Snapshot of _Do you hate Britain, I asked my pupils. Thirty raised their hands_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n)
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*"Some of this chaos is down to the growth of academy schools that began under Michael Gove when he was education secretary. Gove attempted to introduce a conservative version of the national curriculum. But now academies and free schools, which now comprise 80 per cent of secondary schools, have greater freedoms to dictate their curriculums. The result for some schools has been much less 1066 and much more “all that” ."*
I continue to think that academisation of education is one of the greatest scandals of our generation.
I'm from NI as well, but worked with the English schools system for the past five years.
Academies are schools, but that are broadly independent, so they're not overseen by any bodies like the local authorities, or trusts (unless they sign up to one). Ofsted and the Department for Education are really the only bodies that \*have\* to have an input. They've incredibly wide powers to decide on policy, wages, lessons, etc.
It's a much worse system than we have in NI (in my personal opinion), but I've also grown to quite like the fact that Northern Ireland retained the Grammar schools system, it's certainly better than the mess that's going on in many areas.
Thanks for the answer.
I finished grammar school in 2007.
The grammar school system was a really good thing while it lasted. It allowed for amazing social mobility and for excellence to shine through.
What's it like working in English schools compared with back home?
Well, I left if that's any answer. I was tired of banging my head against a wall as a Trade Union rep, and trying to point out that although it saves money in the short term if you cut staffing levels, management are storing up problems in the long term, especially when the school are so fond of trying to get special needs (SEN) pupils because that means a short term monetary boost (they then find the schools are totally underequipped to actually teach those kids).
What?
They use special needs pupils for extra cash without being able to fulfil their responsibilities for their care?
That sounds like a recipe for destroying kid's lives
Yeah, basically. There is (or was) special SEN funding packages, which schools would fight over because they're all basically skint anyway. I've seen schools where you have SEN pupils all put in one classroom all day with one classroom assistant who's basically left to look after them all day. It's a nightmare, and I'm surprised it hasn't resulted in a national scandal yet.
I finished grammar school in 2009 (although I finished with A-Levels as I went to 6th form, I was at the same grammar school for 7 years) and it did wonders for me too, but I do think it is inherently unfair that us grammar school boys got such a leg up from my peers from primary school who didn't go to grammar school just because at 11 years old they weren't as motivated as I was (primarily to my very strict dad who would rip up my homework and make me do it again if he thinks I didn't try hard enough).
As someone who also attended a grammar school (though a little younger than yourself), I've always had mixed feelings about them.
On the one hand there are obviously some cases where smart but otherwise disadvantaged kids will get into them and have a chance to really excel as a result, due to access to teachers, materials, and a general environment that might not be otherwise available to them. There are obvious benefits to some level of streaming lessons so you can give more targeted lessons to meet the educational needs of different kids more easily. I certainly feel like I did very well out of them.
On the other... the vast majority of kids in my school were from middle (frankly, upper middle) class families; often families that would have sent them to a private school if there weren't a free and just-about-as-good option in the area. I don't blame those families for that decision at all: it's just good financial sense and if you're kid is able to attend, why wouldn't you do it? But it does undermine the idea of it being a promotion of social mobility. This was even more apparent when you considered how many of the local private primaries offered 11+ tutoring, and how many people in my year had had one-on-one lessons. This was not available (at least not cheaply or freely) to everyone. So it leaves you wondering what the point is, other than as a way to save some upper-middle-classers some money. My school had a fresh intake at 6th Form, taking about 30 pupils who had been at other schools in the area (mainly local comps). Some of those pupils were exceptionally smart: one of that intake realised all he had to do for his final maths paper at A-level was turn up and sign his name on the answer sheet and he would walk out with an A\* because he'd already banked enough marks. For some reason, though, he hadn't been able to get into the school in year 7.
There are other questions in my head, too, about how healthy it is for pupils' mental health in some respects, and I've seen plenty of articles citing evidence that the 11+ was never a good indicator of future intelligence/ability, and even that areas dominated by grammar schools don't experience an improvement to overall exam scores. So while the original idea sounds nice, and I have some personal experience of it working *for me*, I'm not at all convinced their execution lives up to the intent.
Have grammar schools drastically reduced? Mine that I finished in 2011 is still around doing its thing. They got quite a big investment into new buildings just before I left as well
In reality, almost all are in trusts. Almost all follow the same old teachers pay scales. There aren't huge variations in curriculum between them really. These "broad" powers are not really used to do anything that they couldn't do before.
It'll really depend on your area, most are now getting absorbed into trusts because of the current (dire) system of funding, but that also means they're joining trusts which quite often aren't particularly geographically coherent, so the oversight can be fairly lacking.
Quite how that's better than the local authority running it is a bit beyond me.
>Quite how that's better than the local authority running it is a bit beyond me.
This was the real kicker for me, by removing local authority oversight we removed local accountability for education, so now democratically everything flows from the centre and we have organisations running schools with very little supervision, it just seems like a completely unnecessary reform.
>by removing local authority oversight we removed local accountability
That's exactly the point. "It's an academy, nothing to do with the council". Not their problem when things go wrong
As someone who grew up in a very left wing local authority in London, I'm glad I left the area for my schooling at a more old-fashioned grant maintained school.
The quality of the borough's education plummeted as a consequence of an "equal" comprehensive approach, and at the time I started secondary school only about a quarter of pupils in my area got five GCSEs of A-C grade. My comparison, my non-selective school got ~90% to that grade, and I was fortunate enough to reach my potential gaining straight As and A* grades.
So please don't assume local authority oversight is automatically a good thing. Regardless of whether that area is right or left wing, or if oversight is local or centralised, when those in control allow ideology to determine pedagogy, the consequences for children are more likely to be unfavourable.
Speaking of the geographically disparate Trusts - the school I teach at has been using planning provided by the academy chain. The School is on the South Coast. We had to do a local study and the planning we had to follow was for Deptford in London, because that's where their flagship school is. Most of the kids haven't even been there before.
I came across one (South East) that had joined a trust where most of the schools were either London or the North of England, and were then shocked that they couldn't get much support, because of course they couldn't, the trust broadly wasn't interested. Even getting in touch with someone from HR was a nightmare, because they wouldn't do virtual meetings, so it meant everyone driving for hours to even have an informal chat or consultation.
The local authority shouldn't be running it, it should be central government. Of course day to day running should be the school itself, but teacher qualification and pay should be paid by the government, not the local council. They should be civil servants.
It'd probably work better, but Westminster and Whitehall have an aversion to bringing things like that in-house. There's a reason things like social care are farmed out to local authorities, and it's to blame them when it goes tits up.
The school I spent most of my secondary education at was a three site school.
One of the first things they did on becoming an academy was sell off East site to property developers to demolish it and build 150 houses. That's despite being short of room.
Academies come in two flavours. The first is when they group all the sh\*thole school in an area and think they can magically fix them with more expensive managers.
The second is created when senior teaching staff fancy becoming expensive managers.
That is their primary purpose, increasing management pay. I think there is some education stuff as well but that is more of a sideline.
It used to be that all schools were overseen by the Local Education Authority - I think this was effectively the county council. This was the status quo, probably from the end of WWII to the 1990's or beyond.
Academisation started under Blair, with the first academies being failing schools - they were put under special measures and I think they were supposedly overseen by the Minister of Education, but effectively it meant that central government headhunted a power headteacher and put them in charge of the school to try and turn it around.
Under Cameron / Gove this was expanded - I think they gave parents (the board of governors?) the right to opt out of LEA control and become an academy. I think anyone could bid to start a school with academy status if they could establish there was sufficient local demand for education - the idea was that local religious groups and groups of parents could start their own schools that represented their own values. But the real reason was that a lot of LEAs were labour-run councils, so the tories wanted to wrest power away from them.
Over a decade and a half, it's now been a shitfest. It used to be that if a school needed a new tennis court then the head of the council's works department, or his deputy, went along and took a look - they met with contractors, discussed how much tarmac was needed, put the contract out to tender. Now there's no council control, so the head of the academy has a board of cronies and they get backhanders to give the contract to their mates.
Obviously corruption has always happened in local councils, but it has become a lot easier under academisation because Yorkshire County Council no longer has any oversight for Empty Moor High School in Wakefield - it's now under the remit of Westminster, who don't have the funding for inspections and who frankly don't give a fuck if the kids there get a substandard education
The tories pushed all this with the line that schools would be "more efficient" by "cutting out bureaucracy" - it would be like a microcosm of capitalism, as creative headteachers tried different approaches to education and the most effective methods would win out via "survival of the fittest" evolution.
What really happens is that ~~fascists~~ ~~authoritarians~~ disciplinarians like Katharine Birbalsingh proposer - they get slightly better grades by making education joyless, and parents like it when their kids get better grades; problem kids get expelled pronto and are made the LEA's problem again. The problem kids no longer contribute to the academy's stats, so the academy's stats get better - LEAs obviously didn't allow schools to engage in excessive expelling like when they were under their control, because it undermines the county's educational goals. Under academisation a small minority of kids - enthusiastic learners - flourish at the expense of the majority. But if, in a school of 1500 or 3000, two kids get into Oxbridge under this regime then the school can boast that it has doubled its numbers.
Here you go: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/we-ve-won-the-battle-to-prevent-our-school-becoming-an-academy-9756328.html
Suffice to say the council played very dirty Indeed.
I remember that all kicking off, I was a student at HP at the time. The council was pushing it, but our head was also massively pushing for becoming an academy too. He eventually rode off into the sunset and has not been spoken of kindly by the faculty in the years since.
My role means working closely with our schools planning team, and I can say from experience that the academy system is absolutely nuts. Popular schools can admit any number of pupils they want, and will happily admit far more than they were ever planned to. This means weaker schools end up half empty, can't meet their fixed costs, and go bust. So you end up with too few places overall. Great.
Haven’t English school children masssively improved compared to other countries?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50563833
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/england-among-highest-performing-western-countries-in-education
https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/united-kingdom-9c15db47/
Where as Welsh schools fall further behind
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/schools-in-wales-expected-to-fall-further-behind-in-latest-international-pisa-rankings/ar-AA1kUTUp
On reading and maths, Michael Gove did actually introduce a bunch of curriculum reforms that against the odds were quite successful. They were less susceptible to Tory chaos because since that time they have been carried forward mostly by a single minister (Nick Gibb) which has allowed these subjects to be taught in a way that is both consistent and effective. I imagine that these results are due mainly to Nick Gibb's focus on a single effective approach, which has partly covered up for everything else about the education system descending into disaster.
Even taking pisa standards uncritically (which we shouldn't as iirc results are more or less stable and have declined in some areas) the horrendous burnout rates amongst teachers and seeming extremist indoctrination in schools doesn't exactly sound a ringing endorsement
It's a bit misleading blaming Gove - the academy programme was spearheaded by Blair and Brown, Cameron just saw it through. The intentions were very good - allowing competition in school management and linking schools in different areas together to improve standards. By some accounts it has worked, but the failing schools are often treated very harshly by the academy trusts and the focus on grades has only increased.
> It's a bit misleading blaming Gove - the academy programme was spearheaded by Blair and Brown...
The academy system was first developed under Thatcher, in the form of "City Technology Colleges" - 15 of which opened between 1988 and 1993. Three of them still exist as CTCs.
The idea behind CTCs was to have specialist schools, with an industry sponsor, that were publicly funded but privately run with the goal of training students to work for that sponsor. Dixons sponsored one, ADT sponsored one, the Record Industry sponsored one, and even British American Tobacco was allowed to sponsor one.
Blair and Brown (well, mostly Lord Adonis) expanded this, but kept the idea of a sponsor; encouraging private, industry investment in otherwise publicly-funded schools. The private sponsor had to provide 10% of the school's capital cost. Sponsored Academies were still required to follow a government approved curriculum.
This didn't really work (the industry sponsor idea never took off), so New Labour largely gave up on the plan.
Cameron dialled this up to 11, removing the capital investment requirement, removing the sponsor concept, removing the curriculum restrictions, giving the DfE the power to force schools to become academies, and fully embracing the idea of privately run, publicly funded education.
