeois reactionary elements in key managerial positions who failed to implement the entire radical programme or refused to allocate sufficient funds to the teachers, particulary for fact finding visits to Cuba and Albania.

For these institutions to work properly it is essential that hostile elements amongst the teaching staff are throughly purged and sent for re-education until they admit their faults.

Simon Stephenson.

Yes, Rod, but you're equating "working" with "getting results" - presumably academic test results.

Could it not be that the promoters of the new schools included more than just academic results in their assessment of whether or not the schools worked? For example, yourself. Is there not some intrinsic value in you propelling yourself into the county soccer team? Value that you would not have gained had you spent that year being conventionally taught?

I'm not saying necessarily that they were right, just that their measurement of success may include things that you don't include in your measurement, and so all you are saying, really, is that under your criteria the experiment was a failure, even if under theirs it wasn't.

addick

Every sentient being in this country knows that over the last three decades the education 'establishment' has failed on so many levels as to be wholly criminal.And yet, instead of being publicly flogged, the media continues to give endless airtime to the witless,clueless twits of the various teaching unions, whose refusal to accept any blame, or accept that change is desperately needed, is one of the greatest acts of treason this country has ever endured.
Gove is doing a splendid job, but boy, does he have his work cut out.It will take a very long time to repair our utterly failed system and my fear is that he will be out of a job before we see any improvement.God forbid that a Labour government is returned next time around.They will demolish any positive reforms and throw us back into the hands of the 'progressive' hands of the bearded loons that supposedly educate our children.

Greg

Whilst some of it is ideology I think a lot of it is teachers taking the path of least resistance. Who wouldn't prefer letting kids wander around aimlessly than trying to instil discipline in the ungrateful wretches?

disenfranchised

i have to say rodders, you write rather well for a chap who learnt his english on the football field.
well done that man.
as for your school allowing you to do exactly what you chose to do.
eternal shame on those responsible.....

Tim Hedges

And it's clear that having let down two generations we are going to suffer from it in terms of civil disorder and unemployment. When Blair said Education, education, education, we hadn't realised he didn't really mean it.

seb

Rod. Teachers facilitate learning. This is official policy. As you wrote a fortnight ago, kids learn through play. This is also official policy. Complain about education in the UK and you're just wasting your time. It's been in the incapable hands of f*cktards for decades. Scarcely anyone I meet has any idea that alternatives to the finger-painting, the fluffiness, the sheer waste of colossal amounts of time and money exist. Politicians are certain it's all about money and about who runs schools. None of them has the remotest intention of fixing it because none has any idea why it reeks in the first place.

Lungfish

The educationists had more than a small role in last weeks riots. If the government booted the corduroy wearing appeasers and tree huggers out of the classroom a few of the homeboys may actually avoid the slammer.

Eddie

Exactly so. Traditional methods work, and it was unbelievably arrogant of 60s educationalists to think their way of teaching kids was better than methods proven over hundreds of years!

Kids learn by being taught through repetition and being pushed: they do not deserve choice until they know the basics. Those who left school aged 12 or 13 early in the last century were massively more literate and numerate than kids now - and more so then graduates now too! They learnt to be so through traditional, repetitive methods.

My education was thankfully fairly traditional, though my primary school could be rather silly - I remember doing endless projects, and my last year there seemed to mostly involve doing arts and crafts because the teacher liked doing that!

But what really made me convinced about the superiority of traditional methods was not the fact I know my times tables and can spell - whereas those who went to child-centred mixed comps can't; no - it was the knowledge that in mainland Europe - places such as Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic - kids were and are taught in a very traditional way in selective schools (grammar, vocational and mixed): this results in all those Polish plumbers who come here who are far more numberate than most in this country, and that includes the teachers.

The solution? No idea. Perhaps start by closing all teacher training colleges which exist to brainwash recruits with some PC left-wing nonsense (and I know - I have a PGCE!).

The real problem now is that all the teacher trainers and even the teachers who are nearing 60 all came from that failed system themselves, so their numeracy and spelling are atrocious, and also they seem to regard selection and traditional methods as somehow heresy.

