Saturday, March 31, 2007

"Pedophile" hysteria

Men are being scared away from joining the teaching profession by a wave of "paedophile hysteria", a leading Tory has warned. Boris Johnson said school staffrooms are increasingly dominated by female teachers because men are afraid of attracting false child abuse allegations. He spoke out after figures revealed women now outnumber men by 13 to one in primary schools - which have been worst-hit by the male recruitment slump.

Mr Johnson, Conservative higher education spokesman, declared that young boys needed male role models to aid their intellectual development but "potentially brilliant" teachers were deterred from entering the profession because they feared being branded paedophiles. Even bumping into a child could cause them to run into difficulties, he warned.

Mr Johnson, speaking at a conference of the Independent Schools Council in London, insisted he "did not want to go into bat for paedophiles". But he claimed society may now be over-egging the problem as he recounted his own experience on a recent British Airways flight. He said a flight attendant had directed him to sit away from his children, apparently without realising they were his own. When she did, she apologised but said the airline did not allow lone men to sit next to children they were unrelated to. "I do think one problem we have got is that we do have a kind of paedophile hysteria in this country and I find it very worrying," he said. "I think the whole thing has been ever so slightly over-egged. I don't want to attack BA unnecessarily but I think it's pretty bonkers that a grown man can be asked to move away from his children. "I do think we are over-doing the whole thing and the result is that a lot of brilliant potential male teachers think 'do I want to go through all of that malarky about what I can and can't do'. "What happens if you bump into someone?

"The result is you have got a ratio of female to male teachers in state primary schools of 13 to 1 now. "That is a huge social change and the effects of that are very damaging, or potentially very damaging on young male minds. "Young male minds do need the intellectual inspiration of a male teacher, not because males are any better than females, but it may help them if there's a male model who can help them with their intellectual development." He added: "I don't want to go into bat for paedophiles but it is a factor in deterring male teachers from thinking about this brilliant profession."

The Mail revealed last year that fewer that 10 per cent of primary teachers are men in some parts of the country. Meanwhile, in the space of a generation, the proportion of secondary school male teachers has dropped from 55 per cent to 41 per cent. The figures prompted concern that the lack of male role models is having serious consequences for boys' performance in exams. Boys now lag behind girls in every major school examination. However teachers' leaders claim that studies show boys do just as well [at what?] when taught by women.

Source





DC rediscovers standards

Earning a D.C. high school diploma is going to become more challenging. Superintendent Clifford B. Janey announced yesterday that the school system has adopted a new graduation policy that requires all students to take four years of math, science, social studies and English, an attempt to increase academic rigor and give a high school diploma more meaning.

The policy also says elementary and middle school students must master a new set of skills, known as "learning standards," before they move to the next grade. The old promotion policy did not tie student advancement to the mastery of grade-level material.

The graduation policy will begin with students who will be in ninth grade next school year and will apply to all high school students by 2010. High school students take four years of English, three years of math and science and 3 1/2 years of social studies. In addition to mandating four years of study in each of those core subjects, the revised high school policy will require students to take more science labs and will reduce the number of elective classes.

Maryland requires four years of English and three years of social studies, math and science. Virginia students can earn a standard diploma by taking four years of English and history and three years of math and a laboratory science.

The District's new graduation policy matches those used by Texas and Alabama, which also require four years of courses in those four subjects. But experts noted that the District's emphasis on insisting that high school students take higher-level math and more science classes that have a lab component will make its policy one of the most rigorous in the nation. "For an urban district to raise a standard to this level is notable," said Matthew Gandal, executive vice president at Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group that tracks graduation requirements across the country. D.C. officials are "putting themselves in a position with some of the leading states in terms of raising the expectations. So that's a positive," he said.

The policy also applies to the 19,733 students enrolled in the city's 55 charter schools. D.C. Public Charter School Board spokeswoman Nona Mitchell Richardson said yesterday that its schools had set graduation requirements that exceeded the school system's old policy. The promotion policy will be phased in for elementary and middle school students, requiring them to acquire a core set of skills in the areas of reading, math, science and social studies.

The administration of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), which is looking to take direct control of the schools, praised the new policy yesterday while noting that it should focus on how to improve learning in the classroom. "An end to social promotion is long overdue," Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso said through a spokeswoman. The requirements were approved by the school board last week and presented by Janey yesterday during a news conference at Strong John Thomson Elementary School in downtown Washington.

Lyndsay Pinkus of the Alliance for Excellent Education praised the move but said it takes more than a new set of rules to bring academic improvements. Officials have to make certain "that what's being taught is more rigorous . . . and that teachers have what they need to teach that rigor, and that students have the basic supports to receive it," Pinkus said. "If you're not doing all those things along with raising the requirements then that's not real education reform," she added.

The school system's old policy allowed students to take more elective courses, a practice that allowed some students to put off taking challenging courses. For example, some high school students could take Algebra I as late as their senior year. Under the revised policy, students must take that course as freshmen.

Source






THE SPINELESSNESS OF LEEDS UNIVERSITY MADE CLEAR

For Jewish students, Leeds university has for some time been a source of growing concern. Such students have been forced to run a gauntlet of anti-Jewish prejudice dressed in the familiar camouflage of anti-Israel sentiment, as in the notorious (and now beaten off) attempt to gag the Jewish society. Last week, a more significant controversy erupted there. A non-Jewish German academic, Dr Matthias Kuentzel, was shocked when his planned lecture, `Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East', was abruptly cancelled by the university along with two smaller scheduled seminars.

The university insisted its decision had nothing to do with freedom of speech; nor was it bowing to threats or protests from interest groups. The meeting had been cancelled on safety grounds alone, and because `contrary to our rules, no assessment of risk to people or property has been carried out, no stewarding arrangements are in place and we were not given sufficient notice to ensure safety and public order.' But there was no security risk. No threats had been received. The only ripple was a couple of protests from Muslim students, who claimed the lectures would increase hatred and threaten their `security and well-being' on campus. The university's excuse was absurd.

Indeed, Kuentzel delivered his speech outside the university twice without security problems. Although the university secretary Roger Gair claimed in a letter to the Times that these were the two seminars that were going ahead `as planned', Kuentzel says that, on the contrary, after the cancellation they were hastily convened by private initiative off campus, in Hillel and at a hotel.

Now, fresh information has reached me which reinforces the view that the cancellation was indeed designed to suppress Kuentzel's views. After meeting the university authorities the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, told his staff that, although he didn't think censorship was the issue, if Kuentzel were to be re-invited the university would have to `look closely' at the subject of his talk. `Having now found the text of what I take to be his talk on the web,' he said, `I'm convinced that the university would want to be reassured that it was striking the correct balance between free speech - the expression of ideas - and its obligation to be mindful of the language in which these ideas are framed'.

The real reason for the cancellation was thus laid bare. It was because of what Kuentzel was saying. The implication was that his language was somehow inflammatory. But his lecture - which he previously delivered in January at Yale - is merely a scholarly and factual account of the links between Nazism and Islamic antisemitism. He argues that the alliance between the Nazis and the Arabs of Palestine infected the wider Muslim world, not least through the influence of the Nazi wireless station Radio Zeesen which broadcast in Arabic, Persian and Turkish and inflamed the Muslim masses with Nazi blood libels laced with Arabic music and quotes from the Koran. Subsequently, this Nazified Muslim antisemitism was given renewed life by both the Egyptian President Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the intellectual inspiration for both Hamas and much of the current jihad against the west.

So what exactly is the `correct balance' that this account fails to strike? Indeed, Kuentzel makes the eminently balanced claim that this history shows there is nothing inevitable about Muslim antisemitism, which is merely Nazism in new garb. The link he makes is no more than the demonstrable truth. But clearly, it is not possible to speak this truth at Leeds university. And the reason for this is surely that it draws a straight line between today's Islamic world and Hitler's Germany.

Indeed, Kuentzel sees a seamless connection between Nazism and the jihad against the west. Hitler, he says, fantasised about the toppling of the skyscrapers of New York, the symbol of Jewish power. And the Hamburg trial of terrorists associated with 9/11 heard evidence that New York had been selected for the atrocity because it was a `Jewish city'.

For Islamists, however, such a connection threatens the image they have so assiduously cultivated for themselves as the victims of prejudice. For their appeasers, it destroys the illusion that Islamist extremism arises from rational grievances such as the war in Iraq or `Islamophobia'. Worse still, those on the left who march shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists are thus exposed as the allies of Nazism.

The result is that Leeds has now joined the growing list of universities which have spinelessly given up the defence of free speech, and thus, in the great battle for civilisation against barbarism, run up the campus white flag.

Source

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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"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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