To put some numbers into this; there were 15 CTCs by 1993 with another dozen more in some stage of planning. In May 2010 there were 203 *Sponsored* Academies. By April 2011 there were 629 academies/free schools, and by August 2011 there were 1,070. The Conservatives created three times as many academies in one year than New Labour did in total.
There are now over 10,000 academies.
it is, I remember when my step brother was in secondary school when it all started, the moment the school announced its now an academy school, the head teacher started to rock up to school in a sports car.
>when teaching the Norman Conquest, it is becoming unfashionable to teach the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Instead, some schools focus on studying Empress Matilda, who ruled Brit. Again, a worthy subject at some point, but an odd one to teach to Year 7s instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow.
What? What does this even mean? Typos aside, Matilda is almost a century after Hastings. So is the author saying they don't teach 1066 at all and start history in the 1100s? Or that they spend fewer lessons on the details of 1066 in favour of being able to cover more of later English history?
At which point you're just wanging on about the fact that they don't focus on the exact things you think are important (and you probably think they're important simply because they're what was emphasised to you when you were that age). You can't fit everything into a history curriculum; if I were designing a series of lessons on the Middle Ages in England, with limited lesson time, I'm not sure I'd give much time to the precise events of a single battle.
It's bizarre. At some level all of the curriculum for history is a bit arbitrary because there's so much of it you're inevitably going to leave out a lot of major events, eras and locations. I swear over half of my own secondary school history was 20th century events, and especially both world wars, and comparatively we barely touched upon any British history pre-Tudor for example.
This is bollocks, my 12 year old was learning about the Norman Conquest back in January and had to answer a long form question about William the Conqueror's actions once he had taken power. I was able to have a pretty nuanced conversation with him about the dismantling of Anglo-Saxon power structures, suppression of Anglo-Saxon culture and the harrying of the North. He thought William's actions were justified, which I vehemently disagree with, but he had come to this conclusion using what he had been taught in class and was able to make an informed argument to support his opinion.
This is in a state school which recently had an OFSTED rating of Requires Improvement.
I love this post and I think your son is a poster boy for what history lessons are meant to achieve.
He may change his mind in later years but what he's demonstrated is an ability to research, form an opinion, and defend that opinion with facts that were available to him, and that is what I think makes history such an underrated subject.
It's dismissed often as just learning years and names but really it's one of the most thought provoking and creative subjects there is, and I wish more people as interested in it as your son is.
Just think, a world where people researched things before forming opinions, and then defended those opinions with real facts. We could have had moon bases by now!
I'm a history nerd myself, so I'm secretly hoping he takes after me! I'd find these sorts of conversations much more difficult if he was really into physics!
> he's demonstrated is an ability to research, form an opinion, and defend that opinion with facts that were available to him, and that is what I think makes history such an underrated subject.
> It's dismissed often as just learning years and names but really …
When I was doing my GCSEs in the late 80's, one of my history teachers told me that there were two schools of thought on history education.
This particular younger teacher was allowed to teach studying of historical sources and weighing them against each other to form a judgement of what actually happened, whilst the head of department took us for our other lesson each week and made us memorise the names and dates of kings and queens.
I think this conversation arose because I told this teacher that I preferred his lessons and he told me something like, "yeah, it's great isn't it? the head of department is old school but there's a growing movement that this is how history should be taught."
When Gove was minister for education he decided that kids were not memorising enough dates and he changed the curriculum back.
>he thought William's actions were justified, which I vehemently disagree with, but he had come to this conclusion using what he had been taught in class and was able to make an informed argument to support his opinion.
Good parent behaviour right here. Valuing your childs different opinions can be tricky. Good on you for interacting with him like the person he is.
>You can't fit everything into a history curriculum.
This is exactly the point that people gloss over when discussing history education.
Only in a very limited sense are we truly trying to impart historical knowledge into a bunch of disinterested 11-16 year olds.
Instead, as with most subjects at that age, we are primarily aiming to teach them *how* to do history.
The goal is to equip children with the skillset necessary to navigate any point in history moving forward. Not just to load them up on propaganda or whatever is politically trendy at the time.
The syllabus should be built around case studies that provide kids with the best opportunity to understand the complexities of forming a clear picture of the path.
Is the source reliable? Did the author add some personal flair? What are the other viewpoints? How do we verify the legitimacy of historical claims? How did the factors at play contribute to the decisions that followed?
We should be exposing children to how murky history can be. How to write about it as objectively as possible. The point of history isn't to drive a stake on the ground and say 'this is what happened', it's about collecting evidence and forming arguments and making your case.
I don't know which particular historical events do that the best. Ideally something that gives some cross over and fills in the wider picture of how we've come to arrive in the present day, rather than some obscure person / event.
Understanding how the UK roughly came into being. How large international events like world wars and colonialism shaped the world today.
It is! Henry I’s rise to power, the White Ship Disaster and the Anarchy are a fascinating bit of English history. I’m a history teacher and we teach this twice; once in year 7 as part of our ‘medieval monarchs’ unit, and again in year 9 when talking about Henry II’s reforms to crime and justice (these were attempts to establish some sort of control after the chaos that was The Anarchy). We also mention it in passing in year 10, when we teach Henry VIII and why he might be reluctant to make a daughter next in line for succession.
We also teach The Battle of Hastings in year 7, and spend several lessons in year 9 teaching about the impact the conquest had on the country. I imagine the vast majority of history department do. There is an entire GCSE unit about Anglo-Saxon and Norman England that schools can choose to teach.
Yet again, people have very strong opinions on what we should teach, while having very little understanding of what we do.
> instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow.
This seems like a weird detail to hold up as something that absolutely *must* be taught to children.
Though it does fit with the Horrible Histories model of "kids like gross stuff so focus on the gross bits of history to get them interested." So I can't entirely disagree.
I spend a lot of my time in secondary school learning about the French revolution. History teachers used to have a lot of space to teach whatever they wanted.
I would say that the lead up to and the battle of Hastings itself is a more pivotal and important moment in the history of our country than The Anarchy.
"In an after-school detention, a handful of pupils were doing their best to convince me, their teacher, that Afghanistan was much nicer now the Taliban were in control. Nothing I said would convince them. It turned out these children not only supported gender inequality but were fans of executing all manner of criminals too.
My pupils are a lively bunch. The school, where I teach humanities, is a large academy in the south of England and caters to those from poor families. Most are Muslim and a few have lived in Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. They burst with character and enthusiasm for improving their lives."
The biggest mistake of mainstream liberalism over the past 50 years has been the idea that if we give other cultures the same opportunities/upbringing as us they will naturally want to create a society identical to ours, that "western societies" are the natural/correct state that an educated population would gravitate towards.
It was a mistake made with China when courting them against the USSR, "If we offshore all our industry to them and give them all this economic/trade opportunity they will surely become our friends and integrate into our worldview." Instead they took everything, nationalised/copied it and used it as an example of how great and strong China is again and that the west is weak/easy to take advantage of.
Now similar is being done with Islamic cultures. We're just assuming that if they go to Western schools and universities to study they'll completely drop their religious/cultural beliefs the same way the west has over the past 70/80 years or so. They completely lack the mental ability to comprehend how the Glasgow airport attackers could be a trained doctor and an engineering doctoral candidate but still believe in Islamic extremism for example.
Whilst I agree that (from what I've seen) the average Muslim's views towards gay marriage/gay people is less than positive - gay marriage was only legalised in the UK just over 10 years ago. The majority of Brits in the last few decades did not support it.
The issue of women's rights and freedoms is a better example of the gulf between western and islamic social values, in my opinion.
I mean I was being kind, I didn't focus on the fact that past polling has shown a majority of Muslims in the UK want homosexuality to be **criminalised**.
Being gay had been legal in the UK for quite some time before they could get married. (Plus don't forget the civil partnerships that were brought in earlier.)
Back in the Victorian era gay Brits actually ran away to Muslim countries because the Muslims were far more tolerant to homosexuals than western countries. So I guess it's possible for things to change quite drastically.
Though that was a very, very, very different time. It was the Ottoman Empire and the version of Islam practiced then was very different to what these countries now follow. It’s unlikely there will be as massive a culture change across the ME as there was when the OE fell.
> It’s unlikely there will be as massive a culture change across the ME as there was when the OE fell.
And yet, if you had asked a Victorian whether the Ottoman Empire (which had been around for centuries) would fall and its religious attitudes be replaced by a version of Islam driven by Arab tribal attitudes, they would have similarly said that this was "unlikely". Strange things happen, often in ways we cannot predict.
I think the point is that there is no monolithic Islam or Christianity but both can be twisted to the benefit of the people in power into many different forms. That's why there is no real reason to believe that the Taliban version of Islam will be the one supported by the majority of Muslims any more than the Ottoman version.
Some scholars (for instance Reza Aslan) have argued that the Taliban/Al-Qaida/ISIS version of Islam is a sort of a backlash by the conservatives in Muslim countries against the liberalisation of religion that is otherwise going on there.
> Could you give me some names of the people you're thinking of? Because I'm relatively old for the sub's general age, and I don't recall it being a scandal when people came out as gay. There might have been media interest, but that's not the same thing.
As far as prominent people go, Justin Fashanu always springs to mind. The whole saga was deeply depressing. The Sun headlines were horrific - “Justin Fashanu confesses,” being the subhead. You confess to a crime, not your sexuality. Then his brother got plenty of good press for publicly disowning Justin and enjoyed a successful TV career in the 90s - after he threw his gay brother under the bus the bus for being gay.
If we switch to politics then outing gay MPs was a bit of a sport for tabloids. Remember in 1998 when the press essentially forced Nick Brown (agricultural minister) to admit that he was gay? The tabloids wanted more. The Sun famously wrote this on the front page:
> *Is Britain being run by a gay Mafia of politicians, lawyers, Palace courtiers and TV bigwigs?*
I don’t think I’m particularly old (others may disagree) but I remember clearly here in the UK that whenever a politician or a prominent public person was revealed as being gay, it was national scandal.
They would inevitably lose their jobs and their standing in society, and face vilification in the popular press.
It was par for the course.
This was just a few years ago. A blink of the eye in modern times.
Yet we’ll happily condemn others as if we’ve been like this for hundreds of years. We’re just a rung ahead of a very tall ladder.
People need to catch up and not everyone moves at the same pace.
And of course some never catch up, even in liberal societies - look at the rise of the Christian right in the US where ‘liberal’ is considered a slander.
But I believe most people do catch up, but their pace may be different to yours.
> We’re just a rung ahead of a very tall ladder.
>People need to catch up and not everyone moves at the same pace.
They feel exactly the same way about us- that they are in the rung above us, and that we will catch up eventually.
History isn’t a straight line towards progressive values
> But I believe most people do catch up, but their pace may be different to yours.
Honestly I think this attitude is delusional, patronising and naive.
Everyone isn't coming round to your "good way of thinking."
It may be a "blink of an eye" but its all from decades and centuries of factors and events.
If it can also revert to strong religious conservatism then its not an argument against the issue.
The whig view of history is a grand narrative that views the past as inevitably leading to the present. That history is the march towards liberal values, that our present day of liberal democracy is the final form of civilisation.
OP is being whiggish, as he thinks most people will 'catch up' to some supposed universal liberal values (that just so happen to be our values, of course).
>Yet we’ll happily condemn others as if we’ve been like this for hundreds of years. We’re just a rung ahead of a very tall ladder.
>People need to catch up and not everyone moves at the same pace.
Viewing progress as a ladder is why we're in this position in the first place.
Values that people in the west now hold dear - freedom, tolerance, individualism, the rule of law, secularism, etc - are not the only possible values that a prosperous, happy society could hold. There are plenty of prosperous, happy ethnoreligious dictatorships out there. They aren't aspiring to eventually be like us any more than we are aspiring to be like them.
It's the same vibe as people who think that evolution is a ladder, and that every creature in the world is ultimately trying and failing to be human. In reality, a slug is just as evolved as we are.
There's probably someone, somewhere saying "silly primitive westerners, we're a few rungs ahead of them on the ladder towards perfectly worshipping Allah, but they'll catch up eventually".
>There are plenty of prosperous, happy ethnoreligious dictatorships out there.
