PR boss says parents are lazy and don't teach children respect or discipline

She is obviously right that parents are confused about what values to teach their children -- now that the Leftist dogma "there is no such thing as Right and Wrong" prevails. But the Left do not at all apply that dogma to their own beliefs.  They just use it to discredit non-Leftist values. And they go on to teach their values in the schools.

But the transfer of value education to the schools is fundamentally wrong. Take the trendy belief that physical punishment such as spanking is wrong and harmful. The evidence for that is very poor -- with only extremes of it being demonstrably harmful.

And the prevalence of that false belief has had a huge impact. Discipline in many school classrooms has collapsed, with unruly children ruining the education of  their classmates.  When the Biblical injunction "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: But he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes" (Proverbs 13:24) was the prevaling influence, classes were much more orderly and most kids actually learned something.  In some places these days you have High School graduates who can barely read and write

So schools cannot at all be entrusted with values education and should not be entrusted with it.  They should confine themselves to teaching academic subjects -- literacy, numeracy, history, geography, sciences, languages etc.

And under those circumstances many parents would step up to give their children moral and ethical guidance


Controversial commentator Prue MacSween has labelled the young student who was dragged along the concrete by his principal on the first day of school 'a little smart a** kid'.

Footage quickly went viral on Thursday of Steve Warner, principal of Manor Lakes school in Wyndham Vale, Melbourne, pulling the boy, 9, by one arm.

MacSween took to Channel Nine's Today Show on Saturday to defend the 'poor principal' as she highlighted the so-called problem of 'lazy parenting' across Australia.

MacSween quickly got fired up when discussing the idea that schools could introduce courses for parents to boost their skills in order to help children.

'Our biggest problem is that there is an erosion in our society of people who have respect and who have discipline, and we have these cotton-wool kids,' the PR boss said.

'We have a situation where we have parents who are totally inept, they're lazy.'

MacSween said parents don't have any idea what their responsibilities are, and instead lean on their children's teachers.

'We have bred a generation of people who just want it all, who don't want to work hard for it - pay their dues,' MacSween said.

The outspoken commentator said the younger generation had been failed by poor parenting, with 'yummy mummies' who care more about making it to Pilates rather than how their children behave at school'.

'We saw that yesterday with that poor principal having to drag that little smart a** kid and had to contend with the parents to explain himself,' she said.

'Why are people having children who shouldn't be bloody parenting? Buy a cat, buy a dog, don't have bloody kids!'

False rumours from students and parents at the P-12 school have circulated on social media, claiming the boy kicked a pregnant teacher in the stomach. 

However, the boy's sister Bianca Moore rubbished such claims, saying he kicked a trolley during a 'tantrum' on his first day at his new school.

'He suffers from ADHD and anxiety and obviously starting at a new school has upset him, he was having a tantrum,' she said.

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Higher education struggles are hitting Vermont hard

Green Mountain College and the other higher education institutions sprinkled across Vermont have felt as permanent as the mountains and valleys they stand on, but that ground is shifting quickly.

Higher education is the third-largest industry in Vermont, yet the state faces a particularly acute version of the challenges that threaten the industry nationwide. It has the most colleges per capita yet one of the fastest-declining high school populations in the country — offering a sobering look at what might be in store for the rest of the nation.

With its announcement last week of impending closure, Green Mountain has become the face of this existential struggle, but many other colleges in Vermont are more quietly staring down the same problems.

“There is no doubt that we’re living in a time of profound, disruptive change in higher education,” said Tom Greene, chairman of the Vermont Higher Education Council, an association of all the college presidents in the state.

Greene, who is also founder and president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts and served until recently on the regional accreditation agency, said more schools are likely to close in New England, possibly in Vermont.

The school in Poultney, Vt., cited financial pressure stemming from declining enrollment in deciding to close after the end of spring semester.

“Some of it is demographic, some is climate, some is fundamentally you have an education system that was built in the 19th century,” he said.

Vermont has 21 public and private colleges and universities, a lot for a state with just over half a million residents.

In addition to a network of public colleges and universities, there is elite Middlebury College, Norwich University military academy, quirky Goddard College, and a smattering of other private liberal arts colleges.

All have experienced in some way the repercussions of the population trends.

