UK: Leading educationalist ANTHONY SELDON has a stark warning about the uncharted waters of home-schooling

This is a rather strange article. Homeschooling in Britain is far from uncharted.  It goes back to the 19th century.  So what is the problem Seldon sees with it?  Let me mention what he is really on about.

It is black children.  They get some discipline while in school but out of school they tend to run riot.  And an extended riot of black criminal behavior is what Seldon reasonably fears

I met Seldon in 1977 and had some interesting chats with him.  So I know him as a realistic man.  So I am confident that I am not getting it wrong in saying what he cannot say


There are many drastic changes being made to our lives as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. But what few people appreciate is that Britain has embarked on one of the greatest educational and social experiments in our history.

In any normal year, schools would reconvene in two weeks' time after the Easter holidays for the summer term. Not this year.

Millions of children of school age, with the exception of those who are considered vulnerable or whose parents are in key jobs, will have to adjust to working from home for as long as six months.

It is an eventuality for which we have had next to no time to prepare, the risks are beyond the imagination, and of all the toxic legacies bequeathed by this coronavirus crisis this one may prove to be the most devastating.

It is true that some 50,000 young people are already home-schooled, but their parents long ago worked out how to do it. In educational terms, the vast majority of young people have been abandoned in unknown territory.

Let me make this very clear. When it comes to home-schooling en masse, we have no collective memory of best practice, no historical evidence of the most effective techniques, and no bank of psychological research.

In short, we are embarking on a road without maps.

I write not as a psychologist nor a scientist, but as someone who was a school teacher for 30 years, 20 years of them as a head.

And for the past five years I have been running a university, which makes me the only person in Britain to have run both schools and a university — and I am worried.

In the worst-case scenario, too many of the most vulnerable children who are no longer in school under the watchful eye of teachers will, I fear, fall through the cracks. They are at risk of becoming victims and perpetrators of crime.

They will be easy prey for the equivalent of the spivs and criminals who were spawned by the upheaval of British life during World War II — only their contemporary successors are far more sinister.

Anne Longfield, the Children's Commissioner, has already voiced her fear that criminal gangs will exploit school closures to recruit children as drug mules and street fighters.

She describes the drug-selling networks known as county lines as 'sophisticated enterprises that have well-established hierarchies and use intense violence as part of their business model'.

We know already that these gangs are practised at targeting susceptible children and woo them initially by offering friendship, then money, then drugs. Many such children — and there is an estimated one million of them — live in households affected by violence and addiction.

'For those kids, school is the place where they get their safety, stability and structure in their lives,' says Longfield. Without this support, the Children's Society believes that more and more young people 'will put their lives at risk, rob rival gangs for [drug] supplies'.

Let's face it, schools find it hard enough to keep the disengaged in school and to secure their attention under normal conditions.

Imagine how much more difficult it will be to keep young people studying — and safe — without a structure that combines registration, routine and the threat of sanctions. The fear is that many of them will run amok.

After all, what is to stop young people leaving their homes, congregating out of sight, out of mind, and falling into all kinds of danger?

We have only a limited number of police, they are already overstretched and their new powers to exercise control during this crisis are even now being questioned by judges.

Mental health problems will also proliferate. The past ten years have seen a steady rise in depression among the young, as well as an increase in suicide attempts.

And, only this week, the mental health charity MIND reported seeing a rise in concerns from those with existing conditions.

Even children lucky enough to live in secure and loving families often find that schools are unique in adding meaning and structure to their often anxious lives, as they negotiate the transition from childhood to adolescence.

The reassuring rhythm of the school year, the challenges it provides, and the aspiration it breeds all go towards engendering a sense of community and belonging. All that will be stripped away.

As for those who have worked for years to prepare for GCSE and A-level exams, suddenly hearing that those exams are to be scrapped has proved deeply traumatic.

And children are not the only vulnerable groups. Parents and guardians will be increasingly at risk of mental health problems, too, as they struggle to deliver home-schooling and to keep their children occupied and safe.

Tensions at home will become unbearable for some, leading to sky-rocketing rates of separation and divorce, and the pressures of living in lockdown could even spark an epidemic of domestic violence.

Meanwhile, social inequality will only be enhanced because not all children have parents equally willing and capable of overseeing lessons at home.

The tools they have at their disposal will vary, too, depending upon the resources they have at their disposal.

While many middle-class households will be able to draw upon a wide range of tech devices to enable access to digital technology at home, others on low incomes will find it hard to give their children the equipment they need.

In the same way, children whose families live in cramped high-rise flats may struggle to find quiet spaces in which to study.

Thanks to factors such as these, it may take years to make up the social disadvantages embedded by the loss of the long summer term's study at school.

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Wisconsin Prof Blames U.S. for Coronavirus, Says 'This Is Exactly Like What Happened With Hitler'

A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside has blamed the U.S. for the coronavirus, insisted there is no "patient zero" in China, compared the situation to Adolf Hitler, and insisted that more people die around the world from U.S. economic policies than from the virus.

Regarding the coronavirus, Palestinian-American Sociology professor Seif Da'na insisted that "more people die every year not just from diseases that you can get vaccinated for, like malaria – from which half a million people [die] in Africa – but also from the West's economic policies, at least in the 20th century and the two decades of the 21st century. More people die every year from the consequences of these economic issues than from what is happening now."

According to video translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Da'na compared the coronavirus situation to that of Adolf Hitler in a March 29 interview with Al-Manar TV, a Hezbollah-affiliated station in Lebanon.

"This is exactly like what happened with Hitler. Hitler did not do anything out of the ordinary," the professor said. "He did not do anything that had not been done by the Europeans before. In the colonial days, in the countries of the [global] south, they would kill hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. Hitler came to be viewed as Satan just because he did what he did in Europe."

How does the coronavirus connect to Hitler, Europeans, and the West? Da'na suggested the virus originated in the U.S. — when it is known to have originated in China — and compared the U.S.'s alleged "leaking" of the virus to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"The question about how this virus appeared has not been settled yet. As of now, there is no 'patient zero' in China, and therefore, we do not talk here about a conspiracy as much as we talk about the leaking of the viruses from a laboratory at Fort Detrick in the United States," the professor said. "Perhaps this leaking was not deliberate. We are not talking here about a conspiracy, even though the U.S. annihilated two whole cities in Japan during WWII, despite this being unnecessary. They were already winning the war, but they still used the nuclear bombs."

Da'na is the associate dean of the College of Social Studies and Professional Sciences at UW-Parkside and the department chair of the school's Institute of Professional Educator Development. According to the school's website, he teaches a broad range of classes, including ETHN 206 — race/ethnic relations in the U.S., MAPS 710 — the global city, SOCA 301 — introduction to sociological theory, and more.

UW-Parkside did not respond to multiple requests for comment from PJ Media.

Contrary to Da'na's suggestion, a "patient zero" has tentatively been identified by the South China Morning Post — a 55-year-old individual from Hubei province. The Chinese Communist Party has released propaganda claiming that the U.S. is responsible for the virus, but this is clearly a lie. Scientists have tentatively concluded that the virus has a natural origin in animals, and it appears to have transmitted to humans through the wet markets of Hubei province near Wuhan.

The idea that Hitler "did not do anything out of the ordinary" is grotesque. His genocide directed against European Jews and others (including ethnic minorities and homosexuals) was horrific and is rightly condemned by all right-thinking people. While other genocides have indeed been carried out in the past (such as the Armenian Genocide), and oppressive Communist regimes have murdered tremendous portions of their own people, Hitler's Holocaust stands out as a true pinnacle of evil. Tragically, Holocaust denial is widespread in the Middle East, and that may explain why Da'na thought he could minimize it for Hezbollah-linked Lebanese television.

Finally, the West's economic policies have fostered free markets and previously unimaginable prosperity across the world. In the past two hundred years, the standard of living has increased dramatically in and outside the West. Innovations like air conditioning, refrigeration, microwaves, cheap books, the internet, air travel, and more were barely conceivable in the early 1800s. The world is incomparably richer thanks to the West's economic progress — the very thing Da'na suggested has killed more than the coronavirus will.

This bare fact reveals an astounding ignorance that may only be possible in the far-left thought bubble of American academia.

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Coronavirus and homeschooling: How the tables have turned

I have four at home underfoot, ranging from a uni student, one in Year 12 attempting final year studies, one diving into the huge adventure that’s Year 7 and one in Year 3 trying to learn his tables.

Eight and eight went to the store, to buy Nintendo 64. 56 = 7 x 8 because it’s 5, 6, 7 and 8. Stop! Stop right there! Because we’re no longer meant to learn these natty little short cuts to times tables, we’re not meant to teach our children this way. The current mode of thinking is that kids need to understand the concepts behind the sums, rather than just reeling off the answers by rhyme or rote.

But these ditties are extremely handy in unprecedented times. I have four at home underfoot, ranging from a uni student, one in Year 12 attempting final year studies, one diving into the huge adventure that’s Year 7 and one in Year 3 trying to learn his tables. Let’s just say I begin this whole exercise every morning feeling like Snow White, crisp and clean and contained, trilling away with imaginary bluebirds flying around my head, but end up every afternoon feeling like a combination of Tom (as in Jerry), Oscar (from The Odd Couple) and Cinderella (pre-ball). God I admire teachers, always have, but now … they are my superheroes. This is hard.

So, times tables. The current mode of thinking is that kids need to understand the concepts behind the sums, rather than just reeling off the answers by rote; and through the example of my three older kids I know that schools no longer teach them the old way. I know mine – they were drilled into us every morning, stopwatch hovering, to get us into the correct state of mental alertness for the day. But do our eight-year-old children know theirs? I have primary school memories of the times table grid fresh on the blackboard first thing, to limber us up. Numbers across the top and down the left hand side aaaaaand … go! It was mental arithmetic, it was a race, and it embedded the sums that would be used in some form for the rest of my life.

Through four kids in various schools across two western countries I’ve wondered again and again who’s actually teaching these dear little sums anymore. Is this situation, gulp, actually up to us, the parents? How does it work in all those Asian countries with their amazing PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores? Discipline, structure and sheer grit, I suspect. In 2018, Australian 15-year-olds lagged 3.5 years behind their Chinese counterparts in maths, and we’re now in long-term decline.

So how to raise mathematical standards in Australian kids? Parents, dive in, because I suspect it’s the only way for the time being, and of course some of us have so much free time on our hands now to do this. I asked the school of my Year 3 son what age kids are meant to know their times tables by. End of Year 4, I’m cheerily told, and it’s not necessarily up to teachers alone. The more tigerish parents around me talk of charts on bedroom walls and times tables CDs playing in cars. I panic. I was that mother once. Long ago. God help Child Number Four.

But Aussie maths guru Eddie Woo says it’s essential that all students lock down times tables, because they’re a key form of mathematical fluency. “They’re the bedrock for students to become confident in dealing with fractions: the former is about multiplication and the latter is about division, making them natural partners. Children who struggle with times tables will often find fractions, decimals and percentages very difficult to comprehend … you can see how a child’s difficulties with mathematics may have been sown many years in the past.”

Righto. A few years back the British schools minister declared all pupils should have instant recall of times tables by age nine. And our Aussie kids? I don’t think so. “Six times 6 is 36, now go outside to pick up sticks.” Literally, so Oscar from The Odd Couple can transform into Snow White again.

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