Tuesday, 19th October 2010The silencing of Professor Alderman11:54am
The 2010 Belfast Festival, held under the auspices of Queen’s University Belfast, convened a panel discussion last night on the topic ‘Conflict in the Middle East’. Last September, the Festival’s director, Graeme Farrow, invited Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a British Jewish commentator and defender of Israel, to take part in this panel, an invitation he accepted. To Alderman’s astonishment, last Friday afternoon he received an email from Farrow informing him that ‘a mistake’ had been made in inviting him, and that although he could join the audience the event was to go ahead without his panel participation. The other members of this panel were Professors Avi Shlaim of St Anthony’s College, Oxford and Beverley Milton Edwards, of Queens University, Belfast. Shlaim, an Israeli by birth who hasn’t lived in Israel for years, has made a career out of demonising Israel. Milton... Tweet or twit?11:52am
Not only are BBC folk not exactly signed up to Reithian standards of objectivity (if you listen to Radio Four’s Today programme, objectivity seems to have been redefined as holding the balance between left and further left) but they even go on Twitter to parade their prejudices. Biased BBCobserves of the tweets tweeted by one BBC news editor:
... Monday, 18th October 2010Grovelling alone10:37pmAngela Merkel has got the point. Multiculturalism has failed, she states flatly, as she surveys western Europe going down under the tide of radical Islam. Rather than liberal society creating the utopia of harmonious cultural pluralism, it is being swallowed whole by the giant predator whose voracious mouth it encourages, in the spirit of tolerance, to open ever wider in the unshakeable belief of western liberals that the jaws about to snap shut around their necks are actually stretched wide in a smile. All over mainland Europe, a few shoes are belatedly – maybe too late -- starting to drop. France and Belgium have banned the burqa and other countries are debating doing the same. Switzerland has banned minarets. Denmark has imposed ferocious limits on immigration. In the Netherlands the prosecution in the case against the Dutch politician Geert... Friday, 15th October 2010The war for civilisation11:17pm
Well at least one man gets it. Rupert Murdoch has made a direct, to-the-point, ambiguity-free speech about the anti-Israel, anti-Jew frenzy now consuming the west. In a speech to the Anti-Defamation League, which gave him an award, he said this:
... October 18, 2010 Who will speak these home truths now? melanie phillips Daily Mail, 18 October 2010 When deputy headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh took to the podium at the Tory Party conference earlier this month to speak about schooling, her remarks produced two dramatic results. The first was that she electrified the conference by delivering some brutal home truths about the education system, which she denounced for betraying the poorest and most disadvantaged children. These had been left high and dry by the prevalent ‘all must have prizes’ Left-wing education ideology, which under the banner of ‘equality’ had produced a ‘culture of excuses’ which kept ‘poor children poor’. The second result was that she was promptly suspended from her Church of England school, St Michael and All Angels Academy in South London, on the grounds that she had used identifiable pupils to illustrate her argument and had insulted the teaching profession. After an outcry, it was reported that Ms Birbalsingh would be returning to her position at the school. But now we learn that ‘following discussions’ she has resigned. The inescapable conclusion is that she has been forced out by the school’s governing body. Since she had been denouncing Left-wing education ideology and her headteacher is reportedly an ardent ‘Blairite’, it is furthermore easy to jump to the conclusion — as several have indeed done — that she has been pushed out for saying the unsayable about the teaching profession. In other words, she is a martyr to dissent because the education ranks have closed against her in order to cover up the awful truth about education. Now let me admit to a bit of a qualm about Ms Birbalsingh. As the author of a book published 15 years ago titled All Must Have Prizes, which exposed in almost identical terms the disaster that our education system has become — and for which I received much abuse from the education establishment — I might be expected to offer unqualified support for this beleaguered teacher. However, I also felt very uncomfortable that she had used real pupils to illustrate her argument, displaying pictures of them on the giant conference screens as well as referring to what they had said or done. Ms Birbalsingh has countered that she had asked the children’s parents for permission to identify them, and even that the school had given its consent to her speaking at the conference. But just how informed was that consent? Did she tell the school what she was going to say, and that she was intending to refer to named pupils? And when the parents gave their permission, did they know how she was going to use their children? After all, she effectively pilloried two of them for parroting idiotic ‘anger management’ jargon. True, she was criticising the teaching profession which had taken this culture of excuses to such lengths that even the children were spouting it. But the fact remains that these two pupils were held up to scorn in order to make her point. And what about the Tories, who screened the images of these children? Did they, as the producers of this piece of theatre, ask the parents whether they were happy for their children to be used in this way? Maybe they did check with the parents. And maybe Ms Birbalsingh did spell out to everyone precisely what she was going to say at the conference. We don’t at present know. In her defence, it is also clear that the school’s sensitivities extend beyond any concern for its pupils, since it huffs that such a generalised attack on schooling can be seen as insulting to many teachers — the all-too-predictable defensive crouch of a profession which refuses to listen to necessary criticism. Indeed, it is extremely unfortunate that Ms Birbalsingh’s use of the children has provided a justification — whether rightly or wrongly — for pushing her out. For the fact is that everything she actually said was nothing other than the pure, unvarnished truth. As was plain, her target was not the individual school but the system, and the way of thinking that has become the orthodoxy in the education world and to which all state schools — and no small number of independent schools, too — are in thrall. As she so rightly said, exam standards are dumbing down virtually year by year. Even though children themselves are crying out for order and discipline, they don’t get it. With competition turned into a dirty word, they aren’t allowed to compare their achievements even with their peers in other schools in the state sector, let alone with those in independent schools. So they are even deprived of knowing just how much they don’t know. In a subsequent article for this newspaper, Ms Birbalsingh wrote that there was now a chronic lack of robustness in the classroom, reflected in the increasing use of coursework rather than exams. Pupils could now get a meaningless BTEC in an invented subject such as ‘travel and tourism’ which was worth no fewer than four GCSEs — while modern languages, science or history were in decline simply because they were more demanding. Her most savage accusations concerned black boys who under-achieve at school through a combination of chaos in the classroom and the demonisation as ‘racist’ of any teacher who dares discipline or exclude them. For saying that ‘black children under-achieve because of what the well-meaning liberal does to them’, everyone should cheer her to the echo. It’s also not just black boys who have been abandoned in this way, but all those at the bottom of the heap for which school is their one lifeline out of disadvantage. Such home truths are practically unsayable in the state sector. Over the years, other educational whistle-blowers have been punished for saying them. Some two decades ago Martin Turner, a distinguished psychologist and expert on dyslexia, was forced out of his job and had his reputation blackened for suggesting that many diagnosed classroom disorders were actually caused by a systemic failure to teach children to read. And around the same time, two history teachers, Anthony Freeman and Chris McGovern, were driven out of their posts in state schools for attempting to ensure that children were taught a proper historical narrative as opposed to sociological, politically correct gobbets. Over the years, all attempts at education reform have foundered because of the refusal by the education establishment to acknowledge the damage being done by the shibboleth of ‘equality’ which has brought the system to its knees. As Ms Birbalsingh observed, teachers are so brainwashed by the Left that they reject any such thinking as ‘Right-wing’. That’s because the Left demonises any challenge to itself on the basis that its thinking embodies virtue itself. So its ideas are given the status of holy writ, and a kind of secular inquisition is mounted against anyone who dares to question them. It is rare to find a state-school teacher as articulate and inspirational as Ms Birbal singh who really does ‘get it’. What a tragedy, therefore, that either due to a lapse of judgment (on her part) or professional spite (from her employer) she is currently not in the classroom but out in the cold. |
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