I have removed the piece 'Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony' which was here. I don't want to prejudice my younger son's remaining two years at primary school. His experience in the Scottish education system has been bad enough already.
Few parents today can say the truth about what happened to their children and their family in Scottish education, what they think about their school or what we feel about that without fear of intimidation, recrimination, reprisal and consequence from the local authority. Or simply, we don't want to risk our child being discriminated against in school - not getting chosen, not getting awards because the parent is trouble.
Why not just talk to the school? That would be the obvious choice - a partnership between the parents and the school. What a novel idea; but you can't have a partnership when one side thinks it is really its job alone, that parents are just an unfortunate nuisance that you have to listen to but ignore. It is the same mentality from this council that my father experienced more than twenty years ago when he led his village council. The man from the regional council came to see the village and (supposedly) hear what they wanted. "We have to listen to you but we don't have to do anything you want" he said, bluntly. And they didn't. Now, I see that, shocking though that was, at least it was honest. It isn't like that now. Today, if you have kids - although I expect it is the same if you have to interact with the state for housing or benefits - public sector workers write notes about you, share them with other state representatives and compile dossiers on you and your family. If you find that hard to believe, watch the video stories of the families on the No To Named Person website.
We can't talk to the school because as the piece 'Correspondance' [sic] explains they do not want to know. I know a mother who works in a particular area of special needs in which her own child has those needs but it was a battle for her to even get these recognised in school.
Few parents today can say the truth about what happened to their children and their family in Scottish education, what they think about their school or what we feel about that without fear of intimidation, recrimination, reprisal and consequence from the local authority. Or simply, we don't want to risk our child being discriminated against in school - not getting chosen, not getting awards because the parent is trouble.
Why not just talk to the school? That would be the obvious choice - a partnership between the parents and the school. What a novel idea; but you can't have a partnership when one side thinks it is really its job alone, that parents are just an unfortunate nuisance that you have to listen to but ignore. It is the same mentality from this council that my father experienced more than twenty years ago when he led his village council. The man from the regional council came to see the village and (supposedly) hear what they wanted. "We have to listen to you but we don't have to do anything you want" he said, bluntly. And they didn't. Now, I see that, shocking though that was, at least it was honest. It isn't like that now. Today, if you have kids - although I expect it is the same if you have to interact with the state for housing or benefits - public sector workers write notes about you, share them with other state representatives and compile dossiers on you and your family. If you find that hard to believe, watch the video stories of the families on the No To Named Person website.
We can't talk to the school because as the piece 'Correspondance' [sic] explains they do not want to know. I know a mother who works in a particular area of special needs in which her own child has those needs but it was a battle for her to even get these recognised in school.
It could though be that your child is bullied. How many schools do you know that will admit bullying happens in their school or can provide testimonies from parents or child victims who felt the school got on the case and addressed the issues well? In our area I find very few.
What if your child is bored and you are trying to get extension activities beyond colouring in or asking please could they not turn her off literacy by making her write out and write out and write out words she already knows? What if you don't think it's OK that the school lets out the Primary 1s and then just shuts the door without checking every child has someone to pick them up. What if you think it's not OK when children are playing on condemned equipment in the school grounds? What if you would like an alternative for your child than the religious worship - worship, not learning mind - that Scottish primary schools are legally mandated to provide six times a year? What if a teacher shuts the door in your face in the pouring rain because she says, fallaciously, maliciously, you and your child were not on time? All of these are just a few examples from our school life.
Even if they hear you out, none of it is taken on board. Anything that could be perceived as criticism or, to put it another way, the subject of improvement, is quickly covered up because improvement can only come from within. The last school preached a "growth mindset" - being open to learning from your mistakes and yet is anything but.
I tried for years to get work for my son to alleviate his boredom at his first school - which went through five heads in two years. The battles just to get him to put on school uniform - and what an anachronistic, controlling idea that is - are engraved on my mind. Sometimes we had to take the car because trying to get him to walk there could be so difficult. These problems are caused by the school and yet the parents have to deal with them and their repercussions. Did anyone in Scottish education stop to even think that brainwashing a child and forcing them pray is a form of child abuse, likewise forcing them to write out words they know, likewise cooping them up in a box when they should be outside learning as much as possible?
I tried for years to get work for my son to alleviate his boredom at his first school - which went through five heads in two years. The battles just to get him to put on school uniform - and what an anachronistic, controlling idea that is - are engraved on my mind. Sometimes we had to take the car because trying to get him to walk there could be so difficult. These problems are caused by the school and yet the parents have to deal with them and their repercussions. Did anyone in Scottish education stop to even think that brainwashing a child and forcing them pray is a form of child abuse, likewise forcing them to write out words they know, likewise cooping them up in a box when they should be outside learning as much as possible?
