Category: Education

Reform

Education

God-Emperor Trump’s Administration will, one hopes, cast a baleful eye upon that nest of Commie indoctrination known as the Department of Education, prior to shutting it down.

One hopes.

However, as these festering cockroach nests are almost impossible to eradicate completely (without the introduction of machine guns, anyway), there might be a way to cause wholesale resignations among the cockroaches themselves, by making their jobs impossible (for them).

Such as by implementing the following (drawn from any decent homeschooling curriculum):

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to fill in the last two blanks.

A Ban To Get Behind

Education, Good Stuff

Generally speaking, I tend to be somewhat of a libertarian when it comes to banning stuff, because it either doesn’t work or else has the opposite effect to the stated goal by creating a “forbidden fruit” cachet around the thing.

However, when it comes to banning the chilluns from using their cell phones at school, I’m all over the idea, and here’s one reason why:

One of the first UK schools to ban mobile phones has revealed their pupils are now more sociable and involved in activities than ever before.  12 years ago Burnage Academy for Boys, in Greater Manchester, banned phones — with associate assistant head teacher Greg Morrison now saying that ban’s made a “big impact” in the school.

Phones are not allowed among pupils at any point — including break times — until the end of the school day.

Last year it was named UK Secondary School of the Year at the 2024 TES Schools Awards in London, with judges praising it as an “inspiring and inclusive school where students thrive, love learning and achieve exceptionally well.”

Well well well, who could have predicted this outcome?

“Only anyone with a brain and common sense, Kim.”

Maybe A Good Reason

Education

This piece from the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs makes a few interesting points:

Teens’ homework time fell significantly in the pandemic era, writes Jean M. Twenge on Generation Tech. new data from 2022 and 2023 shows the average time spent on homework fell 24 percent for 10th-graders — from an hour to about 45 minutes — and 17 percent for eighth-graders.

Furthermore, the percentage of students saying they do no homework “spiked,” she writes. In 2021, 6 percent of high school sophomores did no homework. That’s up to 10.3 percent. Eleven percent of eighth-graders said they did no work at home in 2021. Now it’s 15.2 percent.

As a longtime homeschooler, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of homework in the educational process anyway, unless it’s reading prep for the next day’s class, or revision for a test.  But here’s an interesting observation:

Twenge thinks “students have given up on doing hours of homework, and teachers have given up on holding students to high standards.”  Everybody’s “phoning it in.”

But here’s the really salient point:

The 15 percenters who are working for their A’s have a right to complain about stress. They’re doing homework and extracurriculars and community service to impress some jaded college admissions officer. But they’re not the norm.

Perhaps “the norm” as a group has decided that all that prep for college admission is a waste of time because they have no desire to attend college, get into serious debt and have no guarantee of a job once they graduate?  Just a thought.

Then:

The homework research aligns with a slide in 18-year-olds’ work ethic: As they leave high school, they are less likely to say they plan to work overtime or make their jobs a priority. In a sense, they’re “quiet quitting” before they even enter the workforce. Teens are less likely to work after school and in the summer, missing out on lessons about how to meet workplace expectations and manage their time and money.

Hmm.  Of course, at some point reality is going to kick in and they’ll either acquire that work ethic or, more likely, become life dropouts.

Or they’ll get a clue and start doing “muscular work”, as Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson put it, and start trade apprenticeships — for which, it needs hardly be said, most of that shit they learned at school, never mind college, is unnecessary and there’s the added benefit of being paid to work instead of paying for a dubious benefit (e.g. college).

The motivated ones, as always, won’t have a problem:  engineering, medicine and the like will always be attractive to a core group.

My guess is that Gen Z is looking at what we now call “education” and realizing that it’s all a waste of time.  (I’m not even going to analyze the real bullshit like Gender Studies and similar fluff courses.)

Here’s the thing.  As we all know, education occurs only under two conditions:  fear and love.

  • Fear:  if I don’t learn this, bad things will happen to me, and
  • Love:  this topic really appeals to me and I want to pursue it.

We don’t have to worry about the “love” part:  as I said above, there’ll always be a market for that — whether academic or practical.

What’s going to be really interesting is how Gen Z responds to fear.

Out Of Control

Education, Entertainment

Why did I never have school trips like this one?

Head teacher struck off for school ski trip to Switzerland where one girl pupil slept with three boys, another had sex with a boy for £30

…and unbelievably, it gets even better from there.

Sheeesh… and all the school trips I ever experienced were to museums and other such boring nonsense.

As to how all this happened, this sentence may provide a clue:

A Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) misconduct panel heard Mrs Drury was principal of the CP Riverside school in Nottingham, a school which provides alternative education for children aged 13-18 with behavior or social issues.

Wow… who could have predicted this outcome?  (“Only about 99% of all sentient adults, Kim.”)

Well, I guess that all falls under the umbrella of “alternative education” now, dunnit?

Fine By Us

Education

This is interesting:

A radical activist who believes black students should only be taught by same-race teachers has received $20million from billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Sharif El-Mekki has lobbied for a focus on anti-racism education in public schools through his prominent nonprofit and time as an adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, as reported by The Free Press.

A former middle and high school teacher, El-Mekki lobbies through his nonprofit, the Center for Black Educator Development, CBED, which describes its mission as a ‘world where… all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers’ and where ‘all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.’

CBED has over $19.5 million in assets thanks to donations from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And Brother Sharif looks like about what you suspect he would:

Yeah, by all means pull Black kids out of these “White” public schools and put them into all-Black institutions.

Then watch as public schools’ test scores improve and crime goes down.  What will happen in the Black schools is as predictable as the sunrise, just a lot more depressing, and will need still more support from White liberal assholes (without any improvement to show for it, of course).

Somewhere out there, Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave at 12,000rpm, while all those old Afrikaner apartheid supporters are howling with laughter.

Separate but equal, indeed. It’ll work about as well as all other initiatives that have come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose sponsorship of OBED allows ol’ Sharif to pull an annual salary of nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Race hustling has always been a way for Black “leaders” like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to earn the big bucks, but it’s almost as good for the lesser lights, like the above.  For their followers… not so much.

Let African-Americans sink.

Excuses, Excuses

Education

A teacher talks about bizarre excuses for tardiness. Some classics include:

“The ceiling in the boys toilets collapsed due to the weight of the vapes hidden inside the ceiling tiles so they had to go to a different toilet”, and “their grandmother was meant to drop them off but went to the wrong school”, not to mention “the wait for Greggs sausage rolls made them late for school.”

Back when I were a whining schoolboy, I think in about 1970, I once made up an excuse for not having done my Math homework.  If I say so myself, it was a brilliant excuse (sadly, I cannot recall it, only that it was excellent and could have brought many to tears).

Unfortunately, the teacher was not some rookie, but an elderly man who had been teaching at St. John’s College since 1932, and was not to be fooled.  He smiled, and remarked:

“Do you know, I haven’t heard that excuse since the early 1950s.”

Howls of laughter from all the other guys in the class, and Red-Faced Kim had to acknowledge his defeat.  However, Mr. Jefferies (“Judge” was his nickname) showed some empathy by not punishing me, because of my creativity.

I always did my Math homework after that.