The Times has published this piece on the complete insanity that has taken over the state schools:

Edu-babble is turning schoolchildren into ‘customers’

Performativity is forcing curriculum deliverers to focus on desired outputs among customers in managed learning environments.

If you struggled to understand that sentence, pity the poor teachers (curriculum deliverers) who are struggling to interpret jargon and management language rather than simply teaching their pupils (customers).

Edu-babble has become so common that it earns censure today in a review of education led by professors at the University of Oxford. Their report criticises the “Orwellian language seeping through government documents of performance management and control that has come to dominate educational deliberation and planning”.

Heads and teachers receive edicts on inputs and outputs, audits, targets, curriculum delivery, customers, deliverers, efficiency gains, performance indicators and bottom lines, it says.

This language of policymakers and their advisers hinders the enthusiasm of teachers and engagement of pupils, it adds. The Nuffield Review report is the biggest independent analysis of education for those aged 14 to 19 in fifty years, taking six years to complete. It was led by Professor Richard Pring and Dr Geoff Hayward, from Oxford, and professors from the Institute of Education and Cardiff University.

It claims that ministers’ micro-management of schools and colleges has resulted in a narrow curriculum, teaching to the test, and a high number of disaffected teenagers not in education, employment or training.

The report says: “The increased central control of education brings with it the need for a management perspective, and language of performance management — for example, levers and drivers of change, and public service agreements as a basis of funding. The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Stakeholders shape the aims. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits measure success defined in terms of hitting targets. Cuts in resources are euphemistically called ‘efficiency gains’. Education becomes that package of activities (or inputs) largely determined by government.”

It adds: “As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.”

Professor Pring told The Times that policy language was “leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and impoverishment of learning”. He added: “We are losing the tradition of teachers being curriculum directors and developers — instead they’re curriculum deliverers. It’s almost as though they have little robots in front of them and they have to fill their minds, rather than engage with them.”

Bill Rammell, a former education minister, recently told the House of Commons about the establishment of the Centre for Procurement Performance. This had worked “proactively with the schools sector” to “embed principles and secure commitment from the front line” by “working with and through key stakeholders” and “engaging with procurement experts” to “deliver efficiency gains”.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “We call it edu-babble. It completely denudes education from being a human and social act.”

WHAT THE DICTIONARY SAYS

Articulated progression

A clearly defined route through the qualification system that enables pupils to choose the next step in education towards their goal

Big Brother syndrome

A growing tendency among younger learners to voice an ambition for celebrity without notable achievement

Dialogic teaching

Teaching through dialogue between teachers and pupils, and between pupils themselves, which places an emphasis on speaking and listening

Level descriptor

A definition of the outcomes that a learner should have reached

Performativity

A relatively recent term coined to convey the emphasis that monitoring by government agencies and Ofsted places on the achievement of targets

Source: Truncated definitions from the Oxford Dictionary of Education

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6458791.ece?Submitted=true

And this, in a nutshell, is why Home Education as we have known it must be banned.

Home Education exists in the polar opposite, anti-matter universe of what is described above. Home Education is an unknown. There are no statistics available about it, no performance metrics, no hierarchy, no governing body. Home Education is autonomous. Its practitioners are outside of the mainstream, outside of society. Out of control. No one has a handle on them, what they are doing, what they are teaching, how they are teaching it, where they are going, how they get there and who decided what the goals were. No one even knows how many Home Educators there are. There is no uniform curriculum that they follow, no single test that they take, the ‘teachers’ do not need qualifications or state vetting of any kind.

In other words, Home Educators are free.

And that is anathema to the state.

What is worse, is that where there are data on how Home Education performs, the pupils that are measured outperform the state fodder in every way. The top universities are bending over backwards to recruit these exceptional students, taking places away from the state educated ‘customers’. Once they see this trend increasing, the immediate reaction of the state is to imagine a worst case scenario, where there are hundreds of thousands of Home Educated children in the country that will eventually emerge as a superclass that will dominate everyone like the old public school boys did (and still do).

This is why the upcoming report from Graham Badman will recommend the end of Home Education as it has been practiced in the UK. Its secret thrust will be the same as the German desire of not tolerating ‘parallel societies’, and of course, we all know that it was Hitler who outlawed Home Education in Germany for this very reason, and that it is the exact same law that the Third Reich enacted which is being followed to the letter and so brutally enforced in Germany today, with the explicit approval of the European Court of Justice.

The overt pretext for eliminating Home Education will be the absurd notion of, ‘children’s rights’, and the emotionally manipulative call to, ‘protect the children’. Whatever the review says, Home Education is here to stay, and I predict that it will remain unchanged since there will be an unprecedented backlash against any move to change the status quo.

People are leaving state education in droves precisely because of the pernicious influences described above, as well as the insane, suicidal nonsense of introducing (for example) sex education to five year olds and giving condom credit cards to twelve year old boys.

