Education

Raygun – real name Dr Rachael Gunn, author of the PhD thesis Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl’s Experience of B-boying

Yes, that is the bird from the Olympics.

The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week

OK, the claim is that parts of it were AI. But:

but that the article was “the result of several hundred person-hours of intensive human work, of which about 80 hours are my own”.

If she’s talking about the collection of the background statistics – how shitty are high school students when meeting college maths – then maybe and perhaps. But if it’s taken 80 to hundreds of hours to write a 2k word piece then people really should be using AI. Because that’s an appalling rate of productivity.

An experienced journo might take 90 minutes to write that – on a subject they know about already, have a view formed – and anything more than one day would be completely insane.

Of course, the real whinge here is that she’s arguing to reinstate standardised testing to gain entry into Berkeley. You know, make sure the kiddies can do the work when they get there? The more idiot wing of the lefties insists this shouldn’t happen. So, anything to denigrate the argument.

In 2015, a row broke out in which the renowned University of Leeds sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was accused of multiple instances of “self-plagiarism”. Colleagues claimed those allegations were motivated by another scholar’s “personal agenda” and said they were “tantamount to a form of intellectual violence wrapped in objective scholarship that plagues the academy”.

This is even better:

What I do have to say about Jason Arday is really very simple. The overwhelmingly white dons and administrators at Cambridge chose one academic – unrecognised by many of his black peers in the field – and felt his was an appointment with which they could feel comfortable. This resembles a pattern we see elsewhere in public life, where the disproportionately few black people who are selected by white gatekeepers are sometimes chosen for reasons that seem to have little legitimacy among black peers.

Black academics, and black people in general, have never and – it’s my confident prediction – will never demand the right to plagiarise, lie or fabricate our credentials. What we have been demanding is to be treated equally. To be appointed to the levels commensurate with our actual credentials, to have our work taken seriously by intellectual peers, and to be paid fairly and on equal terms for our labour. To not have opportunities taken away because of our race. To have our work, performance and legacy held to the same standards as everyone else’s.

We are very far from anything resembling this.

Whitey’s to blame. As ever.

But interviews with former schoolmates have produced conflicting accounts of his childhood. Two remember him speaking at primary school, describing a chatty child who loved making jokes, while two others say they did not hear him speak until he reached secondary school.

Jonathan Stewart, 40, told the Guardian he remembered Arday from when they were children growing up in south London. He described him as a good mimic who entertained other pupils by putting on accents and singing songs.

Stewart, a YouTuber who says he was in the year below Arday at Heathbrook primary school in Nine Elms, south-west London, said the academic was known as the class clown. “He was always cracking jokes. He was the comedian guy, he would even put on voices,” claimed Stewart, who said he regularly attended church with Arday.

Stewart said that in the Sunday school minibus that would pick them up, Arday would entertain his peers by singing the jingle from the 90s advert for Baby All Gone dolls. He said Arday, a talented goalkeeper, would bring in his own pair of gloves and dive to save shots, even on the school’s concrete playground.

Oh……

To accept that Cofnas holds racist views is not an argument against taking the case against Arday seriously. The racism that black students and academics face is not alleviated by dismissing any allegations against black scholars as “racist smears”. That serves only to give greater legitimacy to figures such as Cofnas.
Arday’s defenders are right, though, that it is rare for allegations of academic plagiarism and fraud to receive such intense scrutiny. Three years ago, another Cambridge academic, the historian William O’Reilly, was found guilty of arguably a more serious case of plagiarism when he lifted passages from his students’ essays to pass off as his own. It barely made headlines and O’Reilly still teaches at Cambridge.
Arday has become as emblematic for certain sections of the right as he has been for academic institutions and would-be antiracists. For the one, he is the face of diversity, for the other an illustration of the surrender of academia to “wokeness”. Many such critics dismiss minority academics as “DEI hires”, and rail against “bogus” disciplines such as sociology. We cannot challenge such claims if we refuse to acknowledge plagiarism and fraud wherever it is found, even in the work of black scholars. That would be to provide even more ammunition to racists and reactionaries.

It’s the rock being lifted, the sight of what scurries underneath. The case that allows the uninitiated to say “You what?”

The sight of the worthies at Good Law saying “nothing to see here” when we’ve clearly got someone’s Black pet promoted to a Cambridge chair. That’s the thing. Not Arday himself, it’s the legions that tried to tell us this was normal, good, the way things should be done. That vile corruption of academe, of society.

We know what we do with cockroaches, we stamp upon them…..

Cambridge sources said that university and college leaders had hoped Arday’s resignation would end the controversy. But internal anger has continued to grow over his appointment process and the threats to the university’s black staff from toxic media commentary.

The toxicity is because you clearly did hire a DEI pet. So, how many others are there?

I do not care to examine the quality of Arday’s scholarship, research or life story beyond what has already been written elsewhere. What concerns me is how little space remains for a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of scrutinising how for many organisations and corporations symbolic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform, leaving it vulnerable to just this kind of backlash. It has also meant that the right has enjoyed a near monopoly on criticism of DEI, leaving it to frame it entirely on its own terms.

But what if the entire idea has been shit and we should care then?

A fraudster has been jailed after making £300,000 by doing university students’ coursework and exams for them.
Shahid Adnan, a “highly educated” Amazon delivery driver, sat students’ online exams while posing as them and charging £250 a time.

Well, it would work for me if I knew enough about any subject to be able to pass an exam in it. Which, obviously, I can’t. I mean, really, what was the effect of Mary Seacole upon Britain’s aviation industry?

A recent analysis by the Financial Times found that six institutions in England admitted more than 50% of their UK-based student intake without qualifications such as GCSEs in 2024-25, including three that took on more than 60% – Ravensbourne University London, Bath Spa and Leeds Trinity.