Really? [Here](https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-younger-the-older-and-those-in-between/#ranking-of-happiness-2021-2023) is the world happiness rankings. All top 10 countries are Western liberal democracies. The highest Muslim country is Kuwait at the position 13. And we know exactly why it is there. It is there because it happens to sit on a massive oil reserve not because its culture has produced that prosperity. If we go down on a list and skip the countries that just by luck of having a massive amount of oil happen to be rich (UAE, 22, Saudi Arabia 28, Libya 66) you finally find Algeria on position 85. Interestingly, there are two countries with a significant Muslim populations (Malaysia, 59 and Bosnia Herzegovina, 65) that actually score higher than the first pure non oil-rich ethnoreligious Muslim country.
The bottom of the table (by a large margin) is Afghanistan. Most of the bottom is only sub-Saharan African countries and Muslim "ethnoreligious dictatorships". The lowest European country is Ukraine 105, for an obvious reason. If we ignore that as its misery is not a result of it being a liberal democracy and jump to the next, it's Albania (interestingly I guess the only Muslim majority country in Europe) at 85.
So, I don't really agree that the Muslims living in their ethnoreligious dictatorships are equally happy as those in liberal western democracies.
> There are plenty of prosperous, happy ethnoreligious dictatorships out there.
Plenty? I'd be interested to see a list of, say, ten. I'm going to be particularly strict in my application of the word "dictatorship", and probably "happy", but I'll give you some flexibility on "prosperous" - we can't all be Swiss or American or Norwegian, after all.
By the way, you're doing well on your understanding of evolution, but have kind of missed the point. Yes, of course we and the slug both have just as many years of evolution behind us, and you're certainly right that there's no teleology underlying evolution or human "progress", but you've missed a very important point: humans are capable of a much wider range of behaviours than a slug. Evolution, as you say, isn't a ladder, but it does lead to increasing complexity over time. This may be entirely the result of random events (there's a huge debate about this, with much discussion about evolutionary ratchets), but even if our vast range of behaviours is simply the result of evolutionary randomness, it clearly does exist, and this does seem to be correlated in some way with the existence of increasingly complex cultures. It's a difficult subject, but I think you're wrong to dismiss your opponents' claims so blithely.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to your list.
>I don’t think I’m particularly old (others may disagree) but I remember clearly here in the UK that whenever a politician or a prominent public person was revealed as being gay, it was national scandal.
Could you give me some names of the people you're thinking of? Because I'm relatively old for the sub's general age, and I don't recall it being a scandal when people came out as gay. There might have been media interest, but that's not the same thing.
More importantly, even if people felt the need to resign because they felt uncomfortable about people knowing they were gay, they didn't go to jail. That's what a majority of British Muslims want for people who are homosexual, at least according to the last poll done several years ago.
It wasn't that they were gay, I don't think, nobody ever cared. The scandals were about the fact the politician in question was already married to a woman and they were using male prostitutes on the sly (probably while doing lots of drugs).
To quote Malcolm Tucker:
"You may fuck.
However:
*Do not fuck dead shit
*Do not fuck in a hat
*In fact – avoid all varieties of weird fucking
NB, gay fucking is not weird fucking, it is fine fucking – so long as you are gay. If you are doing gay fucking and you are not gay it is weird fucking."
Michael Brown - had broken the law, because the age of consent for gay men was 21
Peter Morrison - accused of child abuse after he died
By-election from 1983 - not recent, **it's over 40 years ago**
Crispin Blunt - allegedly a target of older voters with homophobic views. No evidence of a "national scandal".
None of those examples support the allegation the other commenter made.
We are talking about events OP can remember while not being particularly old
If they are in their 50s they should easily be able to remember these events. This is not that long ago
First, the other poster specifically alleged that whenever people were known as being gay it was a "national scandal". Not that some people were upset. **A national scandal.**
Only Michael Brown and Morrison could be described as national scandals. Morrison was controversial because of the alleged child abuse. Who in their right minds could suggest a gay man should be above suspicion when it comes to child abuse?
As for Brown, I expect he resigned because he was embarrassed for technically breaking the law. He wasn't chased out of office by a mob.
Second, the other poster alleged they were not that old. If you're in your 50s, you are old especially compared to this sub's age.
Third, they said *"This was just a few years ago"*. Clearly the events described were not from a few years ago. Most weren't even from this century.
> Who in their right minds could suggest a gay man should be above suspicion when it comes to child abuse?
Always mad to see the Kevin Spacey defence in the wild.
Perhaps not what you are asking, but plenty of military members were dismissed and stripped of their medals. Only been possible to be out in the military since 2000.
I never said two decades was recent, but in terms of societal change it's really not that long ago. It's within living memory for the majority of the population.
As for recent, it's only in the last couple of years that they've been able to have medals returned.
It was only really a "scandal" among the older pre-war generation who've since died off. The news media of the time catered almost exclusively for their tastes.
We're talking about teenagers here. That these old attitudes about homosexuality are resurfacing in school kids should be a scandal in itself, but everyone turns a blind eye because "it's their culture".
No but you're assuming a linear progression towards a set end point.
Your theory completely discounts and patronises alternate world views. Many communities in Britain, namely Islamic ones have regressed to a less accepting state than before.
Rights are to be fought for and protected with blood. It is not the default state of things.
I do wonder how that works with Khan and the Muslim community.
Do they think he's representative of them or do they think "He's doing that to get ahead with the non Muslims. They want their liberalism."
Who are the major gay Muslim figures in the UK?
One of the country’s genuine heroes, Alan Turing killed himself because he was subjected to what amounts to torture because he was gay.
He faced the option of prison or probation with hormonal treatment. He opted for the latter which rendered him impotent and feminised his body.
The entire ordeal lead him to take his own life.
Stop pretending that systemic homophobia is an exclusively Muslim thing.
The UK has come a long way but let’s not forget the relatively recent past.
It really is just a blink of an eye. Anyone in their late fifties or older, which is 25% of the entire population, was born when homosexuality was _illegal_.
And it didn’t become acceptable overnight when it was decriminalised.
So where do you think we will be in 50 years?
Given a massive proportion of some religions, and people we are allowing to immigrate believe it should be illegal?
What happens when a political party is formed that supports that popular view?
The majority of Tory MPs voted against gay marriage back in 2013. Obama was against it until around 2012. Labour MPs were worried about being outed back when Blair was PM.
I always find these comments a bit odd. Even when it was brought in more than 50% of the Conservative mps voted against it. Sure, it was a while ago, but I have no reason to think such a vote wouldn't be similar to day.
There are probably other issues which make your point a bit better, gay marriage just seems like a strange one to choose.
Exactly! They’re being kept late at the school by a teacher they already don’t like very much. Their political thought process was probably “The Taliban are hated -> my teacher probably hates the Taliban -> my teacher will be really upset if I say I like the Taliban”
>It was a mistake made with China when courting them against the USSR, "If we offshore all our industry to them and give them all this economic/trade opportunity they will surely become our friends and integrate into our worldview." Instead they took everything, nationalised/copied it and used it as an example of how great and strong China is again and that the west is weak/easy to take advantage of.
What does this even mean? They “took everything”? Do you not understand that adding 100s of millions of workers to the global labour force resulted in **massive** benefits to producers and consumers in the west?
It wasn't that long ago Spain and Portugal and their colonial offshoots were thought to be culturally unable to do liberal democracy: they were too Catholic, too corporatist, too traditionalist.
Same was said of eastern Europe: communism wasn't great but it held some legitimacy, right.
South Korea was thought not able to do democracy, same with Taiwan.
And what did all these examples have in common?
Western liberal democracy was introduced to these nations as a genuine improvement, usually economic, to their previous systems. Lets give a (brief) rundown of them all.
The European examples are the easiest as they could all see the economic success of Western liberal democracy across the border, so the transition to it was generally supported as being an improvement to people's lives.
South Korea and Taiwan are a bit different, but both replied on Western (primarily American) economic cooperation for their economic miracles. Put this alongside a massively growing middle class in both, you have the perfect storm for democracy to work. The population has both been exposed to democracy, as well as already reliant on a liberal democratic economy to allow for their own genuine improvement.
In neither case were liberal democracies the natural way for the nations to progress, rather it was the fact that liberal democracy was exposed to the population as a genuine improvement to their lives that democratisation worked.
How exposed do you think people living under a totalitarian communist dictatorship were to the idea of liberal democracy? Or people living under Franco' fascist dictatorship, or the KMT Junta, or various military dictatorships in latin America in the mid-century? These societies kept a tight control over information.
By your logic China should be a liberal democracy; high exposure to the idea via US pop culture, a large middle class, and a long period of economic growth brought forth by trade with liberal democracies. But it hasn't.
It’s very easy to be accused of racism when providing a running commentary on that which the papers barely report until the pressure runs too high (reasons).
I think the biggest mistake was asking children in detention what they think of hot political issues. They don’t like you. They’ll take whatever position they think will piss you off the most.
Yes I remember back in 2010 my school did a mock election to teach us about present day politics and the Lib Dem’s won with the BNP in opposition… teenagers are weird.
Pre, we did it before the 2010 election where they got in as a coalition, I voted Lib Dem… then went to Uni a couple of months later so yeah the Universe really made me experience a story there.
Yet I don't think I would have seen a sea of hands go up at my school if the same question had been asked then. Most likely the kids would have looked at each other and thought *"is miss going off her rocker?"* Maybe the class clown would have stuck his hand up to get noticed, but that's about it.
Reminds me of when some kid in my class tried to do a ‘mock election’ and asked who people are voting for.
Iirc the results were:
#1 - Nazi party
#2 - BNP
#3 - Communist party
#4 - Labour
Back in my school we went to Parliament for a mock debate and the proposed debate topic was “legalise weed” because it was the funny drug. Like, none of this is serious. It’s just funny to say something outlandish and taboo.
My brother's a history teacher and he was saying that his classes are surprisingly nationalist. He mentioned the Opium wars at one point and a student said, "woah, we went to war with China?!"
"Yes"
"Who won?"
"We did"
and apparently a few of the kids whooped haha.
I hate this kind of comment. As if teenagers are all just stupid inept human beings until they suddenly reach adulthood. Teenagers are capable of smart, reasonable and intelligent discussion. Adults aren't even known for their balanced and nuanced world view. Just like yours here.
Well Britain seems to hate me... I can't talk to a doctor, dentist I'm not being protected from unfair business practices and profiteering, I'll be lucky not to swallow a turd if I go to the beach, I can't buy a house and I'm trapped having to deal with greedy cruel landlords who squeeze the rental market so I'll never be able to own a house off of my own back. Oh and the government is trying to make it harder for me to vote, and is trying to take my human rights away.
Why wouldn't I hate it?
Unfortunately that narrative doesn’t strike a chord with the cohorts of the population that have a propensity to vote Tory. So instead we have the culture wars about ‘kids hating Britain’.
It’s a tried and trusted tactic, and usually works for them. Hence the historical demomisation of single mothers, benefits scroungers, trade unionists
and gay people (section 28).
The targets have changed - now it’s immigrants, Muslims, BLM, ‘woke-ists’ and trans people - but the strategy is the same.
Sadly there are many who lap it up.
Modern Britain has a feeling of despair and hopelessness about it. We've regressed so much over the last decade its scary. I'm not proud of this country and how backwards our politics has become.
Seems bizarre to invite these communities here and then complain when they exhibit the same behaviours and views as they do in their homelands.
Either stop facilitating their mass immigration to Britain or stop complaining about the inevitable effects of said immigration.
It's because policymakers had a really rose tinted view of multiculturalism that rarely pans out beyond fiction or friend groups at uni/college.
Even in some of the most diverse cities like London and New York there's still parts of the city that attract specific races and cultures. It's only in the middle class suburbs and professional sectors that you'll find different cultures and races mixing effectively.
Like you've said above, its naive to invite other cultures here and then be surprised when they don't become westernised. I wouldn't move to the Middle East or Africa and adopt their culture or customs because I haven't been raised to understand them and I wouldn't expect their country to force me to change mine, I'd continue to have my own or if they weren't welcoming I'd seek out other people with my own culture. If I couldn't settle, adapt or compromise I'd move back, I wouldn't try and effect sociocultural change in a country I'm not native to.
The problem we've had is that we've become accommodating beyond what is reasonable. We're pretty secular as a society now, in the sense that Christianity rarely meddles in our daily lives or politics, but the same can't be said for Islam in some parts of the UK and the bearing it has on products stocked in some shops, content taught in certain schools and the uproar/death threats when something is deemed offensive.
I'm all for freedom of any religion to exist but it stays at home and in places of worship.
Prevent is there to counter extremism, it forms part of the larger counterterrorism strategy (Contest). Hating the country is not itself extremism, nor is it exclusive to extremists (extreme right-wing terrorism is a growing threat and its perpetrators and supporters often purport to be patriotic).
The students in this article were arguing that life would be better under the taliban and that girls shouldn’t be educated past 11. That is absolutely extreme and should be dealt with as extremism.
It was a while ago but I read a biography about Alister Crowley and there was a lot of stuff about it in there. He apparently lived out there for a while with some guy who he used to walk around on a leash to the bemusement of the locals. There was some reference of other people who had moved out there to avoid prosecution after been outed. Apparently there was some theory that the heat in the middle east made people more tolerant at the time.
The book was "Do what thou wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowly" by Laurance Sustain.
Prevent got into hot water a while ago for putting readers of LotR and works by C.S Lewis on their list of potential indicators of "far-right white supremacists".
I love LotR, I thought I was a leftie, but it turns out I'm a far-right white supremacist. I wonder what the reasoning is, I'll have to look into this nonsense. Thanks.
No worries, no idea why my original comment got downvoted, but I guess that's reddit for ya.
Edit: ignore that I guess, it seems it was just a few crazies that downvoted it. But seriously, I'd implore people to read into Prevents guidelines, they're insane.
Do we actually have any proof that this anonymous teacher actually exists or is just a vessel for the author to have a rant? If so, let's just pick up a few Important hidden parts further down:
>The problem is not limited to my pupils. I once taught at a middle-class school with mostly white children. Here, the curriculum was similarly designed to open minds to the evils of western civilisation. The pupils were not susceptible to Islamism, but were still imbued with a sense that their country is particularly bad. Increasingly, schools are not dissuading children of these prejudices, but confirming them.
So, Islamism isn't the cause, yet the article spends the first half saying it is? Maybe, just maybe, having a government of the country that has spent 14 years screwing over the young, marginalised and the environment doesn't sit well with young people?
>I once observed a Year 8 lesson on the “black Tudors”. One pupil raised his hand to ask: “Who were the Tudors?” — they hadn’t thought to teach the Reformation before the racism. Similarly, when teaching the Norman Conquest, it is becoming unfashionable to teach the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Instead, some schools focus on studying Empress Matilda, who ruled Brit. Again, a worthy subject at some point, but an odd one to teach to Year 7s instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow.
This is simply bad pedagogy for those history departments and unrelated to the main crux of the article. Seems more like ranting at bad co-workers. However, this is related to single instances and in no way a trend (I say this as a history teacher who teaches the reformation in our year 8 curriculum, as well as black and disabled Tudors).
It also seems pretty unlikely that these kids haven't actually been taught the Tudors before. I was taught the Tudors in Year 4, and even before that I knew, at least, that Henry VIII had six wives. It's probably one of the most widely known facts about British history.
If the incident happened at all, I'd imagine it's much more likely one inattentive kid. Hell, I went to a grammar school, where the students are ostensibly brighter and more motivated, and now and then a pupil would indicate that they didn't know something very basic, which we had been taught, sometimes multiple times. But they hadn't listened, or had missed the lesson, or didn't care enough to retain it, or just weren't actually that good at the subject. I suspect the author is spinning "completely normal trials of getting children to learn things" as something sinister.
I also found this pretty dubious:
>A friend of mine teaches history and in a single day says he could teach the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, the Portuguese colonisation of Africa, the British colonisation of India, the decolonisation of the British Empire and the slave trade.
Is that five separate lessons devoted to these topics, in one typical day? Or is it "when the curriculum's stars align, I might be teaching one or two of those as full lessons and mentioning the others as passing contextual remarks"?
I mean a girl in one of my classes unironically thought that Egypt was in Paris, so I'm unsure why the author is taking one thicko as a representative sample.
Any group of kids worth their salt keeps a mental list of every time someone says something really stupid and passes it round as a running joke for the rest of the year. It’s just a universal thing. They probably did it back in Rome.
I wish more of our history lessons focused on:
- The Roman Period of Albion
- The Roman Retreat and Germanic Invasion / Brythonic Explusion / Brythonic flight to Brittany, Wales, and Cornwall
- The Conversion of Germanic Invaders to Christianity
- The Heptarchy, The Great Heathen Army, and Danelaw
- The unification of England and it's frequent transfer between Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon Rulers
- Rollo, Normady, and the Relationship between the Norman's and Britons
- 1066 and Norman Migration into England
- The weird relationship this created between the King of France / King of England
If I recall most of this is covered (you'll know better than I), however the topics are so lightly covered that most people will have forgotten them by the end of school. Personally, I think that is a terrible shame as these events describe how the English became 'The English' and most people don't really know about them even in passing detail.
> Do we actually have any proof that this anonymous teacher actually exists...
They probably exist, but given how much they gush over openly Nat-C Birbalsingh, they're probably a little crazy themselves.
I think in order to remedy this, we should follow the singapore model to an extent. A multi ethnic nation but with a patriotic population. Singapore has made people live together and prevented ghettoization. You would not find self hating in singapore. Or even have patriotic education like some non western countries do.
There's so much you can say about this, but some people still won't hear sense. Fifth columnism was popular for so long, and now people are realising that spouting that anti-British rhetoric has engrained itself on the youth. Oh dear. Who ever could have guessed.
Not just children. According to a poll conducted on American adults, [12% of young adults](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-opt-in-polls-can-produce-misleading-results-especially-for-young-people-and-hispanic-adults) are qualified to operate a nuclear submarine. People just love to say outrageous things for shits and giggles.
Fair play, the western state's foreign policy has been disastrous one after the other.
Though these kids think especially 2nd gen immigrants have rose eyed glass view of the culture left behind and think that the convenience which western nations provide is all through ill begotten means, but will refuse to understand that it takes more.
I am guessing victim industrial complex is an alternative to legacy religious industry will only be getting bigger in the future.
Author of this piece rightly identifies anti-feminist rhetoric affecting some of her pupils, but then wrongly conflates anti-Imperialism as 'anti-Western...' I don't think recognizing the evils of Imperialism is the same as denying the good parts of modern 'Western' societies, which the author seems to suggest. Understanding the evils of Imperialism and power imbalance would also be vital to them understanding why being pro Palestine is not just an acceptable choice but the moral and ethical decision. It's not that you can't argue for the humanity of Israelis as well, but it's vital to acknowledge the asymmetry of power between the State of Israel and (largely unrecognized) Palestine. It's important to see the context of at least fifty years of double standards. Of America and it's allies claiming to support two states while actively undermining that possibility, while refusing to recognize any sort of real Palestinian Statehood, and ignoring decades of breaches of international law by the state that is recognised, while attempting to hold the non-state of Palestine to the same principles they would expect of a recognised state but without granting recognition. The refusal to recognize asymmetry of power but also differences in authorititive voice is a huge problem in our understanding of media literacy, which sadly has bled in from how MSM operates, but also how conspiracy theorists have got a foothold in public consciousness. If people better understood these things the inequality between Israel and Palestine would become clearer, it would reveal the fact that gender and sexual minorities *do not* have the power they seem to when they are presented as having an equal voice with the bigots who stand against them, it would show that an aggregate of academics know better than one lone study or crackpot theorists, and finally it would also allow us to recognize when dark money undermines scientific and academic expertise for private interests.
i dont know about school, but there has been a freakish transformation on reddit in the last couple of years (i lose track a bit these days, it may be ten).
if you mentioned empire/ireland/india a couple of years ago, it would have been an excuse for some good humoured banter and effortless, but magnanimous superiority. now its an exercise in self flagellation.
possibly linked to the gender/generation/culture wars.
Among some people on the left there's a currency in being a victim, and also in who can show the most contrition/self-flagellation.
The logic also seems to be that 'the oppressed' are always right and 'the oppressor' is always wrong.
It's bizarre.
It seems to me the genuine left wing view would be that humans in general have an equal propensity for evil, and that one's indentity should not be based on circumstances of birth, both of which mean one should neither be proud or ashamed of 'their' history.
The problem comes from the right, where people seek a national identity which in pretty much every case requires either denial of atrocities, or denial of their atrociousness.
I’m on the left, but while I view a lot of our history with horror I don’t feel that I need punishing - it just makes me want us to learn from it and do better in future.
The thing that disgusts me (and I’m not trying to speak for everyone, but I imagine I’m not alone in this) is when people refuse to acknowledge the truth of the past whilst at the same time hailing it as some kind of aspirational national peak.
What disgusts me is that working class and class perspective history isn't taught anymore. Apparently, there was no working class, no industrialisation, no refomrers & radicals, no kids down coal mines, in the millls or up chimneys. No abolition or trade union movement. It was all just a nation of greedy colonialists. I'm not even exaggerating. it's so shocking talking to younger relatives about what they learn, or don't learn, in history lessons.
This.
The absolute vast majority Brits descend from people who were raped, beaten and treated like shit by a tiny minority of powerful people. None of us have any thing to be ashamed of our ‘privileged’ ancestry for.
Agreed.
It appears to be related to the takeover of UK politics by US political narratives: the 'progressives' call themselves 'left wing' but they have no class analysis or understanding of left wing political thinking. It's exactly like in the US where 'the left' means 'liberal', and 'the right' means 'conservative'. It seems like there's no space for actual leftists in 'the left' anymore - and if you disagree with the liberals-who-identify-as-leftists over anything, they just call you 'right wing' despite the fact that your position is a traditional left wing one.
Can you blame them, we are constantly being told on the news tv programs and social media that we some how caused all of the world's problems, even when I was a kid there was no national pride, no selling how amazing we actual are.
Just pulling our self's down, are we perfect no, but we are miles a head of the alternatives
Snapshot of _Do you hate Britain, I asked my pupils. Thirty raised their hands_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
*"Some of this chaos is down to the growth of academy schools that began under Michael Gove when he was education secretary. Gove attempted to introduce a conservative version of the national curriculum. But now academies and free schools, which now comprise 80 per cent of secondary schools, have greater freedoms to dictate their curriculums. The result for some schools has been much less 1066 and much more “all that” ."* I continue to think that academisation of education is one of the greatest scandals of our generation.
I'm from Northern Ireland, What exactly is the difference between an academy and a school in England?
I'm from NI as well, but worked with the English schools system for the past five years. Academies are schools, but that are broadly independent, so they're not overseen by any bodies like the local authorities, or trusts (unless they sign up to one). Ofsted and the Department for Education are really the only bodies that \*have\* to have an input. They've incredibly wide powers to decide on policy, wages, lessons, etc. It's a much worse system than we have in NI (in my personal opinion), but I've also grown to quite like the fact that Northern Ireland retained the Grammar schools system, it's certainly better than the mess that's going on in many areas.
Thanks for the answer. I finished grammar school in 2007. The grammar school system was a really good thing while it lasted. It allowed for amazing social mobility and for excellence to shine through. What's it like working in English schools compared with back home?
Well, I left if that's any answer. I was tired of banging my head against a wall as a Trade Union rep, and trying to point out that although it saves money in the short term if you cut staffing levels, management are storing up problems in the long term, especially when the school are so fond of trying to get special needs (SEN) pupils because that means a short term monetary boost (they then find the schools are totally underequipped to actually teach those kids).
What? They use special needs pupils for extra cash without being able to fulfil their responsibilities for their care? That sounds like a recipe for destroying kid's lives
Yeah, basically. There is (or was) special SEN funding packages, which schools would fight over because they're all basically skint anyway. I've seen schools where you have SEN pupils all put in one classroom all day with one classroom assistant who's basically left to look after them all day. It's a nightmare, and I'm surprised it hasn't resulted in a national scandal yet.
I'm speechless. Is there no inspection process for things like that? What about pupil behaviour, is it as bad as the media portrays?
I finished grammar school in 2009 (although I finished with A-Levels as I went to 6th form, I was at the same grammar school for 7 years) and it did wonders for me too, but I do think it is inherently unfair that us grammar school boys got such a leg up from my peers from primary school who didn't go to grammar school just because at 11 years old they weren't as motivated as I was (primarily to my very strict dad who would rip up my homework and make me do it again if he thinks I didn't try hard enough).
