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WELSH EDUCATION NEEDS A REVOLUTION!

2/24/2015

2 Comments

 
Picture

   As an ex-teacher I'm often asked whether I miss the classroom and my reply is unequivocally 'No way!'
   Of course , I sometimes do return to classrooms to give creative writing workshops and I  relish this opportunity. Though, given the severe effects of the Cuts, this has become less frequent. 
   Like music, drama and foreign languages, it seems that creative writing has been pushed to the periphery, as schools are forced to focus on literacy and numeracy to the exclusion of so much else.
   Talking to friends and relatives who are teachers only reinforces my feelings about the current education system in Cymru, only marginally better than England's Govian nightmare.
   As I've previously blogged our testing culture is, in many instances, worse than the SATs and in Primaries in particular, we are managing to brand thousands of pupils as inadequate failures in a re-run of what happened with 11 +.
   What teachers tell me is appalling.
  They describe how even the Core subjects are taught regularly by non-specialists.
   How, as a result of the new Welsh Assembly Gov. colour code, GCSE counts for everything and 'A' Level is absurdly ignored.
   How parents in an Amber rated school increasingly pressurise staff during Parents' Evenings, despite the fact that these colour codings are ridiculous.
   How meetings take place after school,often twice weekly, without proper agendas and often for more than an hour.Together with endless form-filling and target-setting, all this makes it virtually impossible to produce resources, let alone mark work properly.
   How morale has reached its lowest point ever, even for young staff, so that many consider leaving.  
 
   The colour code system was set up under present education Minister Huw Lewis (an ex-teacher) to replace the totally discredited banding.
   It places all schools into categories from Green to Red, and the latter can ultimately be threatened with closure. 
  Four traffic lights to add to the confusion!
  The real power behind Lewis is WAG's Senior Advisor Prof. David Reynolds of Southampton University( who has never taught in a school in his whole career).
   When I taught in Merthyr, Reynolds came to the Comp. to deliver a lecture on 'Time Management'. He was three quarters of an hour late and delivered a garbled message which I'd place in the Red category.
   The criteria for coding schools are seriously flawed.
   One Comp. in Cardiff achieves some of the best 'A' Level results in the country, yet is an Amber school because its GCSE results have gone down slightly.
   As well as data set against self-evaluation, the coding is also heavily dependent on the judgement of Challenge Advisors.
   I know one of these who was renowned as a callous bully when a Head , forcing staff he didn't like to leave or go on sick as he targeted them. Now he goes into schools and deploys those bullying tactics against whole establishments.
   Cronyism and not any merits has ensured that these bullies rise to the top and they rule through fear everywhere.
   Advisors need to be as inspirational as they once were.
   I recall the former English Advisor for Mid. Glamorgan David John as one who lead by example, pushing creative writing and Welsh writing to the fore and  pioneering 100% coursework in both Language and Literature.
   Advisors could, once again, become hands-on : helping teachers, taking lessons and producing resources. They could, if they were actually successful teachers themselves!
   These Challenge Advisors are marked only by their desire to get out of the classroom,by their blatant careerism.
   Even more ludicrous is the system whereby the Green schools profit from coding.
   Teachers who are deemed to need improving are sent to these schools at considerable cost, to observe 'good practice'.
   The reality is very different and I know of several from Primaries who had to attend a Cardiff Comp.  over six weeks, only to find that teaching standards didn't warrant that Green at all. 
   (Apparently, the results at GCSE are as much due to home tutoring).


   Teachers need the freedom to teach what enthuses them and their pupils.
   In my Welsh class a few weeks ago I gave a short talk on Prof Gwyn Alf Williams and referred to the Merthyr Rising.
   There are three young people in the group, all educated in the area and still living here.
   None had heard of Gwyn Alf and only one had scant knowledge of the Rising.   
   In History alone we need a revolution in the classroom : local and Welsh History must be at the core of study.
   Pupils need freedom to research and discover from an early age, through their families, local libraries and museums ( those that remain!).
   Huw Lewis and his puppet-master Reynolds are obsessed with data and Wales's position in international PISA tests.
   They have forgotten (if they ever knew) that education is all about the excitement of exploring new ideas and using the imagination.
   However, a revolution in our schools cannot be achieved without one in society.
   No reformist party is going to make things anew.
  Teachers and pupils need to relish their time in schools and not merely learn tricks to pass tests, yet another trait of that old and sordid exam , the 11 plus.






                        NOBODY TRUSTS THE TEACHERS


Nobody trusts the teachers :
the Redtops blurt tales
of disgrace and sexual antics.


Politicians repeat about failures
and send in the trouble-shooters ;
Councils threatened with Commissioners.


Teams of Inspectors invade schools
and deliver their damning judgments.
Heads ambush their lessons


armed with forms and tick-boards.
Parents e-mail to complain
about behaviour, results and testing.


Even the pupils....yes, even them,
after they've heard their parents moaning
as they read newspapers, watch television.


So the teachers don't trust themselves
to ponder, plan, encourage and inspire,
with all that spying vision.




    
2 Comments
Falcon Patel
2/24/2015 09:18:04 pm

This was written nearly 100 years ago and a lot has changed since then but if you read it in the context of the situation today and that of class society I think it is still very relevant.

Chapter 10: Communism and Education

§ 76. The school under the bourgeois regime

In bourgeois society the school has three principal tasks to fulfil. First, it inspires the coming generation of workers with devotion and respect for the capitalist régime. Secondly, it creates from the young of the ruling classes 'cultured' controllers of the working population. Thirdly, it assists capitalist production in the application of sciences to technique, thus increasing capitalist profits.

As regards the first of these tasks, just as in the bourgeois army the 'right spirit' is inculcated by the officers, so in the schools under the capitalist régime the necessary influence is mainly exercised by the caste of 'officers of popular enlightenment'. The teachers in the public elementary schools receive a special course of training by which they are prepared for their role of beast tamers. Only persons who have thoroughly acquired the bourgeois outlook have the entry into the schools as teachers. The ministries of education in the capitalist régime are ever on the watch, and they ruthlessly purge the teaching profession of all dangerous (by which they mean socialist) elements. The German public elementary schools served prior to the revolution as supplements to the barracks of William II, and were shining examples of the way in which the landed gentry and the bourgeoisie can make use of the school for the manufacture of faithful and blind slaves of capital. In the elementary schools of the capitalist régime, instruction is given in accordance with a definite programme perfectly adapted for the breaking-in of the pupils to the capitalist system. All the text-books are written in an appropriate spirit. The whole of bourgeois literature subserves the same end, for it is written by persons who look upon the bourgeois social order as natural, perdurable, and the best of all possible régimes. In this way the scholars are imperceptibly stuffed with bourgeois ideology; they are infected with enthusiasm for all bourgeois virtues; they are inspired with esteem for wealth, renown, titles and order; they aspire to get on in the world, they long for personal comfort, and so on. The work of bourgeois educationists is completed by the servants of the church with their religious instruction. Thanks to the intimate associations between capital and the church, the law of God invariably proves to be the law of the possessing classes. 1)

In capitalist society the second leading aim of bourgeois education is secured by carefully withholding secondary education and higher education from the working masses. Instruction in the middle schools, and still more in the high schools, is extremely costly, so that it is quite beyond the financial resources of the workers. The course of instruction, in middle and higher education, lasts for ten years or more. For this reason it is inaccessible to the worker and the peasant who, in order to feed their families, are compelled to send their children at a very early age to factory work or field work, or else must make the youngsters work at home. In actual practice, the middle and higher schools are the preserves of bourgeois youth. In them, the younger members of the governing classes are trained to succeed their fathers in careers of exploitation, or to fill the official and technical posts of the capitalist State. In these schools, likewise, instruction has a definitely class character. In the domains of mathematics, the technique of industry, and the natural sciences, this may be less striking; but the class character of the teaching is conspicuous in the case of the social sciences, whereby the pupils' outlook on the world is in reality formed. Bourgeois political economy is inculcated with all the most perfected methods for the 'annihilation of Marx'. Sociology and history are likewise taught from a purely capitalist outlook. The history of jurisprudence concludes with the treatment of bourgeois jurisprudence as the natural right of 'the man and the citizen', etc., etc. To sum up, the higher and middle schools teach the children of the capitalists all the data that are requisite for the maintenance of bourgeois society and the whole system of capitalist exploitation. If any of the children of the workers, happening to be exceptionally gifted, should find their way into the higher schools, in the great majority of instances the bourgeois scholastic apparatus will serve as a means of detaching them from their own class kin, and will inoculate them with bourgeois ideology, so that in the long run the genius of these scions of the working class will be turned to account for the oppression of the workers.

Turning, finally, to the third task of capitalist education, we find that

Reply
Falcon Patel
2/24/2015 09:20:10 pm

The rest can be read here:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/10.htm

Reply



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