School daze

Monday, 14th January 2008

Not content with accelerating the total meltdown of British education standards, not content with forcing pupils to stay at schools which teach them less and less for two more years until they are 18 in order to massage the unemployment figures downwards, and not content with ever more prescriptively dictating what is on the curriculum and replacing knowledge by indoctrination, the government is now even interposing its coercive self between teacher and pupil, thus destroying the very basis of that relationship. The Sunday Telegraph reported:

The Government is to outlaw ‘sexist’ career advice which directs girls into jobs such as hairdressing and boys into careers such as engineering. Schools will have to show that pupils are getting ‘impartial’ support and are not being encouraged to take up stereotypical jobs. Young people will be also be offered ‘taster’ sessions in careers they may not otherwise have considered.

And today’s Times splashed with this:

Teachers are to be banned from encouraging their pupils to study A-levels rather than the Government’s controversial new vocational diploma qualifications under legislation that is going through Parliament. A clause in the Education and Skills Bill, to be debated in Parliament today, says that schools will be forbidden from ‘unduly promoting any particular options’ to teenagers seeking advice on courses.

The move has been criticised by academics, who say that the Government is desperate for the diplomas to succeed at all costs. Others fear that the new and ‘impartial’ mortgage-style advice will not be in the best interests of pupils as teachers unconvinced of the worth of the diplomas will be unable to pass on their concerns to either them or their parents.

So teachers are to be forbidden by law from giving their pupils advice about their educational or career options that serves their pupils’ best interests. All to further the government’s purposes of reshaping society according to ideological dogma and giving the impression that education standards are going up by using a rubbishy diploma to squeeze the life out academic A-level, thus forcing those standards down.

This is simply state coercion. There is much wrong with our education establishment and teaching profession. But if teachers are to be proscribed by law from guiding their pupils in their best interests, teaching stops being a profession and becomes instead an agency to further state control of individual lives. This is not how a democracy behaves.