A question I learnt from Atul Gawande's superb Being Mortal is: "For whose convenience is an institution, like a geriatric home set up? For whom is the marketing, the brochures, for whom the efficacy of the operational routines? Similarly for whose convenience is school - for the suppliers or the children? How would learning be or the celebration of success if children had a say in designing and organising it?
Schools won't brook what they would consider 'interference' in their school or the raising of concerns about their methods. In their view, the parental role seems to be essentially to feed, water and house the child. The state 'educates' and what a grim, perverted word that is. If this seems extreme, consider 'education': the spotlight on the teacher the educator, talking, doing, controlling, being important. With 'edcuation' something external is being done to a child, willing or not, to meet targets. Consider learning: more like growth, the focus on the child, the impetus from the child, learning is autonomous, guided, social. It is to do with something you take in to yourself, willingly, make your own, so that you can then use it, create with it.
Schools won't brook what they would consider 'interference' in their school or the raising of concerns about their methods. In their view, the parental role seems to be essentially to feed, water and house the child. The state 'educates' and what a grim, perverted word that is. If this seems extreme, consider 'education': the spotlight on the teacher the educator, talking, doing, controlling, being important. With 'edcuation' something external is being done to a child, willing or not, to meet targets. Consider learning: more like growth, the focus on the child, the impetus from the child, learning is autonomous, guided, social. It is to do with something you take in to yourself, willingly, make your own, so that you can then use it, create with it.
What happens before the child goes to school doesn't count as real learning in the view of educators. It isn't valid. Walking, talking and anything else that still remains entrusted to parents is just instinct. It is clear by the lowering of the ages at which the governments in both England and Scotland want to get children in to free nursery care and in to school that the state wants children away from their families as soon as possible.
The headteacher in her recent spiel to the Primary 7 leavers had decided to appropriate even those things children do learn at home, to the school:
"You have learned
to read,
to write,
to tie your laces
to clear up after yourselves."
[extract: 'Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony']
Don't her pupils learn any of that at home? And that would be schools' defence - many children don't, the supposedly 'many' being one excuse for teaching to the lowest common denominator. What you end up with is a generation held back to the pace of the slowest, as though education is a bike ride through the country. Egalitarian? By some lights, clearly. Or just thwarted and let down? Certainly, that "egalitarianism" is what the SNP wants. Their cry "no child should be disadvantaged by their birth" is just the other side of "no child should be advantaged by their birth". The SNP solution? Pull down any bright kids or any kid with an ounce of initiative so they don't get ahead of the rest, because if there is one thing Scotland under the SNP hates it is anyone getting ahead.
Today's Scottish state patently distrusts the idea of the home because in the home are all those subversive, varied influences of their families, for which, thank goodness, the Supreme Court, granted, at least, a reprieve. It is hard for memories not to crowd in of Aldous Huxley's passage about the children in the state-run hatcheries in the opening of Brave New World.
Another reason we can't talk to the school is because, we would be too worried about the note-taking, the report writing and the additions to the dossier the state has on us (see: Narrative Control). I wouldn't want to make a "Subject Access Request" to find out what the State has been saying about me because I suspect it would be shockingly inaccurate and contain a depressing number of lies and distortions intended to cover and protect the failings of those managing and staffing the schools.
The headteacher in her recent spiel to the Primary 7 leavers had decided to appropriate even those things children do learn at home, to the school:
"You have learned
to read,
to write,
to tie your laces
to clear up after yourselves."
[extract: 'Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony']
Don't her pupils learn any of that at home? And that would be schools' defence - many children don't, the supposedly 'many' being one excuse for teaching to the lowest common denominator. What you end up with is a generation held back to the pace of the slowest, as though education is a bike ride through the country. Egalitarian? By some lights, clearly. Or just thwarted and let down? Certainly, that "egalitarianism" is what the SNP wants. Their cry "no child should be disadvantaged by their birth" is just the other side of "no child should be advantaged by their birth". The SNP solution? Pull down any bright kids or any kid with an ounce of initiative so they don't get ahead of the rest, because if there is one thing Scotland under the SNP hates it is anyone getting ahead.
Today's Scottish state patently distrusts the idea of the home because in the home are all those subversive, varied influences of their families, for which, thank goodness, the Supreme Court, granted, at least, a reprieve. It is hard for memories not to crowd in of Aldous Huxley's passage about the children in the state-run hatcheries in the opening of Brave New World.
Another reason we can't talk to the school is because, we would be too worried about the note-taking, the report writing and the additions to the dossier the state has on us (see: Narrative Control). I wouldn't want to make a "Subject Access Request" to find out what the State has been saying about me because I suspect it would be shockingly inaccurate and contain a depressing number of lies and distortions intended to cover and protect the failings of those managing and staffing the schools.
Those who feel they have no other option go to the newspapers and have to expose their families to public scrutiny. To have your photographs plastered over the front pages, as a local mum did earlier this year because she had a ten-year-old, suicidal from bullying at school, to put your family through that, you must be truly desperate. More and more families seem to be going that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment