I remember how it was -- JR
Britain’s ‘strictest headmistress’ gets a nod in Australia
At the Michaela Community School near Wembley, in north-west London, there are no mobile phones, detentions are given for the slightest misdemeanour and a disused car park is the no-frills playground.
The high school is famed for being Britain’s strictest, and its headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, pulls no punches.“We have the same issues that you have in Australia: poor behaviour and poor learning outcomes, in particular for disadvantaged children,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Birbalsingh espouses traditional teaching and believes in military-style discipline: students walk the corridors in silence and get detentions for forgetting a pencil case, ruler or not turning in their homework. Times tables are taught by rote. Progressive education methods are shunned. Gratitude is practised and expectations are high.
“I’m not wandering up and down the corridors with whips and chains, obviously,” she says. “People say [discipline] is mean. I’d say what is mean is keeping a child illiterate and innumerate.”
Birbalsingh, who was recently appointed chair of the UK’s social mobility commission, was thrust into the spotlight after giving a speech at the 2010 Conservative Party conference where she warned the education system was “broken because it keeps poor children poor”. Four years later, after battling a barrage of detractors and critics, she opened the Michaela school in a dreary converted office block based in the disadvantaged borough of Brent.
The school’s explicit teaching methods, no-excuses behaviour policy and direct instruction style divide opinion. Tough-love behaviour systems (slouching in class is off-limits, toilet breaks are timed) has attracted controversy and critics.
However, it has also drawn praise from experts including Programme for International Student Assessment boss Andreas Schleicher who has described the school as creating “discipline created through structure, predictability and ownership. The children I met appeared happy and confident.” And its results place it well above average when compared to other similar schools, with graduates going off to universities including Oxford and the London School of Economics.
Birbalsingh, labelled Britain’s strictest headteacher, is firm that the school’s behaviour policies, including the silent corridor rule, minimise bullying and maximise teaching time.
“In schools with disadvantaged children sometimes you can find poor behaviour, and it can be constant disruption. As a disadvantaged child school is your one route out, your way of being able to be socially mobile. And if school lets you down, then that’s it.”
“We expect everyone to do their homework. If standards are lowered for certain children, who will inevitably be the disadvantaged children, then those children will never succeed.”
She rejects “progressive” teaching methods, where desks are grouped and students “lead the learning”. Teachers at Michaela have a single voice in the classroom and there is silence for reading, writing and practice.
“You have got to have lots of knowledge about something to think differently about it. When you teach children as a traditionalist you can still break up explanations and have a bit of turn to your partner work and class discussions.”
Tight rules around smartphones and social media are also critical, she says. At an education conference this year she told the audience: “If we genuinely want things to be fairer, and we want our disadvantaged children to be socially mobile, the best thing is getting them not to have a smartphone.”
Students are encouraged to hand over their mobile phones where they are put in a school safe for days, weeks or months.
Michaela, one of about 600 “free schools” in the UK, was singled out last month by NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet in a speech for the James Martin Institute as a school with a “rigorous culture of high expectations, high behavioural standards and back-to- basics teaching that [has] propelled disadvantaged students to extraordinary achievement. I want the same outcomes for our kids.”
“When students are held to reasonable standards of behaviour and respect – they perform better, and they are happier,” he said. It came after NSW announced a global recruitment search for a chief behaviour adviser, as schools across sectors battle worsening student conduct.
This month, Birbalsingh, who was a teacher for more than a decade in inner-London schools before starting Michaela, will appear at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney on a discussion about building world-class schools.
She emphasises that her school, next to the jubilee and metropolitan line (the train can be heard rattling loudly in the bare-bones schoolyard), looks “quite simple”.
“We’ve not covered the walls with lots of pictures and things. People don’t realise, when I was a younger teacher, I spent all of my time decorating. I use my fire engine red paint for the border around my bulletin board and would put up lovely dark blue paper with a golden border around it and I would pay myself to create big laminated sheets with instructions.
“I should have as my time planning better lessons... I shouldn’t have been spending my time on that. And sometimes we all spend our time on things that don’t have as much impact.”
Oliver Lovell, a Melbourne-based maths teacher who visited the school last month, said while it was hard to overstate the positive impact of Michaela’s instruction on disadvantaged students, there were potential costs when a particular educational approach is passionately pursued.
“Some have argued that highly structured instructional methods reduce learner independence which has negative impacts when the structure is removed at university and beyond. I’m glad that we have a diversity of schools, including Michaela, so that we can begin to gain clearer answers to these important questions.”
Lovell said one of the most striking aspects to the school was seeing how the lack of student disruptions “frees up teacher time”.
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Woke University of Southern Maine students demand education professor be fired after she told class that there are only two sexes
A group of students at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine are calling for their professor to be fired after she said in class only two sexes exist.
Christy Hammer, a professor of education, allegedly made the statement during a heated debate about gender identity in her 'Creating a Positive Learning Environment' class, causing an uproar among the graduate students.
Only one student agreed with the educator. The rest maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum.
The point was first made during class on September 7, but was repeated a week later after student Elizabeth Leibiger, who is non-binary and was absent the previous week, brought up the topic again.
She then said she felt 'under personal attack' after the professor again said only two sexes exist. 'I asked [Hammer] how many sexes there were,' Leibiger said. 'She said, 'Two.' I felt under personal attack.'
Biologically, there are only two sexes. Men have XY chromosomes, while women have XX chromosomes. Progressives say gender can have a broader spectrum than sex.
But anti-woke campaigners warning that the fixation on denying the biological reality that only two sexes exist is absurd, and potentially puts people's health at risk.
Almost the entire class of 22 students walked out, all except one demanding a meeting to be held with the university's School of Education and Human Development.
'I let her know I didn't think she was qualified to teach a class about positive learning environments. It's the ultimate irony,' Leibiger said to Fox News.
A restorative justice meeting was held, but Professor Hammer's position didn't change.
Two dozen graduate students in the class continued to demand that the university replace Hammer, believing her to be transphobic.
Students are now refusing to return to the classroom in which she teaches and will only attend class if a new educator be appointed. The class is a requirement to complete the graduate-level Extended Teacher Education Program and become a certified teacher in Maine.
'We are aware of this situation and are taking steps to provide students with the support needed,' Interim Provost Adam Tuchinsky told the Bangor Daily News.
Another student suggested Hammer either undergo diversity training or simply retire.
The university has now suggested that an 'alternative' section for the class will be created but that the professor will not be removed.
'We have developed an alternative plan for this class and will be opening a new section of this course for those students who would like to move. The original section taught by professor Hammer will continue for any student who wishes to remain in that class,' a university spokesperson said.
University officials have not revealed how many students will be moving to the new class.
'It's our job as educators to grow and change, address our biases, and above all else, protect every one of our students,' Leibiger said. 'I think that the next step USM needs to take is being clear what accountability will look like for Christy Hammer.'
There appear to be plenty of people happy to support Hammer's position with almost 2,000 people signing a petition for her to keep her job.
Wrangles over sex and gender issues continue to roil campuses across the US. Transgender rights supporter say they wish to boost visibility and equality for a small, vulnerable section of society.
Critics have likened the issue to a mania they say is eroding women's rights, and convincing youngsters to seek potentially irreversible medical treatments it is feared they could one day regret.
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A hate-filled curriculum in Australia
It has not taken long for Prime Minister Albanese to weigh into the culture wars, even though the lefty progressive types insist that they are a figment of our imagination. Last week, our new PM sent up a rallying cry for what he termed as ‘fair dinkum’ history to be taught in Australian schools. By ‘fair dinkum’ he meant that children need to be taught about the atrocities committed by people of British descent upon indigenous people.
It is clear that the PM has not read the latest version of the national curriculum. If he had, he would have known that according to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority ‘Indigenous’ or ‘Aboriginal’ are now verboten because they are terms of oppression. We now must use ‘First Nations Australians’ or ‘Australia’s First Nations Peoples’. Keep up, Albo!
