Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Rhode Island school bans talking!

A Roman Catholic elementary school adopted new lunchroom rules this week requiring students to remain silent while eating. The move comes after three recent choking incidents in the cafeteria. No one was hurt, but the principal of St. Rose of Lima School explained in a letter to parents that if the lunchroom is loud, staff members cannot hear a child choking.

Christine Lamoureux, whose 12-year-old is a sixth-grader at the school, said she respects the safety issue but thinks the rule is a bad idea. "They are silent all day," she said. "They have to get some type of release." She suggested quiet conversation be allowed during lunch. Another mother, Thina Paone, does not mind the silent lunches, noting that the cafeteria "can be very crazy" at the suburban school south of Providence.

Principal Jeannine Fuller did not immediately return a call seeking comment, but a spokesman for the Diocese of Providence described the silence rule as a temporary safety measure. Spokesman Michael Guilfoyle said the school does not expect complete silence but enough quiet to keep students safe. Lori Healey, a teacher at the school who also has a son in third grade, said "silent lunch" means students can whisper. "They know it's not for punishment," she said. "It's for safety, and they'll be the first ones to tell you." Stacey Wildenhain, a teacher's assistant at St. Rose, said her 7-year-old son does not mind the policy. He told her: "The sooner we eat, the sooner we can get out to play," she said.

Amanda Karhuse, of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said that students should not run wild during lunch, but that they also should not have to remain silent. "It seems kind of ridiculous in our opinion," she said. "Kids need that social time, and they just need time to be kids at that age."

The principal's letter also spelled out other new lunch rules, including requiring students to stay in their seats and limiting them to one trip to the trash can. Any child who breaks the rules will serve detention the next day. Paone's 6-year-old son, Joey, said he accepts the changes, but some of his classmates were having trouble obeying the rules. Kara Casali, who also has a 6-year-old son at the school, said the rules against talking will be tough to enforce. "I can't imagine having a silent lunch," she said.

Source




Corrupting the British curriculum

Why is it ‘brainwashing’ when faith schools teach values but ‘raising awareness’ when the state teaches the pieties of environmentalism?

So what’s the difference between subjecting children to the zealous propaganda of their elders in a faith school and in a secular school? According to today’s cultural commentators, it is ‘brainwashing’ when carried out in a faith school, but ‘raising awareness’ when conducted in a so-called secular environment.

The current wave of hysteria about the apocalyptic consequences of climate change, following most recently the publication of the IPCC summary on 2 February, is being harnessed towards ‘re-educating’ schoolchildren. According to proposals due to be published this week, cautionary tales about global warming will become integral to the British school curriculum. This instruction about global warming will masquerade under the title ‘geography lessons’, but in truth it constitutes a new kind of behaviour management.

This was clear when UK education secretary Alan Johnson announced his new moralising enterprise last week. Johnson said he wants children to alter their behaviour. ‘We need the next generation to think about their impact on the environment in a different way’, he declared. This project, aimed at manipulating how children lead their lives, is justified through appealing to a higher truth. Johnson claims that ‘if we can instill in the next generation an understanding of how our actions can mitigate or cause global warming, then we lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’. Literally save the world! That looks like a price worth paying for making some changes to the geography curriculum. In truth, the moralisation of education will only nurture ignorance.

The school curriculum has become a battleground for moral campaigners and entrepreneurs keen to promote their message. Public health officials constantly demand more compulsory classroom discussions on healthy eating and obesity. Professionals obsessed with young people’s sex lives insist that schools introduce yet more sex education initiatives. Others want schools to focus more on Black History or Gay History. In the widespread media outcry over the sordid scenes of moral and cultural illiteracy on Celebrity Big Brother, many demanded that schools should teach Britishness.

The government hasn’t yet announced any plans for introducing Appropriate Behaviour on Reality TV Shows into the curriculum…but nevertheless, Alan Johnson is a very busy man. Not only is he introducing global warming studies, he has also made the study of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade a compulsory part of the history curriculum.