Hangmansknotinn

I think my mother and father could have taught me in thirty minutes everything I learned during my four years of primary school. And I'm not even joking.

Jeremy

Rod Liddle:

"It’s clear now that they knew open plan and no lessons didn’t work, but rolled it out anyway for ideological reasons…"

And what were those "ideological reasons"?

Might they have involved, or included, deliberately keeping the minds of working class children under-developed and under-educated (which is the same thing), in order for them to lack the skills necessary to advance themselves beyond their class origins or, indeed, even to articulately criticize the very system which had been designed to keep them in this state, in the first place?

In such a context, it would be relatively easy to incubate within such children a sense of class disadvantage and resentment towards those who had received a more rigorous education than themselves, and who therefore possessed the very skills, self assurance and social mobility which they lacked.

One cannot have a Labour voting base without a working class that is in possession of what, on the basis of your account, would appear to be a carefully constructed sense of class disadvantage and resentment. And perhaps the best way to both get and maintain this, is to create just the sort of "unlearning environment" which you describe.

j fraile

...such as 'let them learn s--t'

Clare

'I have to say rodders, you write rather well for a chap who learnt his english on the football field.
Well done that man.'

My feelings entirely, Disenfranchised. And how very satisfying to end up doing rather better than most of the girlie swots despite spending so much time kicking a ball around. Maybe those trendy progressives were onto something after all.

When I was eight I moved from a Colditz-style school where most of the teachers thought that the only good child was a terrified, silent one to a right-on, teachers-are-your-friends kind of a place. I don’t think I’d want my own kids to experience Colditz, which was mostly run by child-hating sadists. On the other hand, right-on education had its own problems. You 'experienced' learning. In your own time. When you felt like it. Only, to be honest, most of us didn't ever feel like it very much.

It is interesting that when parents give up on the state system and pay for private schools, it is nearly always because they want order, discipline and the basics of an education drummed into little Johnny whether he likes it or not. Our local all-ability independent school manages to get more or less all of its children - even the thickest - through ten GCSEs. At the local comprehensive, the number of kids achieving five scrape passes is woefully low. They do learn how to bath babies, though. Not that the school is stereotyping or anything.

andrew kerins

Did the children of the elite, which imposed this on the country, send their children to such schools ?
Maybe one ro two at the start but, afterwards, it was a case of Diane Abbott syndrome.

O

Welcome back Sir.

I wonder what other failures of ideology we could think of?

Antonio Carbajal

1968 it started.

Almost overnight, we were handed over to students who wanted us to be friends and call them Jenny and Bob.

A new subject took the place of Geography and History and English, and it was to be dubbed 'IDS': Independently Determined Studies.

Precisely as you did yourself, we determined independently that we didn't need to study (in our case we played Newmarket and Stop the Bus).

Jenny and Bob if you are reading, you know who you are and you're both prize twats and you know that too by now.

John Thomas Scopes

Mr Liddle.

"...Itâ™s clear now that they knew open plan and no lessons didnâ™t work, but rolled it out anyway for ideological reasonsâ¦"

But what politician, or indeed any ideologically motivated human being, then or now, has ever let the facts come between them and their end goal?

If the study had vindicated child centred learning it would have been used as justification. As it didn't it was just ignored.

Now, if the 'old style' or the 'new' had been the subject of a Public Enquiry it might have been a different matter....

David Ossitt

addick

“Every sentient being in this country knows that over the last three decades the education 'establishment' has failed on so many levels as to be wholly criminal.”

Hello addick; not every sentient being, just read the post of Simon Stephenson immediately before your post, but then he might not be a sentient being.

David Ossitt

Hello Rod; you have been sorely missed, welcome home.

A question if you can write “It’s clear now that they knew open plan and no lessons didn’t work, but rolled it out anyway for ideological reasons”, how come you still support the leftist opinion that came up with these silly ideological reasons?

ACN

Well put(Jeremy 2:41). The left has long realized that a level of class resentment was necessary to maintain their voting base. Give the workers a good education and they might get ideas above their station and vote for a Tory. To the middle class lefties, who have always used the Labour party as a means to gain power, the workers were merely 'useful idiots'.

Simon Stephenson.

David Ossitt : 7.42pm

Maybe I'm not sentient, but perhaps this is how you have to be to recognise that different people have different expectations of education, and therefore that what "works" for one person doesn't necessarily work for another.

Maybe if I were more sentient, I'd amend my thinking so that I'd recognise that what David Ossitt believes, and what David Ossitt thinks is important, are also what everyone else in the world believes and thinks important.

disenfranchised

@clare....

but i'm betting rod's m & d shoved the odd improving book under his nose right after he'd washed the mud off those heroic knees.....

WB

It will all be cubicles connected to the internet next, monitored by retired security guards and SAS types and it *will* work honest.

daniel maris

I'm sure I remember that programme! A big glass building wasn't it?

I don't think that was very representative of comprehensive education.

Still, you didn't do too badly for yourself did you?

daniel maris

Alexius -

State controlled collectives don't work by free agricultural co-operatives are successful in many countries around the world.

arnoldo87

40 years since 1971.

21 of them Tory (including 11 under Thatcher ) - 19 Labour

Manifestly a failure of socialism then.

Clare

Andrew Kerins:-

I notice that David Cameron, who has managed to squeeze the fact that his children go to state school into many an interview, is now softening us up for their inevitable move to a nice, posh institution:

____________

'I've got a six-year-old and a four-year-old and I'm terrified living in central London.

In some parts of the country, there isn't a choice of good schools - that's why people break the bank to send their children private.

Am I going to find a good secondary school for my children? I feel it as a parent, let alone as a politician.

Last year the Eton-educated prime minister pledged to send his children to state schools - as long as they offer a good standard of education.'

_____________

Hmmm.

Robert Saintfield

Open-plan schooling also led to a rapidly developing behavioural problems.Children who not told what to do often end up quarrelling with each other, or dominating others - bullying as it's called.

As a result far too many pupils arrive at secondary school unable to focus on any task long enough to learn and unable to organize their work.

Secondary school teaching has largely followed the primary sector in accommodating 'learning styles' rather than on an insistence on attainment and this has long been recognized by university admissions and employers alike.

The teaching is now a female-dominated profession and although women may have greater empathy with the kids than men in general, this fact has led to greater difficulties for males to assert authority.

Children now tend to demand accommodation with their needs and believe that their misbehaviour should be discussed away with a sympathetic mother figure.

How many times have pastoral care teachers returnes to the classroom teacher with lines such as 'I've discussed the matter with Errol but he says...

he didn't understand

you didn't listen to him

he was feeling sick

you picked on him and didn't punish the other kids

.....

Simon Stephenson

arnoldo87 : 10.04am

Er ..... isn't it possible for an idea or concept to be weak or poor, and for this to be the problem, rather than the colour of the rosettes worn by the party in government? Or do you subscribe to the idea that the government must be held responsible for everything that happens during its time in office, irrespective of whether or not it has the power and/or the resources to change things with which it disagrees?

Eddie

Apparently, telling children off lowers their self-esteem.

Good.

A lot of high self-esteem was on show in the riots recently. Shame the looters didn't have lower self-esteem really - then they would have realise that if they looted, rioted and trashed their areas, they would prove themselves to be utter scum.

Ganstas demanding 'RISPEK' with menaces and the copious hoardes of muggers who live in our vibrant and diverse cities, also seem to have rather high self-esteem.

Conversely, those injured and made homeless by the riots possibly had their self-esteem lowered...

So why this ridicuous worship of preserving a child's self-esteem at all costs in our 'Kidocracy', even if it turns them into spoilt brats, criminals, gangstas or just very unhappy people?

Bringing a child up with discipline is not compatible with forever boosting its self-esteem!

Old Slaughter

Welcome back Rod.

I wonder if we can think of any other failures of ideology?

arnoldo87

@ Simon Stephenson

"irrespective of whether or not it (the Government)has the power and/or the resources to change things with which it disagrees"

Simon - Do you really think it is possible for an educational practice or system to have been so well established that all Governments over a 40 year period were powerless to change it?

