I remember how it was -- JR
Is there no way to stop the secret brainwashing of Britain's next generation?
By PETER HITCHENS
I will always remember the day they took away the history books. My small boarding school, on a rain-lashed Devon hilltop, had until that day taught us about the glory and grandeur of English history. It was a story of courage, freedom and the defeat of foreign threats.
But these volumes, their pages soft from use, their illustrations in wistful black and white, were no longer acceptable. They were gathered up and carted off. Instead, we were given glossy, brightly-coloured replacements with larger print and supposedly exciting photographs of a brave new world.
Luckily for me, the change came just too late. I had already absorbed all the old stuff and I would never be able to regard the 1945 Labour Government as being as exciting or interesting as the Battle of Trafalgar. I thought then, as I think now, that this country had indeed had a Glorious Revolution in 1688.
Significantly, it was about the same time that they began to inflict the ‘New Maths’ on us – but once again I had been lucky enough to learn my times tables by heart long before then.
I should stress that this was a private school mainly attended by the sons of naval officers and prosperous farmers. I’d guess it was round about 1963. Yet even we, in that lost era, could not escape the rising flood of indoctrination which has been washing over British education ever since.
How deep and nasty that flood is we may never know. Its victims, the school pupils don’t know that they are the victims of propaganda, since they have no way of telling when they are being brainwashed. Parents only discover by accident what their children are being taught, then are refused permission to see what is going on. For, as we have learned in recent weeks, the level and nature of propaganda in schools is an official secret, as closely-guarded as our nuclear launch codes.
A parent at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College, an ‘academy’ in South-East London, was concerned about what her teenage daughter was being taught. She found she had been exposed to all kinds of violent and dubious material, including politicised rap music. An assembly was held to discuss ‘white privilege’, in which pupils were told that people perpetuated their privilege just by being white.
And of course (as usual) there was sex education which was more about spreading liberal immorality than anything else. The only unusual thing about this is the determination of the parents involved to find out the facts, and good luck to them.
Most parents have neither the time nor the energy to take this up, and many will reasonably worry that, if they make a fuss, their child will suffer in some way. Are they wrong to fear this?
From my correspondence over the years, I am pretty sure modern education, state and private alike, is filled with radical, politically correct propaganda. This includes the curriculum. And the effective nationalisation of all state schools by the ‘academy’ programme has if anything made them even more secretive than when they used to be run by local government.
This indoctrination works. If you go on social media and engage in debate on some subjects, especially illegal drugs or the sexual revolution, it is amazing how uniform and instant the response is to any conservative or Christian argument.
Someone has taught them to say these things. This conformism is combined with almost total ignorance of history, English literature or anything else worth knowing. The great thinker, academic and author CS Lewis used to ask ‘What do they teach them at these schools?’ I think we now have a pretty good idea, precisely because they won’t tell us.
*******************************************
Principal accused of wanting to oust white teachers created school of ‘insanity’: petition
A Washington Heights principal, accused by staffers of trying to divide the school by race, made good on a vow to ax white staffers and has let the school devolve into “insanity,” insiders said.
Paula Lev, the principal of High School for Law and Public Service faced a Department of Education probe last year after allegedly telling a teacher she was “going to get rid of all these white teachers that aren’t doing anything for the kids of our community,” according to a complaint.
The complaint, first filed with the DOE, is now before the state Division of Human Rights.
Lev, who is Dominican, gave excess notices to four white staffers at the 450-student school in the last year, and made other unpopular changes, insiders said.
Some of the excessed teachers found new jobs, so they weren’t officially considered cut; others left on their own; and at least three more teachers decided to call it quits this month, an insider said.
“There are many more teachers who have voiced that they plan to leave and they feel demoralized,” the staffer said. The exodus comes after teachers took an unusual vote of no confidence against Lev a year ago.
Fed up students are also demanding action.
One student, Angel Dilawar, 17, who will be a senior in September and is the class valedictorian, started a petition on change.org saying “we have had enough and cannot bear to witness the utter disorganization and insanity at our school.”
“We have some new teachers that are super under-qualified, and staff members that were fully experienced and qualified were excessed,” reads the petition that garnered more than 370 signatures in two months.
Dilawar told The Post that Lev has wasted money on frills like hallway TV monitors and $50,000 worth of hoodies to go with school uniforms that no one wears. Meanwhile, violence has increased, she said.
“Right now students can do anything they want and they’re not going to get in trouble,” Dilawar said.
Dilawar said while helping out in the school’s college office she was asked to write recommendation letters for her peers because the assistant who was supposed to do the work had a limited grasp of English.
“These students would be shocked to find out that their recommendation letters would be written by a student, a junior,” she said.
Dilawar said she had emailed Schools Chancellor David Banks numerous times and had not received a response.
Another student, Hannah Maldonado, 16, who will be a senior, said Lev even created divisiveness during a recent Culture Day celebration to promote diversity. When Maldonado asked for a greater musical variety to be played at the cafeteria event, Lev said in Spanish to the DJ to play one other song — and then to “go back to Spanish music,” the student recalled.
“I was told that the student government curated a playlist to be inclusive to all of our cultures,” said Maldonado, who speaks Spanish.
Lev did not return a request for comment.
The DOE contended only two staffers had been excessed, a decision it maintained was determined by contractual rules regarding seniority.
It said a new position had been created to focus on “conflict resolution” and the Culture Day music selection was “informed” by a student survey.
“The Department of Education is absolutely committed to providing a strong and supportive environment in all of our schools and for all of our students. We work with our principals every day to ensure that students and staff receive the support they need,” said spokeswoman Jenna Lyle.
*************************************************
Australia: Shameful star chambers ruin men's lives
Bettina Arndt
In a recent judgment about a sexual misconduct case at Cornell University, the judge compared the campus disciplinary committees to the infamous English Star Chambers. He warned, ‘These threats to due process and academic freedom are matters of life and death for our great universities.’
We too should be regarding what’s happening at our universities with utmost seriousness.
Our universities have wrongly taken it upon themselves to set aside our criminal law system and put in its place their own star chambers where administrators make life-changing decisions about accused young men, derailing their education and publicly shaming them.
This is happening every week in Australia simply because our lily-livered universities are too afraid to stand up to the feminist bullies demanding action in response to the fake campaign claiming a rape culture on campus.
For two years now I have been helping a young man being persecuted by a New South Wales regional university. I’ll call him ‘Andrew’ to protect his privacy – critical now that he has finally received his degree and with great relief left the university to start a new job and a new life. He’s made a podcast with me, bravely deciding to tell his story as a cautionary tale to male students, warning of dangers awaiting them at our universities.
Note: Having witnessed the ruthless behaviour of our universities, I regretfully decided to delete the name of this institution from the podcast rather than hold back on my commentary for fear of legal attack.
For Andrew, it all started one night in March 2020, when he was a 22-year-old final year pharmacy student.
He was at a typical student gathering that involved a bunch of kids, including other pharmacy students, happily drinking together. But one female student, whom I will call ‘Fran’, went overboard and ended up vomiting and needing help to get back to her room at the college. A few students went with her, got her settled in bed, and then asked Andrew to keep an eye on her.
Andrew’s version of events, accepted by the court, was that when they were left alone, Fran suddenly became amorous, kissing Andrew, taking her pants off, and trying to undress him. He protested, telling her he had a girlfriend, but she persisted in pulling his pants down. That’s when the other students walked in on them. Fran’s friends quickly took control, demanding Andrew leave, despite Fran’s protest that he hadn’t done anything wrong and there was no need for him to go.
Despite this abrupt end to the evening initially, there seemed no negative repercussions, with Andrew having friendly social media exchanges with Fran where she showed no sign of any concern. What Andrew didn’t know was that Fran’s friends were at work, rewriting the history of the evening, and persuading Fran to make a complaint to the head of the college.
That happened, and the university leapt into action and started conducting its own investigation. Think about that. Here we have administration people – who not legally trained – blundering around, encouraging the young women to come up with their versions of events that evening. Suddenly there was the suggestion that Fran’s drink might have been spiked and that she was in and out of consciousness. Unsurprisingly, the whole scandal took on a life of its own and by the time the police were involved and sworn witness statements were taken, these colourful additions were part of the story.
It doesn’t take a lawyer to understand how that compromises the basic principles of police investigation. But that was just the beginning.
Andrew knew nothing about what was going on until two months later when he suddenly received a call from the university administration telling him he was excluded from the college and university campus until what was now a criminal matter was determined.
Andrew was no ordinary student. He was a hard-working kid on a scholarship doing honours in the final year of his pharmacy course. He was a resident fellow at the college, elected to the SRC, and a shining sports star. He was captain of various sporting teams, and had numerous leadership roles… All positions which he had to abandon when charged with a criminal offence.
When the shattered Andrew first contacted me, he was facing the frightening prospect of a criminal trial and the humiliation of finding excuses to withdraw from his numerous university positions, against the backdrop of malicious rumours about the allegations he was facing.
It was a tough year as we found local lawyers willing to represent him in the criminal case and brought in others to jump through the ludicrous hoops being erected by the university administrators. Boy, were these bureaucrats relishing in their power to torment this young man.
Although Andrew could study online in the early months of 2020 during Covid lockdowns, he needed to get back on campus for a few days in October to attend an intensive practical course to complete his degree. Naturally, the university’s petty tyrants said no.
Lawyers’ letters flew back and forth and then we had a breakthrough. A friend at the university dug out a regulation stating that the, ‘University must take steps to ensure students are not academically disadvantaged while a matter is being determined.’ Whoopee! That was inserted into the next lawyer’s letter and finally did the trick. Andrew was allowed to complete his course work – but the university still decided to withhold his degree, awaiting the decision from the magistrate’s court.
Convicted felons are allowed to study at our universities. What gives any university the right to steal a student’s degree – an asset towards which he has devoted years of effort and spent tens of thousands of dollars? Our laws say nothing about withholding degrees as punishment for sex crimes. The universities have made this stuff up with no proper authority.
So here we have the university telling this hard-working student that they were withholding his degree, refusing to allow him to take his rightful place as a qualified pharmacist, derailing his pharmacy internship, and costing him between $30-60,000 in earnings that year. This situation left him in limbo for half a year until a local magistrate could make a decision, and then another eight months while their star chamber swung into action.
In June 2021, the case was heard and the magistrate very quickly dismissed the single charge of ‘sexual touching’ that Andrew was facing, saying Andrew’s version of events ‘may well be true’. Fran repeated in court that she did not feel Andrew had done anything wrong at the time and confirmed that she had objected to her friends making Andrew go, asking, ‘Why does he have to leave?’
So that was it. Smooth sailing after that, you might imagine. Not with this university in charge…
We had an amusing moment late last year when Andrew received an email congratulating him on his degree and inviting him to apply to have his degree sent to him. He quickly filled in the right form and hoped for the best. Sadly, no degree arrived through the post. The invitation turned out to be a mistake. The bumbling administration then announced there was still a misconduct charge to be determined and the university planned its own investigation.
Here we have our justice system deciding a young man was innocent, but that’s not good enough for this great university. They chose to have another go, conducting their investigation and decision-making process. The reason? This university, as is true of all similar institutions, have decided they are entitled to their own star chamber determining these matters using a lower standard of proof. So, if he gets off in the criminal system there remains another, easier way to nail him.
Sure enough, after months of delay whilst everyone awaited the transcript of the magistrate’s written judgment, the university set up its investigation and re-examined all the evidence that the magistrate had used to determine Andrew was completely innocent. They then grilled Andrew – denying him any legal support in the process.
Eventually, they found him guilty of ‘behavioural misconduct’ because he should have somehow resisted any contact with the drunk girl. That’s very different from the original ‘sexual touching’ charge where he was wrongly alleged to have done something wrong, behaving inappropriately towards the girl. The university decided he was guilty of not doing something, failing to resist or retreat quickly enough from a girl’s amorous advances.
Not only are males now to be held responsible for taking advantage of drunk women, they are in trouble for letting such a woman near them.
Andrew was officially reprimanded and told he wasn’t allowed back on campus for three years. The decision was issued by a brand-new Vice Chancellor, who was no doubt keen to throw a bone to the feminists that control the university, as they do in all such institutions. Andrew was naturally upset by this decision, but the punishment hardly mattered. He has no intention of going near this dastardly institution ever again.
This week Joe Biden’s government announced new regulations to wind back the meagre reforms to the American campus star chambers which the Trump administration had managed to push through. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that Biden’s new regulations will eliminate or weaken basic procedural protections for students accused of sexual misconduct:
‘The right to a live hearing? Erased. Cross-examination? Unrecognisable. The standard of proof to determine guilt? Weakened,’ sums up the correspondent, adding that this sets the Education Department on a collision course with the courts. As he explains, over the past decade in America, judges nationwide have issued more than 200 rulings favourable to students accused of sexual misconduct, chastising universities for ‘rushing to judgment in rigged proceedings designed to appease the federal government’.
Our Aussie rigged proceedings were designed by our universities not to appease the government, but to kowtow to the feminist mob. That’s why they attract absolutely no scrutiny from our legacy media which serves precisely the same master. How else can we explain why journalists happily bang on about trans athletes – an issue which impacts tiny numbers in our community – whilst ignoring the huge population of families whose sons are at risk of injustice at our universities?
Our society’s indifference to what’s happening here is a national disgrace.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/07/shameful-star-chambers-ruin-mens-lives/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*******************************
No comments:
Post a Comment