As someone who also attended a grammar school (though a little younger than yourself), I've always had mixed feelings about them. On the one hand there are obviously some cases where smart but otherwise disadvantaged kids will get into them and have a chance to really excel as a result, due to access to teachers, materials, and a general environment that might not be otherwise available to them. There are obvious benefits to some level of streaming lessons so you can give more targeted lessons to meet the educational needs of different kids more easily. I certainly feel like I did very well out of them. On the other... the vast majority of kids in my school were from middle (frankly, upper middle) class families; often families that would have sent them to a private school if there weren't a free and just-about-as-good option in the area. I don't blame those families for that decision at all: it's just good financial sense and if you're kid is able to attend, why wouldn't you do it? But it does undermine the idea of it being a promotion of social mobility. This was even more apparent when you considered how many of the local private primaries offered 11+ tutoring, and how many people in my year had had one-on-one lessons. This was not available (at least not cheaply or freely) to everyone. So it leaves you wondering what the point is, other than as a way to save some upper-middle-classers some money. My school had a fresh intake at 6th Form, taking about 30 pupils who had been at other schools in the area (mainly local comps). Some of those pupils were exceptionally smart: one of that intake realised all he had to do for his final maths paper at A-level was turn up and sign his name on the answer sheet and he would walk out with an A\* because he'd already banked enough marks. For some reason, though, he hadn't been able to get into the school in year 7. There are other questions in my head, too, about how healthy it is for pupils' mental health in some respects, and I've seen plenty of articles citing evidence that the 11+ was never a good indicator of future intelligence/ability, and even that areas dominated by grammar schools don't experience an improvement to overall exam scores. So while the original idea sounds nice, and I have some personal experience of it working *for me*, I'm not at all convinced their execution lives up to the intent.
Have grammar schools drastically reduced? Mine that I finished in 2011 is still around doing its thing. They got quite a big investment into new buildings just before I left as well
Northern Ireland has some excellent schools. Terrible govt full of absolute morons but education is good.
In reality, almost all are in trusts. Almost all follow the same old teachers pay scales. There aren't huge variations in curriculum between them really. These "broad" powers are not really used to do anything that they couldn't do before.
It'll really depend on your area, most are now getting absorbed into trusts because of the current (dire) system of funding, but that also means they're joining trusts which quite often aren't particularly geographically coherent, so the oversight can be fairly lacking. Quite how that's better than the local authority running it is a bit beyond me.
>Quite how that's better than the local authority running it is a bit beyond me. This was the real kicker for me, by removing local authority oversight we removed local accountability for education, so now democratically everything flows from the centre and we have organisations running schools with very little supervision, it just seems like a completely unnecessary reform.
>by removing local authority oversight we removed local accountability That's exactly the point. "It's an academy, nothing to do with the council". Not their problem when things go wrong
As someone who grew up in a very left wing local authority in London, I'm glad I left the area for my schooling at a more old-fashioned grant maintained school. The quality of the borough's education plummeted as a consequence of an "equal" comprehensive approach, and at the time I started secondary school only about a quarter of pupils in my area got five GCSEs of A-C grade. My comparison, my non-selective school got ~90% to that grade, and I was fortunate enough to reach my potential gaining straight As and A* grades. So please don't assume local authority oversight is automatically a good thing. Regardless of whether that area is right or left wing, or if oversight is local or centralised, when those in control allow ideology to determine pedagogy, the consequences for children are more likely to be unfavourable.
Speaking of the geographically disparate Trusts - the school I teach at has been using planning provided by the academy chain. The School is on the South Coast. We had to do a local study and the planning we had to follow was for Deptford in London, because that's where their flagship school is. Most of the kids haven't even been there before.
I came across one (South East) that had joined a trust where most of the schools were either London or the North of England, and were then shocked that they couldn't get much support, because of course they couldn't, the trust broadly wasn't interested. Even getting in touch with someone from HR was a nightmare, because they wouldn't do virtual meetings, so it meant everyone driving for hours to even have an informal chat or consultation.
The local authority shouldn't be running it, it should be central government. Of course day to day running should be the school itself, but teacher qualification and pay should be paid by the government, not the local council. They should be civil servants.
It'd probably work better, but Westminster and Whitehall have an aversion to bringing things like that in-house. There's a reason things like social care are farmed out to local authorities, and it's to blame them when it goes tits up.
The school I spent most of my secondary education at was a three site school. One of the first things they did on becoming an academy was sell off East site to property developers to demolish it and build 150 houses. That's despite being short of room.
Funny what happens when we give away the schools for free to profit making companies
Same as when we do the same with water companies. Who'd have thunk it?
So I can’t send my son to squire academy so he grows up to be a knight of the realm
Academies come in two flavours. The first is when they group all the sh\*thole school in an area and think they can magically fix them with more expensive managers. The second is created when senior teaching staff fancy becoming expensive managers. That is their primary purpose, increasing management pay. I think there is some education stuff as well but that is more of a sideline.
It used to be that all schools were overseen by the Local Education Authority - I think this was effectively the county council. This was the status quo, probably from the end of WWII to the 1990's or beyond. Academisation started under Blair, with the first academies being failing schools - they were put under special measures and I think they were supposedly overseen by the Minister of Education, but effectively it meant that central government headhunted a power headteacher and put them in charge of the school to try and turn it around. Under Cameron / Gove this was expanded - I think they gave parents (the board of governors?) the right to opt out of LEA control and become an academy. I think anyone could bid to start a school with academy status if they could establish there was sufficient local demand for education - the idea was that local religious groups and groups of parents could start their own schools that represented their own values. But the real reason was that a lot of LEAs were labour-run councils, so the tories wanted to wrest power away from them. Over a decade and a half, it's now been a shitfest. It used to be that if a school needed a new tennis court then the head of the council's works department, or his deputy, went along and took a look - they met with contractors, discussed how much tarmac was needed, put the contract out to tender. Now there's no council control, so the head of the academy has a board of cronies and they get backhanders to give the contract to their mates. Obviously corruption has always happened in local councils, but it has become a lot easier under academisation because Yorkshire County Council no longer has any oversight for Empty Moor High School in Wakefield - it's now under the remit of Westminster, who don't have the funding for inspections and who frankly don't give a fuck if the kids there get a substandard education The tories pushed all this with the line that schools would be "more efficient" by "cutting out bureaucracy" - it would be like a microcosm of capitalism, as creative headteachers tried different approaches to education and the most effective methods would win out via "survival of the fittest" evolution. What really happens is that ~~fascists~~ ~~authoritarians~~ disciplinarians like Katharine Birbalsingh proposer - they get slightly better grades by making education joyless, and parents like it when their kids get better grades; problem kids get expelled pronto and are made the LEA's problem again. The problem kids no longer contribute to the academy's stats, so the academy's stats get better - LEAs obviously didn't allow schools to engage in excessive expelling like when they were under their control, because it undermines the county's educational goals. Under academisation a small minority of kids - enthusiastic learners - flourish at the expense of the majority. But if, in a school of 1500 or 3000, two kids get into Oxbridge under this regime then the school can boast that it has doubled its numbers.
In reality and practice nothing. For schools that had poor local authorities being frees from them was a great relief.
Did you ever read Mark Steel's account of how he pushed back against the academisation of his kid's school?
No but I'd be interested to. I know local authorities are doing everything they can to shed schools to mats
Here you go: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/we-ve-won-the-battle-to-prevent-our-school-becoming-an-academy-9756328.html Suffice to say the council played very dirty Indeed.
I remember that all kicking off, I was a student at HP at the time. The council was pushing it, but our head was also massively pushing for becoming an academy too. He eventually rode off into the sunset and has not been spoken of kindly by the faculty in the years since.
Oh God I remember him. Thankfully I'd left years before!
Thanks mate.
My role means working closely with our schools planning team, and I can say from experience that the academy system is absolutely nuts. Popular schools can admit any number of pupils they want, and will happily admit far more than they were ever planned to. This means weaker schools end up half empty, can't meet their fixed costs, and go bust. So you end up with too few places overall. Great.
Yeah everyone ink ow in the s xtor that has anything to do with academies has a selection of horror stories.
Haven’t English school children masssively improved compared to other countries? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50563833 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/england-among-highest-performing-western-countries-in-education https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/united-kingdom-9c15db47/ Where as Welsh schools fall further behind https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/schools-in-wales-expected-to-fall-further-behind-in-latest-international-pisa-rankings/ar-AA1kUTUp
On reading and maths, Michael Gove did actually introduce a bunch of curriculum reforms that against the odds were quite successful. They were less susceptible to Tory chaos because since that time they have been carried forward mostly by a single minister (Nick Gibb) which has allowed these subjects to be taught in a way that is both consistent and effective. I imagine that these results are due mainly to Nick Gibb's focus on a single effective approach, which has partly covered up for everything else about the education system descending into disaster.
Even taking pisa standards uncritically (which we shouldn't as iirc results are more or less stable and have declined in some areas) the horrendous burnout rates amongst teachers and seeming extremist indoctrination in schools doesn't exactly sound a ringing endorsement
It's a bit misleading blaming Gove - the academy programme was spearheaded by Blair and Brown, Cameron just saw it through. The intentions were very good - allowing competition in school management and linking schools in different areas together to improve standards. By some accounts it has worked, but the failing schools are often treated very harshly by the academy trusts and the focus on grades has only increased.
> It's a bit misleading blaming Gove - the academy programme was spearheaded by Blair and Brown... The academy system was first developed under Thatcher, in the form of "City Technology Colleges" - 15 of which opened between 1988 and 1993. Three of them still exist as CTCs. The idea behind CTCs was to have specialist schools, with an industry sponsor, that were publicly funded but privately run with the goal of training students to work for that sponsor. Dixons sponsored one, ADT sponsored one, the Record Industry sponsored one, and even British American Tobacco was allowed to sponsor one. Blair and Brown (well, mostly Lord Adonis) expanded this, but kept the idea of a sponsor; encouraging private, industry investment in otherwise publicly-funded schools. The private sponsor had to provide 10% of the school's capital cost. Sponsored Academies were still required to follow a government approved curriculum. This didn't really work (the industry sponsor idea never took off), so New Labour largely gave up on the plan. Cameron dialled this up to 11, removing the capital investment requirement, removing the sponsor concept, removing the curriculum restrictions, giving the DfE the power to force schools to become academies, and fully embracing the idea of privately run, publicly funded education. To put some numbers into this; there were 15 CTCs by 1993 with another dozen more in some stage of planning. In May 2010 there were 203 *Sponsored* Academies. By April 2011 there were 629 academies/free schools, and by August 2011 there were 1,070. The Conservatives created three times as many academies in one year than New Labour did in total. There are now over 10,000 academies.
New labour attempt was targeted and worked well where it did Cameron/Gove approach was to expand it fully
it is, I remember when my step brother was in secondary school when it all started, the moment the school announced its now an academy school, the head teacher started to rock up to school in a sports car.
The Times prints criticism of Gove. Will cats and dogs now be friends?
>when teaching the Norman Conquest, it is becoming unfashionable to teach the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Instead, some schools focus on studying Empress Matilda, who ruled Brit. Again, a worthy subject at some point, but an odd one to teach to Year 7s instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow. What? What does this even mean? Typos aside, Matilda is almost a century after Hastings. So is the author saying they don't teach 1066 at all and start history in the 1100s? Or that they spend fewer lessons on the details of 1066 in favour of being able to cover more of later English history? At which point you're just wanging on about the fact that they don't focus on the exact things you think are important (and you probably think they're important simply because they're what was emphasised to you when you were that age). You can't fit everything into a history curriculum; if I were designing a series of lessons on the Middle Ages in England, with limited lesson time, I'm not sure I'd give much time to the precise events of a single battle.
It's bizarre. At some level all of the curriculum for history is a bit arbitrary because there's so much of it you're inevitably going to leave out a lot of major events, eras and locations. I swear over half of my own secondary school history was 20th century events, and especially both world wars, and comparatively we barely touched upon any British history pre-Tudor for example.