This is bizarre thinking, even for you.

Austin Barry

From open plan schools, through illiteracy, to open plan prisons.

Nice one.

rod liddle

Eddie - the stuff about self esteem is the basis of my piece in the mag this week.

Occasional Ostrich

arnoldo87 @ 10:04am

Once the worm's in the apple . . .

Remember Shirley Williams?

addick

Simon Stephenson asks of Rod 'is there not some intrinsic value in propelling yourself into the county football team'
Unfortunately, the answer is No...he ended up supporting Milwall.Had he pursued his Latin classes, he may well have been Mayor of london instead.

David Ossitt

arnoldo87 August 17th, 2011 12:37pm

Careful arnold, he/she/it bites.

Dr Starkey

In about 1966, when I was 7, my mother went to see the headmaster of my primary school about my poor reading skills. He said to her something along the lines of "when a child wants to read, he will take a book off the shelf and start to read". She replied, "all children in Scotland can read to this standard by the age of 5". Progressive education. I went to cambridge, but only because my parents, at great sacrifice, took me out of the State system. Plus ca change.

Reed

'The soft bigotry of low expectations'.

Except this time not played out just on poor inner city children, but on a whole generation. Presumably, the notion that education should be challenging to young minds has been hived off to the private sector. The rest had to make do with pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Children are not 'young adults'.

Amanda

Eddie, excellent points about self-esteem, which I read out to my husband, a high school teacher. He agrees.

But he also pointed out that it shouldn't be a question of high esteem on the one hand or low esteem on the other. There should be instead a *striving* for a self-esteem that is well deserved.

Beyond that, I think that what is more important than the somewhat airy-fairy notion of SE is confidence -- confidence in one's ability to learn and tackle new subjects, particularly. Furthermore, self-confidence should be built as part of the development of good character. Also, what is wrong with proper pride on the one hand -- a more useful and realistic concept than self-esteem in my view -- and reasonable humility on the other? Good-natured, teachable people and decent citizens have both.

Simon Stephenson

arnoldo87 : 12.37pm

"Simon - Do you really think it is possible for an educational practice or system to have been so well established that all Governments over a 40 year period were powerless to change it?"

In a word, yes. This doesn't mean that governments haven't been able to make one or two fairly inconsequential changes, but at no stage since the mid-60s has it been practicable for a 5-year government to set about removing the stranglehold of the left-leaning authoritarian educational establishment under which children are trained to accept orthodoxy as a priority over being taught to think.

francis exavier

thank god you are back - I was starting to read Melanie Phillips new blog and as a consequence I really need a long holiday.
Sadly, the older I get the more I appreciate that your early years are about learning (that is not the same as absolute enjoyment or blatant hedonism without any understanding of duty or responsibility). many clearly learn in their youth through the behaviour of their peers and elders and copy it in later life. apparently, according to my wife, I am a clone of my father who never allowed me to beat him at chess or a game of football in the back garden between 1968 when I was 5 and 1980. my first victory celebration was nearly matched by tardelli in the 1982 wold cup final.

peter crawford

Rodmansworth, good to see you back dude. Checked out your stuff in The Sun (as Guest Handshandy pumper) and hope that worked out well although your re-appearance here does not inspire too much confidence.

I went to a large state comprehensive (Ifield School) and happen to think you are correct. The discipline there was tough. If you didn't return the books to the correct place on the shelf Mr Whitehead (the maths master) used to pinion you by the arms and Mrs. Waddon (art, drama, and dance) took a 40-yard run-up and kicked you in the bollocks. It made men of us. Men with high pitched voices true but you can't beat a solid West Sussex education.

"progessive" schools are crap and when are you going to stop being a lefty and join the ranks of the righteous ? You are too clever to be a leftist.

Damon

@Tim Hedges. "When Blair said Education, education, education, we hadn't realised he didn't really mean it."

Some of us realised it very clearly in 1997, Tim. We were called Tories. Unfortunately, there were only about eleven of us in the country at the time.