He would also know that the singular narrative currently taught to Australian children in the history syllabus is that Australia was founded on racism, and that the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 resulted in dispossession and genocide.
In Year 3, teachers will explain that ‘people have different points of view on some events that are commemorated and celebrated; for example, some First Nations Australians regard “Australia Day” as “Invasion Day”’. In Year 4, students will learn about the ‘effects of contact with other people on First Nations Australians and their Countries/Places following the arrival of the First Fleet and how this was viewed by First Nations Australians as an invasion’.
As part of a classroom activity, they will look at ‘paintings and accounts by individuals involved in exploration and colonisation to explore the impact that British colonisation had on the lives of First Nations Australians; for example, dispossession, dislocation and the loss of lives through frontier conflict, disease, and loss of food sources and medicines, the embrace of some colonial technologies…’.
In Year 9, they will study ‘the impact of colonisation by Europeans on First Nations Australians such as frontier warfare, massacres, removal from land, and relocation to “protectorates, reserves and missions”’. They will also investigate ‘the forcible removal of children from First Nations Australian families in the late 19th century and 20th century (leading to the Stolen Generations), including the motivations for the removal of children, the practices and laws that were in place, and experiences of separation.’
We are all for talking about the mistakes of the past. Nobody is suggesting that they should be ignored. No one is saying that there was no violence between white settlers and the indigenous populations. Quite the contrary. These are important aspects of the history of modern Australia that all children should know.
But this discussion has nothing to do ‘fair dinkum’ history, or even unfair dinkum history for that matter. What Australian children are being introduced to in the classroom is pure post-modernist theory, specifically post-colonial theory. They are being schooled in the ‘settler colonialism genocide’ paradigm which sprang from the febrile imagination of Australian historian Patrick Wolfe in the 1990s.
Wolfe famously declared that settler colonialism was a structure, not an event and that it was premised on the elimination rather than exploitation of the native population. According to Wolfe, how settler colonialism disrupted the indigenous relationship to land was a profoundly violent attack on their very being, which violence continues with every day of ‘occupation’.
Our education bureaucrats are motivated by the belief that European expansion was a capitalist and racist attempt to replace indigenous people with more productive non-indigenous populations, even at the cost of genocide.
Wolfe’s paradigm has been embedded into every single subject of the national curriculum, not just history, via the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Cultures and Histories cross-curriculum priority. The ‘organising ideas’ of this priority are worth reproducing in full. Namely, that:
First Nations communities of Australia maintain a deep connection to, and responsibility for, Country/Place and have holistic values and belief systems that are connected to the land, sea, sky and waterways.
The occupation and colonisation of Australia by the British, under the now overturned doctrine of terra nullius, were experienced by First Nations Australians as an invasion that denied their occupation of, and connection to, Country/Place.
The First Peoples of Australia are the Traditional Owners of Country/Place, protected in Australian Law by the Native Title Act 1993 which recognises pre-existing sovereignty, continuing systems of law and customs, and connection to Country/Place. This recognised legal right provides for economic sustainability and a voice into the development and management of Country/Place.
If Prime Minster Albanese was really concerned about truth-telling in history, he would make sure that the history syllabus desists from propagating historical inaccuracies, such as the mythical notion that the British were warmongering, genocidal invaders. He would make sure that the positive aspects of how modern Australian history came into being were taught to children. He would start explaining to young Australians why this country has been the safe haven for millions of people fleeing from all over the world.
But the Prime Minister is not interested in a true account of history, he is interested in spin and politics. The left wing of the Labor party, of which Albanese is a product, sees power in the division of society, which is why it so strongly believes in multiculturalism and in undermining unifying symbols such as the Crown, Australia Day and the parliament.
Right now, the Albanese government is committed to dividing Australians by race by way of creating a parallel system of representative government comprised of indigenous Australians to the exclusion of all other Australians. Albanese and the left-wing political parties will use education to continue to inflict guilt and shame upon the nation until such a time that their ideas are accepted as fait accompli.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/unfair-dinkum-history/
***********************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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