For Johnson, the subject of history, like that of geography, must be subordinated to a higher good. He is not interested in the slave trade as part of an academic discipline with its own integrity; rather he sees slave trade studies as part of a moral crusade. ‘This is about ensuring young people understand what it means to be British today’, he said in defence of his reorganisation of the history curriculum. Johnson’s title, education secretary, is something of a misnomer. He seems to have no interest in education as such. His preoccupation is with using the classroom to transmit the latest and most fashionable prejudices. He can’t even leave school sports alone, recently announcing that PE lessons will now stress the importance of a healthy lifestyle and will raise awareness about the problem of obesity. So after children have received instruction on how to behave as green consumers, lead responsible sex lives and feel very British, they’ll be taught how and why to lose weight.

This ceaseless attempt to instil in schoolchildren fashionable values is symptomatic of a general state of moral confusion today. Instead of attempting to develop an understanding of what it means to be a good citizen, or articulate a vision of public good, Britain’s cultural elites prefer to turn every one of their concerns into a school subject. In the classroom, the unresolved issues of public life can be transformed into simplistic teaching tools. Citizenship education is the clearest example of this corruption of the curriculum by adult prejudices. Time and again, school inspectors have criticised the teaching of citizenship, which is not really surprising considering that leading supporters of citizenship education seem to have little idea what the subject is or ought to be about.

Nick Tate, former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, argued that citizenship education was ‘about promoting and transmitting values’, ‘participation’ and ‘duties’. But the obvious question of ‘values about what?’ was carefully avoided. Instead, those advocating citizenship education have cobbled together a ‘hurrah list’ of unobjectionable and bland sentiments that have been rebranded as values. Alongside fairness, honesty and community, even participation and voting have been turned into values. Professor Bernard Crick, a key adviser to the government on citizenship education, stated that ‘students must demonstrate a commitment to active citizenship, commitment to voluntary service and concern for the environment’.

A few years down the road and the meaning of citizenship is even less clear than when schools started teaching it as a subject. Last month, a review of how schools teach citizenship found that the subject failed to communicate any sense of what it means to be British. Anyone with the slightest grasp of pedagogy will not be surprised by the failure of successive social engineering projects in the classroom. The absence of any moral consensus in Britain today will not be solved through subjecting children to sanctimonious platitudes. Those who are genuinely interested in educating children and inspiring them to become responsible citizens will instead look to real subjects, which represent a genuine body of knowledge. Propaganda campaigns around the latest fashionable ‘value’ only distract children from learning. Values-led education has helped create a situation where children learn that the Holocaust was awful, but do not know which country suffered the greatest number of casualties during the Second World War. It will produce children who know that the slave trade was bad, but who are ignorant about how the right to vote was won in Britain.

And they will learn in geography that we face human extinction, but will not be able to name the highest mountain in Europe. In other words they will be values-rich but uneducated.

Source




British students to be disciplined for publishing Mohammed Cartoon

Cambridge University is in effect putting its behind up in the air and saying to the Muslims: "F**k me". Cambridge has of course long been a traitorous place. Post below lifted from Pub Philosopher

While the French establishment was leaping to the defence of Charlie Hebdo, the authorities at Clare College were considering taking disciplinary action against students who published one of the Mohammed cartoons in the college magazine. The magazine, Clareification, had been renamed Crucification for a special issue on religious satire.

According to the local paper, the student who wrote the piece containing the cartoon is in hiding and the college chaplain has met leaders of Cambridge University's Islamic society and local Imams in an attempt to reduce racial tension. 

This may just be a precaution but the college clearly has some concern that the cartoon might provoke a violent response from Muslims at the university or in the town.  Even so, most of the authorities' wrath has been directed at the students who produced the magazine. Clare College fellows have called for a Court of Discipline to be convened, something which has not happened for many years. Officials of the college, the students union and Cambridge University have queued up to condemn the publication of the cartoon.

Printing this cartoon may have been an irresponsible act but if you can't push the boundaries of free speech in an academic environment, where can you do it?  Universities are supposed to be places where people experiment, test ideas and think the unthinkable. If people are not free to defy conventions and make themselves unpopular in a university,  they will not be free to do so anywhere.  The university authorities should be saying that they disapprove of the cartoon and find it in poor taste but are nevertheless duty-bound to defend the students' right to publish it. 

The great and good in France may still appreciate the importance of defending free speech.  Cambridge University, the second oldest in the English speaking world, now seems to have other priorities.

Update: Local Muslim leaders have expressed outrage over the printing of the cartoon and are demanding public apologies from all the students involved.      

***************************

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"


Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

***************************

No comments: