Tuesday, December 13, 2005

PRIVATE EDUCATION EVEN FOR THE LEFTIST POLITICAL ELITE IN BRITAIN

Tony Blair and David Cameron may be on opposing sides at the dispatch box, but both belong to the same elite club in the House of Commons, according to a study published today. The Labour and Conservative leaders are among the one in three MPs who were educated at private schools, nearly five times the national average. The research by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, also found that one in four MPs is a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. Mr Cameron was educated at Eton and Oxford, and Mr Blair went to Oxford from Fettes College in Edinburgh, often described as the "Eton of the North".

The trust, which promotes social mobility, said that its report showed that our parliamentary representatives were unrepresentative of the public. Just 7 per cent of Britons were educated privately, yet 32 per cent of MPs went to fee-paying schools. A further 25 per cent attended selective grammars, and 42 per cent went to comprehensives. Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the trust, said: "This is symptomatic of a wider issue - the educational apartheid which blights our system and which offers the best life chances to those who can afford to pay for their schooling."

Mr Cameron deflected comments about his privileged upbringing during the Tory leadership campaign, but most of his Shadow team seem to have had a similarly fortunate start in life: 19 of the 35 MPs appointed last week were educated privately, including the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne (St Paul's). Oliver Letwin, Director of Policy, Hugo Swire, Shadow Culture Secretary, and Boris Johnson, Shadow Higher Education Minister, are all old Etonians, like their leader. Of the sixteen members of Mr Cameron's team educated at state schools, only six went to comprehensives and ten to selective grammars.

The Government is unrepresentative of the population and of Labour MPs as a whole, according to the trust. A quarter of ministers enjoyed a private school education, compared with 16 per cent of backbench Labour MPs. Ministers and shadow ministers are also more likely to be Oxbridge graduates than their backbench colleagues. The proportion from public schools is 62 per cent in the House of Lords. Almost a third of the 391 privately educated peers went to just five schools, with 82 from Eton, 11 from Winchester, and 10 each from Harrow, Westminster, and Stowe.

Source







IDIOT AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR

Excerpt from Miranda Devine

Either Mem Fox's comprehension skills are impaired or she hasn't read the report of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, which was released last week. But the celebrated children's author didn't let ignorance get in the way of damning the report as "extreme phonics" and "back-to-the-'40s nonsense", and suggesting the inquiry may have been corrupted by "vested interests".

As Mark Latham's Read Aloud ambassador, Fox was supposed to be Labor's secret weapon in the last election. The ploy backfired because, unlike Fox, most people know it takes more than reading Possum Magic aloud to teach children how to read. For all her claims about wanting to improve children's literacy, Mother Fox just seems intent on fanning the flames of the Reading Wars: the destructive four-decade ideological battle between two methods of teaching reading, the phonics approach and the whole-language approach.

I was one of 12 members of the committee that produced the Teaching Reading report after a year of careful examination of the reading research. There is nothing "extreme" about finding that the most effective way to teach children is to show them how to link sounds with letters and break the code of reading. This is called explicit phonics instruction. It is not the only element of teaching reading but it is essential.

The whole-language approach, which once held sway in Australian schools, assumed that learning to read is natural and that all children will learn by osmosis, by being immersed in a "literature-rich" environment. At the beginning of the year, even some members of the committee (which included teachers, parents and deans of education) thought the inquiry was an unnecessary exercise because Australia had few literacy problems.

But the fact is, as many of the 453 submissions to the inquiry pointed out, there is a problem. Up to 20 per cent of Australian adults have "very poor" literacy skills. One in 10 students in years 5 and 7 is failing to meet the minimum national benchmarks for reading. Universities are forced to provide remedial reading courses for students who have left school barely literate.

But in Fox's Pollyanna world, if parents just read aloud "a minimum of three stories a day to the children in their lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation". Reading aloud to children is lovely, and the report encourages it, while stressing that "schools have the main responsibility to teach children to read and write".

But for up to 30 per cent of children no amount of reading aloud is going to be enough to teach them to read proficiently.

Pretending otherwise just lays unfair burdens of guilt on parents and offloads responsibility for teaching reading from schools. It also makes second-class citizens of children whose parents are unable or unwilling to read to them.

As for vested interests, Mem Fox sells millions of books because the education establishment endorses her. She is no Roald Dahl, and yet wildly enthusiastic teachers, unions, school librarians and journalists never miss an opportunity to thrust her unremarkable picture books down children's throats. So she is hardly likely to alienate her best salespeople by suggesting there might be a better way of teaching children to read....

Perhaps there is a clue in an interview she gave Andrew Denton this year: "I haven't got time for self-doubt. The job is too important for self-doubt. You can't. You just have to say, 'I know what I'm talking about. I'm 59' . . ."

Even 59-year-olds can be wrong, no matter how many books they sell.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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