Following the week before last's horrifically tabloid TV viewing, Dispatches: Cheap Pie Shock – Not Much Meat!, I was somewhat reticent about retrieving this little gem from the recorded items archive. The recent quiverings of do-gooders intent on interfering in yet another informed parental choice (the right to home educate) has already set my teeth on edge.
What can I say? It fulfilled my expectations. Without sinking into a blow-by-blow account of Dispatches’ mind-numbing, mass-pleasing stupidity, I can quite happily make the following observations:
- Calling a bare, furniture-less cell the “Snowdrop Room’; ‘Family Area’, ‘Comfort Zone’ or other such guff is pretty semantically pointless when it’s bare, furniture-less and typically used as punishment by confinement. Even when children are “positively handled” into it (by three adults at a time).
- I want my child to question many of the mindless practices and behaviours I saw demonstrated by teachers and support assistants, endorsed and encouraged by their schools. How’s this for a lesson in mediation:
“Let’s listen to your side and listen to his side and then we can meet somewhere in the middle,” says the über-patronising teacher responsible for pastoral care, before turning to one of Britain’s Most Challenging Children and telling him exactly what his side of the story was, in her own words, without having even witnessing the scuffle. Just don’t try this one in the workplace (unless you’re a teacher of course).
- I expect that if my child did question a teacher in such a manner she would end up being positively handled into the Snowdrop Room – and televised as a prime example of the very “challenging behaviour” 98% of teachers blame on parenting and believe that sufficient “early intervention” would rectify.
- Is it really a shock that placing challenging (any!) children in “nurture rooms” – areas that “bridge the gap” between home and school, offering small groups of children the opportunity to engage in creative play, learning at their own pace things of their own choosing, in a homely environment (with settees, a kitchen, a dining table etc) - actually learned better, and developed reading, writing and mathematical skills more quickly and effectively than their mainstream peers? It is to the programme’s Expert Principal Psychologist. Do you need any more proof that professional status is not necessarily a key indicator of actual intelligence?
- I have become resigned to paying my taxes and yet refusing the many interventions designed to “save me from myself” (thanks for that, Dr Alan Maryon Davis), but what I really object to is the demand for MORE resources to be poured into a defective, post-war factory system that clearly doesn’t meet the learning needs* of a significant proportion of children unless, it seems, it actually replicates the real-life environment it seeks to remove them from for at least 12 years of their lives. CREATING AN ENTIRE ALTERNATIVE REALITY IN EVERY SCHOOL IS PRETTY DAMN COSTLY, NOT TO MENTION POINTLESS, SO, BARONESS MORGAN OF DREFELIN, YOUR INQUIRY INTO THE PERCEIVED INADEQUACIES OF HOME EDUCATION HAD BETTER NOT RESULT IN DEMANDS FOR MORE MONEY FROM ME, SPECIFICALLY TO REGULATE ME, WHEN I DECIDE TO KEEP MY CHILD ON HER OWN SOFA IN THE REAL WORLD, BECAUSE SHE’LL LEARN BETTER THERE.
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A choice is only a choice if it’s actually a choice. So, Teaching Support Assistant, saying to a child: “You have a choice. Are you going to make the choice to go into assembly? You have to make the right choice.” isn’t really a choice. It’s actually just another decision you’ve made on behalf of a child who is universally correct when he tells you that you really don’t understand a thing.
- One last thing - schools and teachers, please don’t boast about “your” success when Levi increases his reading ability by 2 years in 3 months (courtesy of “the nurture room”), unless you’re also willing to admit to your failure to provide a suitable learning environment for Levi in the many years preceding that. Because it makes me want to vomit.
*I emphasise learning needs because, comrades, it alarms me that the state now appears to view schools and teaching as the best possible mechanism for securing each child’s good health, social welfare and devoted citizenship – if not their very soul. If only we could send them there 24 hours a day, then they’d be perfectly compliant…
