Nutty British schools honcho

Deception is a stock in trade of the Left so I guess we should not be surprised that he wants more of it

Head teachers have expressed their astonishment after Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, suggested that the best way to prevent six and seven-year-olds from getting stressed about exams was simply not to tell them they were being tested. Mr Balls said that he was angry with schools that had informed parents in advance when children in primary school would sit their compulsory Key Stage 1 tests, sometimes known as SATs. “I cannot believe they are doing that. They should not be doing that,” he said in an interview published today in the New Statesman.

“The best head teachers will ensure that no six or seven-year-old knows they are doing SATs. If you are telling pupils in Year 2 that they are doing SATs then that’s the wrong thing. You should not be stressing the children.” He added: “They don’t need to do the SATs in a sit-down environment. It’s something that can be done as part of the school day. Honestly. And there are loads of schools doing that.”

But his remarks drew an angry response from head teachers. David Fann, head of Sherwood and Broughton primary schools in Preston, and chairman of the Primary Committee of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said Mr Balls had very little idea of the daily realities of running a school. “Children very soon work out when the national tests are going on. Parents hear rumours from parents of children at other schools so it makes no sense to keep the dates a secret. That would add to the stress,” he said. “At my schools we invite in the parents in April to explain the procedures. We do it in a relaxed manner. “When the tests do happen, it is in the usual classroom with a teacher the children know, so it feels normal to them,” he added.

Other head teachers said that they routinely informed parents about the Key Stage 1 testsbecause a warning ensured that children were not taken on holiday that week, were given plenty of sleep and were in school on time. Mr Fann said that a little bit of stress could be good for children, if it was well managed. “Head teachers want to keep stress to reasonable levels, but we also want to motivate and challenge children to do their best,” he said.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the NAHT, said he was glad that Mr Balls had admitted that children found tests stressful. Mr Balls will announce an ambitious expansion of the newly formed children’s trusts today. The trusts, which are designed to act as a focal point for integrated service, will become a statutory requirement in every area, placing a legal duty on police, youth justice officials, social workers, and health agencies and other children’s services to include at least one representative from local schools on their board.

Mr Balls will argue that schoolchildren are still being let down by the failure of different parts of the public sector to communicate properly. “Many schools still find it more difficult than they should to get support and specialist help when they need it,” he will tell a conference in London organised by the children’s charity NCH. Mr Balls will also announce powers for central government to force local councils to take over underperforming schools. “It’s important these powers are used appropriately, which is why we are going to bring in legislation to require local authorities to consider formal warning notices when these are clearly justified,” he will say.

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How our Marxist faculties got that way

It's August 1968. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators have just wrecked the Democratic national convention in Chicago and ruined Hubert Humphrey's chances to become President. So what did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next?

They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses. And they stayed in the top half of their class. This effectively deferred them from the military draft, a draft that discriminated against young men who didn't have the brains or the money to go to college. That draft also sparked the wave of grade inflation that still swamps our colleges. Vietnam-era faculty members lowered standards in order to help the "Hell No, We Won't Go" crowd.

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon ended the war and Congress ended military conscription. So the Marxist anti-war activists -- activism is now a full-time profession -- had to do something else. Most of them went to work in the real world. But a meaningful number remained in school and opted for academia, especially the humanities and the social sciences. If they got a Ph.D., they might even become university teachers, and many of them did. They then climbed academia's ladder, rising from instructor to assistant professor, from assistant professor to associate professor, and from associate professor to full professor. These last two ranks usually carry tenure, which means a guaranteed job until one decides to retire or is fired for raping little children in the streets.

Forty years have passed since the 1968 Democratic national convention. During that time, American academia has been transformed into the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society. It is now a bastion of situational ethics and moral relativity and teaches that there are no evil people, only misunderstood and oppressed people. American academia is now a very intolerant place, As Ann Coulter, who has been driven off more than one campus podium because of her conservative views, has put it, "There is free speech for thee, but not for me."

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Marxism collapsed in Russia and in Eastern Europe. But it survived in U.S. universities, where politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge, and where politically-correct emotions are now more important than logic and critical thinking. Our students and graduates are well trained, but badly educated. Outside of what they must learn to make a living, they don't know very much. But they have been taught to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past.

In the main, our students and graduates, no matter where they went to school, don't understand that China, in return for Sudanese oil, is supplying the weapons used to commit genocide in Darfur. But they feel bad about the Drfurians. They don't now that the Palestinians have rejected every opportunity to have a state of their own. But they feel sorry for them and they blame the Israelis for their plight. They aren't familiar with the Koranic verse "the Infidel is your inveterate enemy." But they keep searching for the "root causes" of Muslim hatred and many of them believe that terrorism is the result of what the United States and Israel, obviously the two worst countries on this planet, do or do not do.

Deficient in history, geography, and economics, our college-trained citizens cannot fathom that the main reasons for high gasoline prices are the speculation in oil futures and the continuing industrialization of Japan, China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and other countries. Instead, they blame the "greedy" U.S. oil companies, whose "obscene" profit margins are not as high as many other industries. Nor do they understand that their simultaneous and illogical opposition to nuclear power, coal, liquified petroleum gas, on-shore and off-shore oil drilling, and new refineries guarantees that we will have energy shortages and high energy prices.

Their professors don't make the big bucks in America. What their professors do earn, however, are huge psychological incomes in the form of power -- the power to shape the minds of their students and the power to influence their colleagues who want raises, sabbaticals. grants, promotions, and tenure. One of the best ways to influence students, colleagues, and the citizenry at large is to hire, promote, and tenure only those people who agree with you. Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, its psychology chairman was asked in a radio interview if his department hired Republicans. He answered: "No. We don't knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not."

If I were a psychologist, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.

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