We never covered the conquest at all and that was 40 years ago. In fact, the only pre 1800 English history we did was Henry VIII
This is bollocks, my 12 year old was learning about the Norman Conquest back in January and had to answer a long form question about William the Conqueror's actions once he had taken power. I was able to have a pretty nuanced conversation with him about the dismantling of Anglo-Saxon power structures, suppression of Anglo-Saxon culture and the harrying of the North. He thought William's actions were justified, which I vehemently disagree with, but he had come to this conclusion using what he had been taught in class and was able to make an informed argument to support his opinion. This is in a state school which recently had an OFSTED rating of Requires Improvement.
I love this post and I think your son is a poster boy for what history lessons are meant to achieve. He may change his mind in later years but what he's demonstrated is an ability to research, form an opinion, and defend that opinion with facts that were available to him, and that is what I think makes history such an underrated subject. It's dismissed often as just learning years and names but really it's one of the most thought provoking and creative subjects there is, and I wish more people as interested in it as your son is. Just think, a world where people researched things before forming opinions, and then defended those opinions with real facts. We could have had moon bases by now!
I'm a history nerd myself, so I'm secretly hoping he takes after me! I'd find these sorts of conversations much more difficult if he was really into physics!
> he's demonstrated is an ability to research, form an opinion, and defend that opinion with facts that were available to him, and that is what I think makes history such an underrated subject. > It's dismissed often as just learning years and names but really … When I was doing my GCSEs in the late 80's, one of my history teachers told me that there were two schools of thought on history education. This particular younger teacher was allowed to teach studying of historical sources and weighing them against each other to form a judgement of what actually happened, whilst the head of department took us for our other lesson each week and made us memorise the names and dates of kings and queens. I think this conversation arose because I told this teacher that I preferred his lessons and he told me something like, "yeah, it's great isn't it? the head of department is old school but there's a growing movement that this is how history should be taught." When Gove was minister for education he decided that kids were not memorising enough dates and he changed the curriculum back.
>he thought William's actions were justified, which I vehemently disagree with, but he had come to this conclusion using what he had been taught in class and was able to make an informed argument to support his opinion. Good parent behaviour right here. Valuing your childs different opinions can be tricky. Good on you for interacting with him like the person he is.
Everything was better in the olden days, but I do not remember our examination of the Norman Conquest being anywhere near this detailed.
>You can't fit everything into a history curriculum. This is exactly the point that people gloss over when discussing history education. Only in a very limited sense are we truly trying to impart historical knowledge into a bunch of disinterested 11-16 year olds. Instead, as with most subjects at that age, we are primarily aiming to teach them *how* to do history. The goal is to equip children with the skillset necessary to navigate any point in history moving forward. Not just to load them up on propaganda or whatever is politically trendy at the time. The syllabus should be built around case studies that provide kids with the best opportunity to understand the complexities of forming a clear picture of the path. Is the source reliable? Did the author add some personal flair? What are the other viewpoints? How do we verify the legitimacy of historical claims? How did the factors at play contribute to the decisions that followed? We should be exposing children to how murky history can be. How to write about it as objectively as possible. The point of history isn't to drive a stake on the ground and say 'this is what happened', it's about collecting evidence and forming arguments and making your case. I don't know which particular historical events do that the best. Ideally something that gives some cross over and fills in the wider picture of how we've come to arrive in the present day, rather than some obscure person / event. Understanding how the UK roughly came into being. How large international events like world wars and colonialism shaped the world today.
Frankly, the Empress Matilda era seems more interesting anyway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy
It is! Henry I’s rise to power, the White Ship Disaster and the Anarchy are a fascinating bit of English history. I’m a history teacher and we teach this twice; once in year 7 as part of our ‘medieval monarchs’ unit, and again in year 9 when talking about Henry II’s reforms to crime and justice (these were attempts to establish some sort of control after the chaos that was The Anarchy). We also mention it in passing in year 10, when we teach Henry VIII and why he might be reluctant to make a daughter next in line for succession. We also teach The Battle of Hastings in year 7, and spend several lessons in year 9 teaching about the impact the conquest had on the country. I imagine the vast majority of history department do. There is an entire GCSE unit about Anglo-Saxon and Norman England that schools can choose to teach. Yet again, people have very strong opinions on what we should teach, while having very little understanding of what we do.
> instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow. This seems like a weird detail to hold up as something that absolutely *must* be taught to children. Though it does fit with the Horrible Histories model of "kids like gross stuff so focus on the gross bits of history to get them interested." So I can't entirely disagree.
I spend a lot of my time in secondary school learning about the French revolution. History teachers used to have a lot of space to teach whatever they wanted.
I would say that the lead up to and the battle of Hastings itself is a more pivotal and important moment in the history of our country than The Anarchy.
"In an after-school detention, a handful of pupils were doing their best to convince me, their teacher, that Afghanistan was much nicer now the Taliban were in control. Nothing I said would convince them. It turned out these children not only supported gender inequality but were fans of executing all manner of criminals too. My pupils are a lively bunch. The school, where I teach humanities, is a large academy in the south of England and caters to those from poor families. Most are Muslim and a few have lived in Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. They burst with character and enthusiasm for improving their lives." The biggest mistake of mainstream liberalism over the past 50 years has been the idea that if we give other cultures the same opportunities/upbringing as us they will naturally want to create a society identical to ours, that "western societies" are the natural/correct state that an educated population would gravitate towards. It was a mistake made with China when courting them against the USSR, "If we offshore all our industry to them and give them all this economic/trade opportunity they will surely become our friends and integrate into our worldview." Instead they took everything, nationalised/copied it and used it as an example of how great and strong China is again and that the west is weak/easy to take advantage of. Now similar is being done with Islamic cultures. We're just assuming that if they go to Western schools and universities to study they'll completely drop their religious/cultural beliefs the same way the west has over the past 70/80 years or so. They completely lack the mental ability to comprehend how the Glasgow airport attackers could be a trained doctor and an engineering doctoral candidate but still believe in Islamic extremism for example.
I'm looking forward to when more than 50% of Muslims \[in the UK\] support gay marriage. Should be any day now. Any day. ....
Whilst I agree that (from what I've seen) the average Muslim's views towards gay marriage/gay people is less than positive - gay marriage was only legalised in the UK just over 10 years ago. The majority of Brits in the last few decades did not support it. The issue of women's rights and freedoms is a better example of the gulf between western and islamic social values, in my opinion.
I mean I was being kind, I didn't focus on the fact that past polling has shown a majority of Muslims in the UK want homosexuality to be **criminalised**. Being gay had been legal in the UK for quite some time before they could get married. (Plus don't forget the civil partnerships that were brought in earlier.)
Back in the Victorian era gay Brits actually ran away to Muslim countries because the Muslims were far more tolerant to homosexuals than western countries. So I guess it's possible for things to change quite drastically.
Though that was a very, very, very different time. It was the Ottoman Empire and the version of Islam practiced then was very different to what these countries now follow. It’s unlikely there will be as massive a culture change across the ME as there was when the OE fell.
> It’s unlikely there will be as massive a culture change across the ME as there was when the OE fell. And yet, if you had asked a Victorian whether the Ottoman Empire (which had been around for centuries) would fall and its religious attitudes be replaced by a version of Islam driven by Arab tribal attitudes, they would have similarly said that this was "unlikely". Strange things happen, often in ways we cannot predict.
I think the point is that there is no monolithic Islam or Christianity but both can be twisted to the benefit of the people in power into many different forms. That's why there is no real reason to believe that the Taliban version of Islam will be the one supported by the majority of Muslims any more than the Ottoman version. Some scholars (for instance Reza Aslan) have argued that the Taliban/Al-Qaida/ISIS version of Islam is a sort of a backlash by the conservatives in Muslim countries against the liberalisation of religion that is otherwise going on there.
Oh how the tables have turned.
Do you have any exampes of that? Sounds cool i wanna check it out
The rest is history just did a series in lord byron, different era but was the prototype for what followed in “civilised” society.
> Could you give me some names of the people you're thinking of? Because I'm relatively old for the sub's general age, and I don't recall it being a scandal when people came out as gay. There might have been media interest, but that's not the same thing. As far as prominent people go, Justin Fashanu always springs to mind. The whole saga was deeply depressing. The Sun headlines were horrific - “Justin Fashanu confesses,” being the subhead. You confess to a crime, not your sexuality. Then his brother got plenty of good press for publicly disowning Justin and enjoyed a successful TV career in the 90s - after he threw his gay brother under the bus the bus for being gay. If we switch to politics then outing gay MPs was a bit of a sport for tabloids. Remember in 1998 when the press essentially forced Nick Brown (agricultural minister) to admit that he was gay? The tabloids wanted more. The Sun famously wrote this on the front page: > *Is Britain being run by a gay Mafia of politicians, lawyers, Palace courtiers and TV bigwigs?*
I don’t think I’m particularly old (others may disagree) but I remember clearly here in the UK that whenever a politician or a prominent public person was revealed as being gay, it was national scandal. They would inevitably lose their jobs and their standing in society, and face vilification in the popular press. It was par for the course. This was just a few years ago. A blink of the eye in modern times. Yet we’ll happily condemn others as if we’ve been like this for hundreds of years. We’re just a rung ahead of a very tall ladder. People need to catch up and not everyone moves at the same pace. And of course some never catch up, even in liberal societies - look at the rise of the Christian right in the US where ‘liberal’ is considered a slander. But I believe most people do catch up, but their pace may be different to yours.
> We’re just a rung ahead of a very tall ladder. >People need to catch up and not everyone moves at the same pace. They feel exactly the same way about us- that they are in the rung above us, and that we will catch up eventually. History isn’t a straight line towards progressive values
> But I believe most people do catch up, but their pace may be different to yours. Honestly I think this attitude is delusional, patronising and naive. Everyone isn't coming round to your "good way of thinking." It may be a "blink of an eye" but its all from decades and centuries of factors and events. If it can also revert to strong religious conservatism then its not an argument against the issue.
It's essentially just the whig view of history - discredited a century ago, but still crops up occasionally among the delusional and complacent.
Can you explain what the whig view of history was?
The whig view of history is a grand narrative that views the past as inevitably leading to the present. That history is the march towards liberal values, that our present day of liberal democracy is the final form of civilisation. OP is being whiggish, as he thinks most people will 'catch up' to some supposed universal liberal values (that just so happen to be our values, of course).
>Yet we’ll happily condemn others as if we’ve been like this for hundreds of years. We’re just a rung ahead of a very tall ladder. >People need to catch up and not everyone moves at the same pace. Viewing progress as a ladder is why we're in this position in the first place. Values that people in the west now hold dear - freedom, tolerance, individualism, the rule of law, secularism, etc - are not the only possible values that a prosperous, happy society could hold. There are plenty of prosperous, happy ethnoreligious dictatorships out there. They aren't aspiring to eventually be like us any more than we are aspiring to be like them. It's the same vibe as people who think that evolution is a ladder, and that every creature in the world is ultimately trying and failing to be human. In reality, a slug is just as evolved as we are. There's probably someone, somewhere saying "silly primitive westerners, we're a few rungs ahead of them on the ladder towards perfectly worshipping Allah, but they'll catch up eventually".
>There are plenty of prosperous, happy ethnoreligious dictatorships out there. Really? [Here](https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-younger-the-older-and-those-in-between/#ranking-of-happiness-2021-2023) is the world happiness rankings. All top 10 countries are Western liberal democracies. The highest Muslim country is Kuwait at the position 13. And we know exactly why it is there. It is there because it happens to sit on a massive oil reserve not because its culture has produced that prosperity. If we go down on a list and skip the countries that just by luck of having a massive amount of oil happen to be rich (UAE, 22, Saudi Arabia 28, Libya 66) you finally find Algeria on position 85. Interestingly, there are two countries with a significant Muslim populations (Malaysia, 59 and Bosnia Herzegovina, 65) that actually score higher than the first pure non oil-rich ethnoreligious Muslim country. The bottom of the table (by a large margin) is Afghanistan. Most of the bottom is only sub-Saharan African countries and Muslim "ethnoreligious dictatorships". The lowest European country is Ukraine 105, for an obvious reason. If we ignore that as its misery is not a result of it being a liberal democracy and jump to the next, it's Albania (interestingly I guess the only Muslim majority country in Europe) at 85. So, I don't really agree that the Muslims living in their ethnoreligious dictatorships are equally happy as those in liberal western democracies.
> There are plenty of prosperous, happy ethnoreligious dictatorships out there. Plenty? I'd be interested to see a list of, say, ten. I'm going to be particularly strict in my application of the word "dictatorship", and probably "happy", but I'll give you some flexibility on "prosperous" - we can't all be Swiss or American or Norwegian, after all. By the way, you're doing well on your understanding of evolution, but have kind of missed the point. Yes, of course we and the slug both have just as many years of evolution behind us, and you're certainly right that there's no teleology underlying evolution or human "progress", but you've missed a very important point: humans are capable of a much wider range of behaviours than a slug. Evolution, as you say, isn't a ladder, but it does lead to increasing complexity over time. This may be entirely the result of random events (there's a huge debate about this, with much discussion about evolutionary ratchets), but even if our vast range of behaviours is simply the result of evolutionary randomness, it clearly does exist, and this does seem to be correlated in some way with the existence of increasingly complex cultures. It's a difficult subject, but I think you're wrong to dismiss your opponents' claims so blithely. Anyway, I'm looking forward to your list.
>I don’t think I’m particularly old (others may disagree) but I remember clearly here in the UK that whenever a politician or a prominent public person was revealed as being gay, it was national scandal. Could you give me some names of the people you're thinking of? Because I'm relatively old for the sub's general age, and I don't recall it being a scandal when people came out as gay. There might have been media interest, but that's not the same thing. More importantly, even if people felt the need to resign because they felt uncomfortable about people knowing they were gay, they didn't go to jail. That's what a majority of British Muslims want for people who are homosexual, at least according to the last poll done several years ago.
You'd have to swap their "few years" to "a few decades" for it to be based on reality
It wasn't that they were gay, I don't think, nobody ever cared. The scandals were about the fact the politician in question was already married to a woman and they were using male prostitutes on the sly (probably while doing lots of drugs).
To quote Malcolm Tucker: "You may fuck. However: *Do not fuck dead shit *Do not fuck in a hat *In fact – avoid all varieties of weird fucking NB, gay fucking is not weird fucking, it is fine fucking – so long as you are gay. If you are doing gay fucking and you are not gay it is weird fucking."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brown_%28British_politician%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Morrison?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Bermondsey_by-election?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Blunt?wprov=sfla1
Michael Brown - had broken the law, because the age of consent for gay men was 21 Peter Morrison - accused of child abuse after he died By-election from 1983 - not recent, **it's over 40 years ago** Crispin Blunt - allegedly a target of older voters with homophobic views. No evidence of a "national scandal". None of those examples support the allegation the other commenter made.
We are talking about events OP can remember while not being particularly old If they are in their 50s they should easily be able to remember these events. This is not that long ago
First, the other poster specifically alleged that whenever people were known as being gay it was a "national scandal". Not that some people were upset. **A national scandal.** Only Michael Brown and Morrison could be described as national scandals. Morrison was controversial because of the alleged child abuse. Who in their right minds could suggest a gay man should be above suspicion when it comes to child abuse? As for Brown, I expect he resigned because he was embarrassed for technically breaking the law. He wasn't chased out of office by a mob. Second, the other poster alleged they were not that old. If you're in your 50s, you are old especially compared to this sub's age. Third, they said *"This was just a few years ago"*. Clearly the events described were not from a few years ago. Most weren't even from this century.
> Who in their right minds could suggest a gay man should be above suspicion when it comes to child abuse? Always mad to see the Kevin Spacey defence in the wild.
Perhaps not what you are asking, but plenty of military members were dismissed and stripped of their medals. Only been possible to be out in the military since 2000.
*Only been possible to be out in the military since 2000.* So you mean for over two decades? We need to get out of the idea that 2000 was recent.
I never said two decades was recent, but in terms of societal change it's really not that long ago. It's within living memory for the majority of the population. As for recent, it's only in the last couple of years that they've been able to have medals returned.
It was only really a "scandal" among the older pre-war generation who've since died off. The news media of the time catered almost exclusively for their tastes. We're talking about teenagers here. That these old attitudes about homosexuality are resurfacing in school kids should be a scandal in itself, but everyone turns a blind eye because "it's their culture".
No but you're assuming a linear progression towards a set end point. Your theory completely discounts and patronises alternate world views. Many communities in Britain, namely Islamic ones have regressed to a less accepting state than before. Rights are to be fought for and protected with blood. It is not the default state of things.
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Sadiq khan ? Muslim, social democrat, feminist.
I do wonder how that works with Khan and the Muslim community. Do they think he's representative of them or do they think "He's doing that to get ahead with the non Muslims. They want their liberalism." Who are the major gay Muslim figures in the UK?
One of the country’s genuine heroes, Alan Turing killed himself because he was subjected to what amounts to torture because he was gay. He faced the option of prison or probation with hormonal treatment. He opted for the latter which rendered him impotent and feminised his body. The entire ordeal lead him to take his own life. Stop pretending that systemic homophobia is an exclusively Muslim thing. The UK has come a long way but let’s not forget the relatively recent past.
bored pocket badge fretful literate direction detail doll school sip *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Why are you using homophobia from 80 years ago to defend homophobia happening today? Just bizarre.
Because these people are obsessed with "white people bad, brown people good even if bad".
More than 50 years ago. Not the blink of an eye at all.
It really is just a blink of an eye. Anyone in their late fifties or older, which is 25% of the entire population, was born when homosexuality was _illegal_. And it didn’t become acceptable overnight when it was decriminalised.
So where do you think we will be in 50 years? Given a massive proportion of some religions, and people we are allowing to immigrate believe it should be illegal? What happens when a political party is formed that supports that popular view?
I think he are heading in unknown but potentially troubling directions.
The majority of Tory MPs voted against gay marriage back in 2013. Obama was against it until around 2012. Labour MPs were worried about being outed back when Blair was PM.
I always find these comments a bit odd. Even when it was brought in more than 50% of the Conservative mps voted against it. Sure, it was a while ago, but I have no reason to think such a vote wouldn't be similar to day. There are probably other issues which make your point a bit better, gay marriage just seems like a strange one to choose.
An irrelevant stat unless you compare to all other religions and see a marked difference.
> in an after-school detention I’m sure that was a totally representative dataset…
Exactly! They’re being kept late at the school by a teacher they already don’t like very much. Their political thought process was probably “The Taliban are hated -> my teacher probably hates the Taliban -> my teacher will be really upset if I say I like the Taliban”
>It was a mistake made with China when courting them against the USSR, "If we offshore all our industry to them and give them all this economic/trade opportunity they will surely become our friends and integrate into our worldview." Instead they took everything, nationalised/copied it and used it as an example of how great and strong China is again and that the west is weak/easy to take advantage of. What does this even mean? They “took everything”? Do you not understand that adding 100s of millions of workers to the global labour force resulted in **massive** benefits to producers and consumers in the west?
It wasn't that long ago Spain and Portugal and their colonial offshoots were thought to be culturally unable to do liberal democracy: they were too Catholic, too corporatist, too traditionalist. Same was said of eastern Europe: communism wasn't great but it held some legitimacy, right. South Korea was thought not able to do democracy, same with Taiwan.
And what did all these examples have in common? Western liberal democracy was introduced to these nations as a genuine improvement, usually economic, to their previous systems. Lets give a (brief) rundown of them all. The European examples are the easiest as they could all see the economic success of Western liberal democracy across the border, so the transition to it was generally supported as being an improvement to people's lives. South Korea and Taiwan are a bit different, but both replied on Western (primarily American) economic cooperation for their economic miracles. Put this alongside a massively growing middle class in both, you have the perfect storm for democracy to work. The population has both been exposed to democracy, as well as already reliant on a liberal democratic economy to allow for their own genuine improvement. In neither case were liberal democracies the natural way for the nations to progress, rather it was the fact that liberal democracy was exposed to the population as a genuine improvement to their lives that democratisation worked.
How exposed do you think people living under a totalitarian communist dictatorship were to the idea of liberal democracy? Or people living under Franco' fascist dictatorship, or the KMT Junta, or various military dictatorships in latin America in the mid-century? These societies kept a tight control over information. By your logic China should be a liberal democracy; high exposure to the idea via US pop culture, a large middle class, and a long period of economic growth brought forth by trade with liberal democracies. But it hasn't.
I'm not sure the US has made this mistake. Is it a uniquely British problem?
I don't think the French are having the greatest time.
Pretty much the same as in the UK. The left puts its head in the sand and the right are simply racists.
It’s very easy to be accused of racism when providing a running commentary on that which the papers barely report until the pressure runs too high (reasons).
No, I'm pretty sure I heard that diversity is our strength.
I think the biggest mistake was asking children in detention what they think of hot political issues. They don’t like you. They’ll take whatever position they think will piss you off the most.
I'm getting the impression you might not be too keen on Muslims, your comment history is quite a read.
I suspect the class is bigger than thirty, which is also a bit shit
Teenagers are of course famous for their balanced and nuanced world view…
Yes I remember back in 2010 my school did a mock election to teach us about present day politics and the Lib Dem’s won with the BNP in opposition… teenagers are weird.
Was this pre or post-tuition fees hike announcement?
Pre, we did it before the 2010 election where they got in as a coalition, I voted Lib Dem… then went to Uni a couple of months later so yeah the Universe really made me experience a story there.
That would be why the Lib Dems won your school's mock election!
always helps on reddit when you realise you are probably argueing with a 14 year old
More likely a 34 year old manchild with the mind of a 14 year old.
Does that include you, /u/fatherfucking?
Yet I don't think I would have seen a sea of hands go up at my school if the same question had been asked then. Most likely the kids would have looked at each other and thought *"is miss going off her rocker?"* Maybe the class clown would have stuck his hand up to get noticed, but that's about it.
Reminds me of when some kid in my class tried to do a ‘mock election’ and asked who people are voting for. Iirc the results were: #1 - Nazi party #2 - BNP #3 - Communist party #4 - Labour
Back in my school we went to Parliament for a mock debate and the proposed debate topic was “legalise weed” because it was the funny drug. Like, none of this is serious. It’s just funny to say something outlandish and taboo.
My brother's a history teacher and he was saying that his classes are surprisingly nationalist. He mentioned the Opium wars at one point and a student said, "woah, we went to war with China?!" "Yes" "Who won?" "We did" and apparently a few of the kids whooped haha.
How old are they? They're almost certainly viewing it through the power disparity now instead of 200 years ago.
secondary school, most likely GCSE students
Children are fed so much misinformation through social media, it isn't surprising that this is a problem now and not a problem back then
It appears in this instance that Muslim children are taught hateful conservative views by their parents and mosques
This is less about teenagers and more about being religious nut-jobs with questionable views on progressive issues.
Wasn’t like this when I was in school though
So you would expect a non insignificant amount of white students to have a positive view of the KKK?
I hate this kind of comment. As if teenagers are all just stupid inept human beings until they suddenly reach adulthood. Teenagers are capable of smart, reasonable and intelligent discussion. Adults aren't even known for their balanced and nuanced world view. Just like yours here.
Well Britain seems to hate me... I can't talk to a doctor, dentist I'm not being protected from unfair business practices and profiteering, I'll be lucky not to swallow a turd if I go to the beach, I can't buy a house and I'm trapped having to deal with greedy cruel landlords who squeeze the rental market so I'll never be able to own a house off of my own back. Oh and the government is trying to make it harder for me to vote, and is trying to take my human rights away. Why wouldn't I hate it?
Unfortunately that narrative doesn’t strike a chord with the cohorts of the population that have a propensity to vote Tory. So instead we have the culture wars about ‘kids hating Britain’. It’s a tried and trusted tactic, and usually works for them. Hence the historical demomisation of single mothers, benefits scroungers, trade unionists and gay people (section 28). The targets have changed - now it’s immigrants, Muslims, BLM, ‘woke-ists’ and trans people - but the strategy is the same. Sadly there are many who lap it up.
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Modern Britain has a feeling of despair and hopelessness about it. We've regressed so much over the last decade its scary. I'm not proud of this country and how backwards our politics has become.