Much of the problem comes down to simple math. Enrollments are dropping, and costs are rising.

The College of St. Joseph in Rutland has 32 percent fewer students now than a decade ago. The school is set to lose its accreditation at the end of this semester if it does not remedy its financial problems.

Goddard, in Plainfield, is on probation with accreditors, also for financial problems.

Vermont Law School revoked tenure for three-quarters of its faculty this year as part of an effort to plug a budget gap.

Marlboro College, where enrollment has dropped 26 percent in the last 10 years, sold a building.

Even Middlebury, with its $1 billion endowment, announced voluntary buyouts last year in an effort to save $8 million in staff salaries to close an operating budget deficit.

Schools have closed before. Burlington College shut its doors in 2016 after controversy that began with its purchase of a much larger campus it ultimately could not afford. Trinity College of Vermont closed in 2000; Woodbury College, in Montpelier, merged with Champlain College in 2008.

The situation in Vermont is particularly important because it is something of a harbinger for what might be in store for the rest of the country.

The state has led the nation in low fertility for more than a decade, according to Nathan Grawe, a professor at Carleton College in Minnesota and national expert in how shifting demographics will affect higher education.

Today, the US fertility rate is just slightly higher than Vermont’s was a decade ago. The national decline is also relevant for Vermont, because 60 percent of its college students come from other states.

Experts predict that the number of high school graduates nationwide will stagnate in the next few years, after 15 years of steady growth.

Then, after 2025, this population will begin to drop. In Vermont, however, the population of high schoolers has been dropping since 2008 and is expected to plummet further. From 2000 to 2017, the number declined from 36,000 to 31,000, according to state data.

Public colleges in Vermont face challenges, too. The state system receives the least amount of state aid per student in the country, making public schools nearly as dependent on tuition as private colleges.

The University of Vermont, in Burlington, has addressed this shortfall by attracting a large number of out-of-state students, about three out of four undergraduates.

The state’s community college network plus its technical college and two regional universities, however, educate a large number of Vermonters, who must make up for the state’s negligible contribution from their own wallets.

Amid declining enrollment, two regional colleges, Lyndon State and Johnson State, merged last year into Northern Vermont University, a budget-saving measure that officials said has already proved effective.

Jeb Spaulding, chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System, said the system is searching for more efficiencies as well as ways to reach new students. This includes apprenticeships, online programs, shorter semesters, weekend classes, and non-degree credentials for people who need job skills.

In Vermont, about 42 percent of high school graduates do not go on to college, and that percentage increases to 63 percent among economically disadvantaged students. Spaulding said that simply reaching those people is another way to increase enrollment.

When Green Mountain College’s president announced its closure last week, he described the attempts that officials had made to keep it in business. But ultimately, he said, it was most responsible to close.

The loss will affect more than just the students.

Higher education employs more than 12,000 people who are paid more than $589 million total annually, according to a 2017 report by the council Tom Greene chairs. Schools like Green Mountain also bring money to local communities. “It’s a big impact when a college closes,” he said.

Greene said the schools best-equipped for success are those with unique specialties that differentiate them from the many mid-tier liberal arts schools.

That includes Norwich’s military training program, Sterling College’s agriculture program, or Greene’s own school, which specializes in low-residency graduate degrees in writing, art, and film.

Goddard College runs an unusual low-residency program that lets students come to campus for a week at the beginning of each semester then complete the rest of the class online.

But Bernard Bull, who started Nov. 1 as Goddard’s president, said he is candid with anyone who asks: His school is in trouble. “I tell people our future is not certain, but we are committed to doing everything we can,” Bull said.

Bull worries that school closures will kill the diversity of the college landscape. “It grieves me to think that we are moving to a higher education ecosystem that is less diversified, and that means there is going to be less access and opportunity for people,” he said.

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UK: Can you be a class traitor?

The Leftist below says that underclass life is so distressing that any opportunity to climb out of it should be taken  -- without that making you a class traitor.  That many of the burdens of an underclass life are self-inflicted is not addressed

In this week’s news cycle, online trolls and old establishment media alike have lost their figurative rag over Hasan Patel: 16-year-old socialist, loud critic of private school elitism, and now, Eton scholarship holder. From a Leyton council estate and son of two immigrant parents, he has been the target of a heavily racialised Twitter witch-hunt, in which adults are flinging around terms like “class traitor” and “champagne socialist” at a child. The Times waded in with a smug headline euphemistically identifying Hasan as a hypocrite. Times readers retweeted it, likely having not even read it, with equal smugness.