Now take a look at the sickening origins of this:

Part 1

Part 2

The state cannot run the schools that it is in charge of. They are failing the pupils that they are already responsible for; only a total idiot would want the state to interfere in Home Education, and only a deluded imbecile would call for incompetent people to try and regulate something that already works far better than the thing the incompetent are failing to run correctly.

I do not know a single Home Educator that is going to change what they do and how they do it in any way; no matter what they recommend in this report, and no matter what changes are made in the legislation, the rights of man are set in stone; this far, and no further – no one has the right to enter any home and demand that a family behave in one way or another. This is the logical conclusion of the totalitarian fascist state; they try and control everything you do outside the home, and now that they have nowhere left to legislate, they come into the home to control you there also. Many Home Educators are saying, “over my dead body”, and I agree with them one thousand percent.

No matter what this review of Home Education says, Home Educators will not be managed, manipulated, registered, corralled, categorized, controlled and subjected to the abuse that they dish out at state schools.

You can take your Edu-Babble, your reviews, your ignorant opinions and your bogus concerns and take a running jump. No one is buying what you have to sell, no one will tolerate your attempts to control and destroy the family, and you can go straight to hell.

And for your information, this is how you tell them to go to hell. This is a TRUE THING:

[…]

Yesterday morning, I received a phone call from a gentlemen in the EOTAs section of a Local Authority who asked me to tell him the names and addresses of all the people who attend a home education group we help to run and any other home educating families I happen to know about. Naturally, I told him this was impossible as I didn’t know him from Adam and anyway I couldn’t possibly breach people’s confidentiality or betray their friendship and trust, even had he come at me with a badge, his Criminal Record’s Bureau Check, his CV, his passport, you name it. All the while I was thinking, I do actually love loads of the people he is asking about. Who does he think I am?

The conversation, if anything, then took a turn for the even worse with a perfect demonstration of one LA employee’s serpentine understanding of current legislation. Actually, chopped logic is the phrase that springs to mind.

I tried to explain that I thought he might like to think again about his understandable belief that he must search us all out for the purpose of assessing every family for the suitability of their educational provision, whether or not there is any reason to think that there might be a problem. I suggested that this behaviour might create both a constitutional and a practical problem for his authority, whatever current guidance might actually say.

I told him that since he (understandably) believes that it is this duty to assess all out of school educational provision, then he must accept that the state is responsible for determining the nature of education in this country. In which case, I went on, I think both home educating and state schooled parents alike whose children are being failed by this state-elected educational provision should be rubbing their hands rather gleefully, since it looks like bonanza time.

He then said “Well, it’s up to the parents what and how they teach”. In which case, says I, “Why are you bothering to visit? If the parent says that they are not going to help their child to learn to read because that is part of their educational philosophy, what exactly are you going to do about it, if it is up to the parents to make that decision?”

At which point, he turns round and says angrily and heatedly (sorry, this is mutating into a bad episode of Eastenders I do realise), “This is not what this conversation is about. I just rang you up for the names and addresses.”

“Yes, you did,” I says, “and I can’t help you there, and no-one I know will help you”.

“Well, how am I supposed to do my job then?” he asks.

“The thing is,” says I, “I don’t think that is my problem,” which I don’t think it is really, as I didn’t vote for this government and didn’t write the Education and Inspections Act 2006.

“But”, says I, trying to be generous, “If it’s any consolation, I’ll tell you that there isn’t a single family I currently know of who isn’t providing a highly suitable education. ”

“Well, that’s not up to you to decide”, says he.

I didn’t actually manage to provide an instant summary of his argument at the time, but in l’esprit d’escalier:

“So what you’re saying is that it’s not up to the state to decide on the nature of a suitable education because it’s up to the parents, but it’s actually not really up to the parents, because in fact the state does have this duty. Err?

[…]

http://daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/stasiland.html

WTF?

WELL DONE to this person for having the guts and brains and awareness to be on your toes when a call like this invades your home. She is a heroine.

Second, HOW DID THEY GET HER PHONE NUMBER?

Third, By what statute are they able to demand that she provide information on other people?

Fourth, this is ONLY THE BEGINNING. If ContactPoint is not stopped, they will be calling everyone who is the parent of a child not listed as registered in a school. All HE people need to be ready to receive this call or one like it, and answer it in terms like this or less, i.e., telling them they do not have your permission to call your telephone, telling them to write to you, and hanging up. You should then ban their number by dialing 14258 after you hang up and blocking the last number called. Then, when the letters arrive, simply ignore them.

This is the only way to deal with these subhuman animals; be on your toes and ready to react instantly and firmly.

These people and their power are like spider’s webs; easily brushed away. They have no real power, and no ability to do anything. They cannot even collect the names of Home Educators without the collaboration of the people they are trying to target. They have lost before they have even begun.

It is people like the HE mother above who make a difference to everyone by setting such a sterling example, and then posting it for everyone to read.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Home Schooling, Insanity, The Facts, wtf?.