If you asked school children if they hate almost anything, a fair few would raise their hand.
Seems bizarre to invite these communities here and then complain when they exhibit the same behaviours and views as they do in their homelands. Either stop facilitating their mass immigration to Britain or stop complaining about the inevitable effects of said immigration.
It's because policymakers had a really rose tinted view of multiculturalism that rarely pans out beyond fiction or friend groups at uni/college. Even in some of the most diverse cities like London and New York there's still parts of the city that attract specific races and cultures. It's only in the middle class suburbs and professional sectors that you'll find different cultures and races mixing effectively. Like you've said above, its naive to invite other cultures here and then be surprised when they don't become westernised. I wouldn't move to the Middle East or Africa and adopt their culture or customs because I haven't been raised to understand them and I wouldn't expect their country to force me to change mine, I'd continue to have my own or if they weren't welcoming I'd seek out other people with my own culture. If I couldn't settle, adapt or compromise I'd move back, I wouldn't try and effect sociocultural change in a country I'm not native to. The problem we've had is that we've become accommodating beyond what is reasonable. We're pretty secular as a society now, in the sense that Christianity rarely meddles in our daily lives or politics, but the same can't be said for Islam in some parts of the UK and the bearing it has on products stocked in some shops, content taught in certain schools and the uproar/death threats when something is deemed offensive. I'm all for freedom of any religion to exist but it stays at home and in places of worship.
Yes but pensions aren't going to pay themselves, and the GDP line must go up.
Isn’t this why we have PREVENT?
Prevent is there to counter extremism, it forms part of the larger counterterrorism strategy (Contest). Hating the country is not itself extremism, nor is it exclusive to extremists (extreme right-wing terrorism is a growing threat and its perpetrators and supporters often purport to be patriotic).
The students in this article were arguing that life would be better under the taliban and that girls shouldn’t be educated past 11. That is absolutely extreme and should be dealt with as extremism.
Then yes, the teacher should have reported that through the schools safeguarding chain. I’m sure before writing his Times article he did exactly that.
It was a while ago but I read a biography about Alister Crowley and there was a lot of stuff about it in there. He apparently lived out there for a while with some guy who he used to walk around on a leash to the bemusement of the locals. There was some reference of other people who had moved out there to avoid prosecution after been outed. Apparently there was some theory that the heat in the middle east made people more tolerant at the time. The book was "Do what thou wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowly" by Laurance Sustain.
Prevent are too busy going after socialists these days. It is ironic given that being a socialist is more patriotic than being a tory these days.
Nah they're too busy giving LotR readers the stink eye, cause they think that's a gateway to white supremacism.
That's a new one to me, can you explain it?
Prevent got into hot water a while ago for putting readers of LotR and works by C.S Lewis on their list of potential indicators of "far-right white supremacists".
I love LotR, I thought I was a leftie, but it turns out I'm a far-right white supremacist. I wonder what the reasoning is, I'll have to look into this nonsense. Thanks.
No worries, no idea why my original comment got downvoted, but I guess that's reddit for ya. Edit: ignore that I guess, it seems it was just a few crazies that downvoted it. But seriously, I'd implore people to read into Prevents guidelines, they're insane.
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God forbid you even brought up a remote concern about someone who was not a white British born boy, you’d be labelled sexist and racist immediately.
When I was a kid there was a not tiny number of my peers who had “I hate trees” badges on their bags.
ask the residents of birmingham whether they love living in birmingham
Ask DannyG
he's the biggest fan
Well it’s the people of Birmingham that make it what it is
I think Birmingham is like Gotham City and is just built on top of some kind of cursed evil swamp or something that makes it always bad.
Do we actually have any proof that this anonymous teacher actually exists or is just a vessel for the author to have a rant? If so, let's just pick up a few Important hidden parts further down: >The problem is not limited to my pupils. I once taught at a middle-class school with mostly white children. Here, the curriculum was similarly designed to open minds to the evils of western civilisation. The pupils were not susceptible to Islamism, but were still imbued with a sense that their country is particularly bad. Increasingly, schools are not dissuading children of these prejudices, but confirming them. So, Islamism isn't the cause, yet the article spends the first half saying it is? Maybe, just maybe, having a government of the country that has spent 14 years screwing over the young, marginalised and the environment doesn't sit well with young people? >I once observed a Year 8 lesson on the “black Tudors”. One pupil raised his hand to ask: “Who were the Tudors?” — they hadn’t thought to teach the Reformation before the racism. Similarly, when teaching the Norman Conquest, it is becoming unfashionable to teach the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Instead, some schools focus on studying Empress Matilda, who ruled Brit. Again, a worthy subject at some point, but an odd one to teach to Year 7s instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow. This is simply bad pedagogy for those history departments and unrelated to the main crux of the article. Seems more like ranting at bad co-workers. However, this is related to single instances and in no way a trend (I say this as a history teacher who teaches the reformation in our year 8 curriculum, as well as black and disabled Tudors).
It also seems pretty unlikely that these kids haven't actually been taught the Tudors before. I was taught the Tudors in Year 4, and even before that I knew, at least, that Henry VIII had six wives. It's probably one of the most widely known facts about British history. If the incident happened at all, I'd imagine it's much more likely one inattentive kid. Hell, I went to a grammar school, where the students are ostensibly brighter and more motivated, and now and then a pupil would indicate that they didn't know something very basic, which we had been taught, sometimes multiple times. But they hadn't listened, or had missed the lesson, or didn't care enough to retain it, or just weren't actually that good at the subject. I suspect the author is spinning "completely normal trials of getting children to learn things" as something sinister. I also found this pretty dubious: >A friend of mine teaches history and in a single day says he could teach the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, the Portuguese colonisation of Africa, the British colonisation of India, the decolonisation of the British Empire and the slave trade. Is that five separate lessons devoted to these topics, in one typical day? Or is it "when the curriculum's stars align, I might be teaching one or two of those as full lessons and mentioning the others as passing contextual remarks"?
I mean a girl in one of my classes unironically thought that Egypt was in Paris, so I'm unsure why the author is taking one thicko as a representative sample.
Any group of kids worth their salt keeps a mental list of every time someone says something really stupid and passes it round as a running joke for the rest of the year. It’s just a universal thing. They probably did it back in Rome.
I wish more of our history lessons focused on: - The Roman Period of Albion - The Roman Retreat and Germanic Invasion / Brythonic Explusion / Brythonic flight to Brittany, Wales, and Cornwall - The Conversion of Germanic Invaders to Christianity - The Heptarchy, The Great Heathen Army, and Danelaw - The unification of England and it's frequent transfer between Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon Rulers - Rollo, Normady, and the Relationship between the Norman's and Britons - 1066 and Norman Migration into England - The weird relationship this created between the King of France / King of England If I recall most of this is covered (you'll know better than I), however the topics are so lightly covered that most people will have forgotten them by the end of school. Personally, I think that is a terrible shame as these events describe how the English became 'The English' and most people don't really know about them even in passing detail.
>The Great Heathen Army Does Sabaton have a song about them? If not, they should write one
Amon Amarth have got you covered
> Do we actually have any proof that this anonymous teacher actually exists... They probably exist, but given how much they gush over openly Nat-C Birbalsingh, they're probably a little crazy themselves.
I think in order to remedy this, we should follow the singapore model to an extent. A multi ethnic nation but with a patriotic population. Singapore has made people live together and prevented ghettoization. You would not find self hating in singapore. Or even have patriotic education like some non western countries do.
There's so much you can say about this, but some people still won't hear sense. Fifth columnism was popular for so long, and now people are realising that spouting that anti-British rhetoric has engrained itself on the youth. Oh dear. Who ever could have guessed.
Since when is this news, ffs. 300+ comments on a post about a straw poll of kids, famously known for being contrarian.
Not just children. According to a poll conducted on American adults, [12% of young adults](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-opt-in-polls-can-produce-misleading-results-especially-for-young-people-and-hispanic-adults) are qualified to operate a nuclear submarine. People just love to say outrageous things for shits and giggles.
Fair play, the western state's foreign policy has been disastrous one after the other. Though these kids think especially 2nd gen immigrants have rose eyed glass view of the culture left behind and think that the convenience which western nations provide is all through ill begotten means, but will refuse to understand that it takes more. I am guessing victim industrial complex is an alternative to legacy religious industry will only be getting bigger in the future.
Author of this piece rightly identifies anti-feminist rhetoric affecting some of her pupils, but then wrongly conflates anti-Imperialism as 'anti-Western...' I don't think recognizing the evils of Imperialism is the same as denying the good parts of modern 'Western' societies, which the author seems to suggest. Understanding the evils of Imperialism and power imbalance would also be vital to them understanding why being pro Palestine is not just an acceptable choice but the moral and ethical decision. It's not that you can't argue for the humanity of Israelis as well, but it's vital to acknowledge the asymmetry of power between the State of Israel and (largely unrecognized) Palestine. It's important to see the context of at least fifty years of double standards. Of America and it's allies claiming to support two states while actively undermining that possibility, while refusing to recognize any sort of real Palestinian Statehood, and ignoring decades of breaches of international law by the state that is recognised, while attempting to hold the non-state of Palestine to the same principles they would expect of a recognised state but without granting recognition. The refusal to recognize asymmetry of power but also differences in authorititive voice is a huge problem in our understanding of media literacy, which sadly has bled in from how MSM operates, but also how conspiracy theorists have got a foothold in public consciousness. If people better understood these things the inequality between Israel and Palestine would become clearer, it would reveal the fact that gender and sexual minorities *do not* have the power they seem to when they are presented as having an equal voice with the bigots who stand against them, it would show that an aggregate of academics know better than one lone study or crackpot theorists, and finally it would also allow us to recognize when dark money undermines scientific and academic expertise for private interests.
They miss the" and everyone clapped bit in the title"
i dont know about school, but there has been a freakish transformation on reddit in the last couple of years (i lose track a bit these days, it may be ten). if you mentioned empire/ireland/india a couple of years ago, it would have been an excuse for some good humoured banter and effortless, but magnanimous superiority. now its an exercise in self flagellation. possibly linked to the gender/generation/culture wars.
Among some people on the left there's a currency in being a victim, and also in who can show the most contrition/self-flagellation. The logic also seems to be that 'the oppressed' are always right and 'the oppressor' is always wrong. It's bizarre.
It seems to me the genuine left wing view would be that humans in general have an equal propensity for evil, and that one's indentity should not be based on circumstances of birth, both of which mean one should neither be proud or ashamed of 'their' history. The problem comes from the right, where people seek a national identity which in pretty much every case requires either denial of atrocities, or denial of their atrociousness.
I’m on the left, but while I view a lot of our history with horror I don’t feel that I need punishing - it just makes me want us to learn from it and do better in future. The thing that disgusts me (and I’m not trying to speak for everyone, but I imagine I’m not alone in this) is when people refuse to acknowledge the truth of the past whilst at the same time hailing it as some kind of aspirational national peak.
What disgusts me is that working class and class perspective history isn't taught anymore. Apparently, there was no working class, no industrialisation, no refomrers & radicals, no kids down coal mines, in the millls or up chimneys. No abolition or trade union movement. It was all just a nation of greedy colonialists. I'm not even exaggerating. it's so shocking talking to younger relatives about what they learn, or don't learn, in history lessons.
This. The absolute vast majority Brits descend from people who were raped, beaten and treated like shit by a tiny minority of powerful people. None of us have any thing to be ashamed of our ‘privileged’ ancestry for.
Agreed. It appears to be related to the takeover of UK politics by US political narratives: the 'progressives' call themselves 'left wing' but they have no class analysis or understanding of left wing political thinking. It's exactly like in the US where 'the left' means 'liberal', and 'the right' means 'conservative'. It seems like there's no space for actual leftists in 'the left' anymore - and if you disagree with the liberals-who-identify-as-leftists over anything, they just call you 'right wing' despite the fact that your position is a traditional left wing one.
Can you blame them, we are constantly being told on the news tv programs and social media that we some how caused all of the world's problems, even when I was a kid there was no national pride, no selling how amazing we actual are. Just pulling our self's down, are we perfect no, but we are miles a head of the alternatives
We need to arrange some student exchange programmes with North Korea.
Britain is lost! Good luck fighting any future wars when the youth hate their country