It’s easy to be self-righteous and smug when you don’t live on a council estate. Not all politicos are held to the same puritanical standard. The charge of hypocrisy is not regularly flung with this level of vitriol at the numerous high-profile commentators on the left who went to famous private schools. In the case of white excellence, the process of how someone becomes excellent is obscured. That process is one of the right dinner table conversations, being surrounded by the right ideas, and—most commonly—being sent to the best schools and universities.

Equipped with the metaphorical tools of political battle, of debate and rhetoric, we can wage war. So, what does it mean when we refuse to equip young brown kids in this same way? When not only right-wing commentators but white people on the left brand a 16-year-old a hypocrite for seeking access to the type of opportunities they benefitted from, they are gatekeeping access to a political discourse. It is almost as if they do not want the wrong people to rise up and change how politics works.

East London is not Shoreditch or Columbia Road. East London is Newham, Ilford, Hackney, Tower Hamlets. The people who built that East London are being systematically impoverished, by gentrification—sorry, “regeneration”—and by successive cuts to local authority funding. Brampton Manor Academy School has been in the news recently for being the exemplary East London state school; 41 kids into Oxbridge, most of whom are BAME; a huge feat and undeniable win for all involved.

But we must be careful not to extrapolate outwards from Brampton Manor; all is not well, educationally speaking, in East right now. Newham is predicted to lose £611 per student in educational funding by 2020. Teachers are having to do more with less, and communities are cracking under the pressure. Brampton Manor may look like a beacon in the darkness, but due to oversubscription, competition for sixth form places is 10:1—more competitive than some Oxbridge courses. That’s 10 young, bright, capable Newham kids fighting for one, increasingly defunded, school place. How does that look like an educational solution to anybody?

Class is defined by one’s material conditions; it’s not an identity. Class is not confusing; it is perfecting the art of avoiding the bailiff at the door, of understanding how to make 5 different meals out of a tin of beans, of predicting, with clairvoyant accuracy, how long you can get away with leaving your rent unpaid before you get served a section 21 eviction notice. And when you realise that’s what it is, you also see that given the choice, none of us would choose to live like that.

It is not possible to be a class traitor. You cannot ‘betray’ conditions that have been inflicted upon you. If we get frank about class and admit that ‘working class’ is largely a euphemism for “worse off than most people” or “alienated from one’s labour,” we may uncover that there isn’t much there to stay pedantically loyal to. Socialist politics are instinctive for many working-class people; socialism is a structural way out, a fundamental overhaul in the way we live, a redistribution of resource for the many. It’s also not our current political reality—but one we are slowly acquiring the means to strive towards.

I’ll be upfront about my stake in this conversation: I am an East London girl, state-educated for most of my life. I was born in a council flat, raised by a single mother, as close to a Jeremy Kyle byline that the voyeuristic liberal gaze requires me to be. In Year 9 of secondary school, I won a full scholarship to a private school. The classes were small, the teachers were not overworked or underpaid; when a student was troubled, they noticed, and they had the resources to intervene. I got the pastoral and emotional support I needed; they even paid for me to go to therapy. These are the invisible support networks that elite educational spaces are able to provide to a select few, and that comprehensives, increasingly, can no longer afford to. It’s no wonder that the privately educated-elite continue to dominate top jobs in almost every field.

If I had not taken that scholarship, I wouldn’t be writing this article. I wouldn’t have the same words. I wouldn’t have time; my education has meant that I can get higher paid jobs than I used to, so I can afford to sit around and think about class and education in abstract ways. When you live in the grip of mortality—when you’re hustling to put a tenner on your gas meter only for a fiver of it to instantly disappear on an ancient debt recovery plan—you don’t have time to write articles about funding cuts to education. This is how communities become systematically impoverished: by being too overwhelmed by the need for survival such that there is simply no space to do political work. Hasan has found a way to carve that space out for himself, even if it’s through the flawed model of private-school scholarships. They are not a political solution, but they might just be the means to one.

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