Swissy J

Personally I blame Pink Floyd, who were much more popular with yoof than disciplinarian school teachers. Remember The Wall - "We don't want no education .....Teacher, leave them kids alone!" 1971, I think.

arnoldo87

David Ossitt @ 7.32

No David - It only barks (at great length)

A. MacAulay

I went to lots of schools and they were all crap and the boredom was only occasionally lifted through the agency of a decent teacher. That is decent as a human being. The rest were simply human rubbish. So, you were lucky, Rod Liddle in going to a school were you weren't being pestered by morons all the time.

Prm

I went to the same school as Rod - two words, Rod - Mr Broderick. For the uninitiated, a jackbooted nazi of a biology teacher. Very old school, very, very tough. Put the fear of the Lord into his charges - but the results spoke for themselves - his classes achieved a very high percentage of Grade A 'O' Levels. Of course, many of those pupils are still in therapy...............

Robert Taggart

@Lungfish...
do you not wish we had the pleasure of being taught by corduroy wearing tree hugging appeaser educationists ?
Methinks it would have been much easier on our butt !

Stabledoor

You'll have got a shock then when you went to the Lawrence Jackson. I was in the first comprehensive year there and they were pretty traditional in their approach to teaching

Archibald

We've gone from being a nation of shop keepers to a nation of shop looters. There are many factors at work, but I couldn't agree more that a large part of the blame must lie squarely at the feet of schools who so badly fail those from poor backgrounds. Berenson noted "Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second." Schools seem to have opted for (c) None of the above.

But will this come up in any debate? Is the Pope a Muslim?

Richard of Moscow

@Tim Hedges. "When Blair said Education, education, education, we hadn't realised he didn't really mean it."

The slogan was Lenin's. Blair didn't mean it, but Lenin did. So (as mentioned on this site by a current resident) even poverty-stricken Kyrgyzstan still teaches its children to read, but the west is unwilling to match Kyrgyz education.

Just to say that lefties, with all their faults, did not get everything wrong. Only the current system, a sickly hybrid of the worst of left and right, could cock it up this much.

Take a bow, Blair and Brown.

Amanda Has A Full Glass, Thank You

This is not on the topic at hand but commenting on the fact that Rod was clearly missed when he went MIA recently.

Are we agreed? That Rod is somewhat of a brash, plain-speaking, take-no-prisoners softy who is also rather a rake and a category-breaker?

So why do most of us have a soft spot for him? You can see it in the fact that readers are always giving him pet names, variations on his first name. Never mind 'Liddle'. Do you call the mate you're drinking with down the pub by his surname? Exactly. You do not call him Liddle. You call him Rodunovsky.

As for my first question: it answers itself, don't it?

Eddie

Richard of Moscow - yes, absolutely! The communists and those who followed all believe absolutely in selection. We do too, in sport, for example; but in the school system the prevailing 'wisdom' of educationalists is that there should be no selection at all.

It really is a sacred cow of teacher training colleges and educationalists: 'selection = bad'. And yet, as I well know (having lived in Prague for a year in the 90s and taught in secondary schools), how the eastern bloc and central/eastern europe now believes in 1) selection by ability where the academic go to grammar schools and those who are not go to vocational schools from age 13/14; and 2) traditional methods: the daily repetition and rote learning that really does work - with maths and reading and writing.

Having met a lot of teacher trainers and educationalists, I can say that they have all been very left of centre, fond of spouting silly theories, and not a few failed the 11 plus too and barely scraped a degree at a 3rd rate poly - hence the enormous chip on their shoulder. Anyone (like me) who favours grammar schools is made to feel like a pariah at any typical teacher training department!

Two facts:
Life is selective and some people are more intelligent than others; children learn no differently now than they ever did and will become literate and numerate when taught using traditional methods (not touchyfeely childcentred circletime nonsense).

I despair daily at the state of the British education system, and am so glad I no longer work in it.

McCfuzz

Once your mind is lost to an ideology then that is the day you lose your rationality.
From then on you have to make the world fit your ideology.

Lungfish

@Taggart-- put it behind you Robert