I remember how it was -- JR
School children were told prostitution is a 'rewarding job' by sex education providers who promoted wild kinks to pupils.
Organisations brought in to teach kids about sex have introduced children to hardcore kinks including being flogged, caned, locking people up in a cage and being slapped in the face, The Times reported.
Children were even told to show where they liked to touch themselves by one organisation.
Private contractor Bish (Best in Sexual Health) is written by Justin Hancock and charges £500 a day to deliver sex education sessions at secondary schools.
His website advises a 14-year-old girl in a relationship with a 16-year-old boy that her 'risks of pregnancy are very, very low' even if her boyfriend relies on pulling out rather than using a condom.
Mr Hancock did not tell her the relationship was illegal but instead suggested using lube during anal sex.
The 'sex and relationships educator' also told someone on his site that prostitution could be 'rewarding'. He suggested if this was not the case for a sex worker, they could 'get better clients'.
Writing about masturbation Bish suggested children could practice on plasticine models of their genitals to understand how to touch themselves, a move the Safe Schools Alliance told The Times was 'sexual abuse'.
Although Hancock said the website should not be used in classrooms, Bish says more than 100,000 young people learn about sex from the site every month.
Meanwhile, LGBT youth charity the Proud Trust, asked children between the ages of seven to 11 whether they were 'planet boy, planet girl, planet binary'.
Although gender is a social construct and can be chosen, sex is a biological fact and cannot be changed.
Last night campaigners said that 'inclusiveness is overriding child safeguarding' and that the materials were 'bordering on illegal'.
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The online university is a cruel, destructive place
A lot has been written about the decline of humanities/arts faculties in the contemporary university due to the politicisation of much of the syllabus. Arguably, an even more serious development in the past two decades has been the elimination of the teacher, as a living presence and influence in lecture hall and seminar room – and not just in humanities. The role of teacher has been devalued.
The universities have been quick to embrace online learning, and they did so well in advance of the Covid years which made remote study a temporary necessity. Online learning is practical in some circumstances, but only in a subordinate role. Now, lectures and even seminars in many areas have come to be considered relics of a great one-thousand-year-old tradition, scorned as anachronistic and unsuited to modern students. Already 11 years ago, I was prohibited from including lectures in a new course – from which I then withdrew.
I well remember, when I was a postgraduate student in Cambridge, that my doctoral supervisor would give lectures on Romanticism to a packed lecture hall of 400, many of them, like myself, sitting in voluntarily. These lectures excited interest in historical themes, ideas, the characters of the poets whose lives and passions were woven in, but above all in the deep importance and significance of the scholarly enterprise exemplified by this charismatic teacher.
Plato held the most important social institution to be the one that teaches the teachers. Indeed, a key indicator of the health of any society is how it prepares every new generation to enter adulthood, with the character, education, and confidence to work effectively for the collective good.
Individuals, years later in life, may remember teachers with gratitude, some of whom changed their lives. What is usually described is character, as incarnation of personal virtues, including dedication to their subject and to their students (exemplars of vocation). Implied also is that these teachers were adults to admire, and to want to be like. It is less the particulars of what was taught that is recalled – this skill, or that body of knowledge – and more an ideal of how to be human, and how to move and act in the world.
Gifted teachers will almost inevitably pass on an enthusiasm for their subjects, but this is, actually, no more than a by-product of the true mission of education. Freud, reflecting on his schooldays, wrote: “In many of us the path to the sciences led only through our teachers.”
Above all, teachers are servants of the truth, dedicated to passing it on. Their role illustrates the centrality to the good life of coming into harmony with the deep truths of human existence; and believing in the possibility of so doing. This even holds in scientific and vocational disciplines, where an ethos is transmitted, including timeless methods of thinking, and ways to attack problems, as well as factual knowledge. Life, under this star, becomes a long voyage of learning, with the teacher as captain, bestowing legitimacy and authority on the voyage. The passion for learning flows from the same deep, core motivation.
But this only works in person, in an actual classroom. Imagine parenting by Webex or Zoom! Seminars and tutorials have their own importance here, settings in which students can freely test their own interpretations and understandings in the hurly-burly of group discussion, under the guidance of the teacher.
The Melbourne University Law Faculty has until recently made lectures compulsory – essential seminars are still not made available online. Students thereby used to have first-hand experience of their lecturers, some of whom alternate as leading barristers and authoritative essayists in their specialised areas. A true collegiate was hereby preserved, one in which students were admitted into a club in which they were invited to work, rub shoulders with, and listen to those who are leaders of the profession and who take it with deep seriousness. It is surely not unrelated that Melbourne Law has often ranked in the top 10 schools in the world, side by side with Stanford, Cambridge, and Yale.
The shift to online learning has also had financial attraction to the universities. It has made easier the steady shift away from employing full-time academics, on fair salaries, to emptying out their ranks, and filling the gap with low-paid casual staff – leading to exploitation of new generations of successful PhD students and researchers, and their demoralisation. The fewer students there are to teach in person, the easier for the institutions to make this rationalisation. Over the past century, university employment has swung from a ratio of 20 per cent administrative to 80 per cent academic, to well over 50 per cent non-academic today. The real work of the university – teaching and research – is now being carried out by a diminishing minority, overseen by a large bureaucracy.
The online university is cruel to students in another way. It destroys student life. A physical campus, with teaching buildings intermixed with cafes, squares, shops, and libraries, provides places for students to gather together with their fellows, catch up, and discuss classes. A key rite of passage is being damaged, one that is especially important for students who leave school and go directly to university, ones who find themselves cast adrift in a no man’s land, having to negotiate the hazardous transition to the vast and intimidating adult world.
The online university is at risk of compounding individual isolation and the anomic sense that the world is a lonely, unsupportive place. Older generations often remember fondly their student days as a time of liberation after school, experimentation, leisure and fun, peer camaraderie, and freedom from the responsibilities that come later with work and family.
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U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts
Everyone knows that students buff their résumés when applying to college. But a math professor is accusing Columbia University of buffing its own résumé — or worse — to climb the all-important U.S. News & World Report rankings of best universities.
Michael Thaddeus, who specializes in algebraic geometry at Columbia, has challenged the university’s No. 2 ranking this year with a statistical analysis that found that key supporting data was “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.”
In a 21-page blistering critique on his website, Dr. Thaddeus is not only challenging the rating but redoubling the debate over whether college rankings — used by millions of prospective college students and their parents — are valuable or even accurate.
Columbia said it stood by its data. Officials said there was no accepted industry standard for the data that goes into college rankings — every rankings project does it differently — and they strove to meet the technical requirements as set by U.S. News. But, they said, the university was not necessarily defending the process.
The dispute has seized the education world, and university officials are in the awkward position of trying to defend themselves against the sleuthing of one of their own tenured faculty, while not alienating him or his colleagues.
“I think the majority of institutions would be happy if the rankings went away,” said Colin Diver, a former president of Reed College, who has a book coming out about college rankings.
“But as long as the rankings are taken seriously by applicants, they’re going to be taken seriously by educators.”
This year, Columbia rose to No. 2 from No. 3, surpassed only by Princeton in the No. 1 spot and tied with Harvard and M.I.T.
Dr. Thaddeus notes that Columbia was ranked 18th in 1988, a rise that he suggests is remarkable. “Why have Columbia’s fortunes improved so dramatically?” he asks in his analysis.
He does not question that in some ways, Columbia has gotten stronger over the years, he said in a Skype interview this week from Vienna, where he is on sabbatical. But some of the statistics immediately aroused his suspicion because they did not conform to his own observations as a professor in the classroom.
Searching further, he said he found discrepancies with other sources of data that he believes made undergraduate class sizes look smaller than they are, made instructional spending look bigger than it is and made professors look more highly educated than they are.
Columbia officials said that the numbers could be sliced in different ways, including in ways that would be even more favorable to the university, and that the public data sources Dr. Thaddeus used were not always the final word. Asked about Dr. Thaddeus’s analysis, U.S. News & World Report did not address the details, but said that it relied on schools to accurately report their data.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/us/columbia-university-rank.html
***********************************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)
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