Bath Spa used to be Bath Technical College (plus the arts school outta town). Which, to be fair, is about the right sort of place for those without even the one GCSE.

Gotta say tho’, not sure that Bath Spa is going to add much to that education…..

Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate.

Sorry?

Tarryn Phillips is a medical anthropologist and associate professor of crime, justice and legal studies in La Trobe University’s department of social inquiry. Danielle Couch is a public health researcher, health sociologist and adjunct senior research fellow at Monash Rural Health. Carmen Vargas is a research fellow at Deakin University’s school of health and social development

So, the argument:

In addition to creating “villains”, crisis narratives also cast “heroes” and “victims” in misleading ways. While in-store shoppers were vilified during Covid-19, Australia’s supermarket giants were positioned as either innocent victims or as virtuous “heroes” saving the day. This framing deflected attention from the role of these large institutions in monopolising the industry and shaping (and profiting from) the scarcity.
….
And, as the cost of living continues to increase, it is understandable that those already living on the edge may feel a need to buy extra petrol now before the price goes up. By portraying individual “hoarders” as the problem, attention shifts away from corporate profiteering, bad policy decisions and crisis management failures.

It’s the system, innit!

As Australians stock up on jerry cans amid fears of oil shortages due to war in the Middle East and politicians label such behaviour as “un-Australian”, a familiar blame game is taking place.

But pointing the finger at “panic buyers” misses the point, obscures the real problems and can make matters worse. We can learn a lot from the way we handled – and mishandled – the Covid-19 toilet paper crisis.

This from “public health” specialists.

It’s because we live in a capitalist, corporate dominated, economy that people panic buy. Apparently.

The morons have clearly never considered what happens in a socialist economy when there’s supply. And, having lived there and done that, what we call panic buying here and now pales in comparison.

This whole idea is simply moronic. Close the universities.

Romanians are claiming a record number of student loans in a suspected widespread fraud, an investigation by The Telegraph has found.

The number of Romanians taking loans of up to £13,000 is nearly four times higher than the closest other nationality and second only to the 1.1 million British students borrowing money to fund their studies.

Student loans claimed by Romanians have tripled in five years, rising from 25,046 in 2019/20 to 78,325 in 2023/24 and dwarfing the 19,653 Polish nationals receiving funds.

Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has admitted a “disproportionate” number of Romanians are receiving student loans and vowed to crack down on the franchised colleges where most of them enrol.

You know, that idea of higher education as being one of our thriving export industries?

When, in fact, we lend J Foreigner the money first, then they spend it, then they don’t pay it back. So there’s no export at all. It’s just cycling govt money into fourth tier crap.

Close 90% of the universities, obviously.

It was never a typical school. No uniform. Vegetarian. Origins in eastern mysticism. No “Sir” nor “Miss”, with teachers referred to by their first names.
For bohemian London parents who wanted to send their children off to board, this alternative culture was precisely the appeal of St Christopher’s School ever since its founding more than 100 years ago.
Yet for decades, beneath the alluring sheen of “progressive” education, rampant predators were free to roam its 25-acre campus. It was a “hunting ground” to target children.
Now, after a seven-month investigation by The Telegraph, the disturbing sexual, psychological and physical abuse endured by pupils at the school, in Letchworth, Herts, can finally be revealed.

I’ll spare you the Agatah Christie working it out thing.

It was the staff. Or some perhaps.

How unlike progressives, eh?

Reading fiction has been such a joy for me that my heart broke a little to learn recently that many schools no longer assign full books to high school students.

Rather, teens are given excerpts of books, and they often read them not in print but on school-issued laptops, according to a survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents by the New York Times.

The reasons are many – including the belief that students have shorter attention spans, and schools’ efforts to teach students to perform well on standardized tests.

One factor is the Common Core, a set of standards adopted by many states in the US more than a decade ago. Given those standards, many schools use curriculum products like StudySync, which uses an anthology approach to introducing students to literature.

Well, OK, horse’s mouth and all that. Given that schools get ever larger budgets to get ever worse perhaps that near exclusive control of the school system by Democrats might be the thing to change?

The very public claims that Farage, a man with pretensions to lead our country, hurt people as a racist school bully and refuses to atone or suitably acknowledge their hurt now that he is a dog-whistling adult.

It’ll be demanding reparations next.

Half of graduates would be earning a better salary if they had skipped university and taken a higher-level apprenticeship instead, according to a think tank.
A report published this weekend says the country is “obsessed” with university degrees, which comes at the expense of the economy and is to the detriment of many students.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found that, five years after qualifying, a higher-level apprentice earns £5,000 a year more than an average graduate.

It usually was true that a new graduate earned less than someone of the same age – say, 21/22 – who had been working for three to five years. Some firms employing such graduates deliberately “undepaid” in fact in order to make sure they were hiring the right sort. Bit like those Army regiments with astonishingly high mess bills. They’d end up with only those with family money which could subsidise those first few years.

But the gap usually reversed after the first few years – by late 20s, certainly. The white collars were, by that time, earning more than the blue. That’s what the change is here, not in those starting salaries, but in those, hmm, early career numbers?

It’s also an obvious sign that there are just too many doing grievance studies.

Farage was educated at Dulwich college from 1975 to 1982; there, fellow students have told the Guardian, he allegedly used racist insults about fellow pupils and sang a song with the lyrics “Gas ’em all”. I attended Eton a couple of decades later, but the attitudes of some of the people I encountered there were not very different. One pupil, having fallen out with me over some perceived slight, boasted that his great-grandfather was a slave driver. A Jewish friend who was there with me at the same time told me how common it was to hear “Jew” or “rabbi” being used to describe anyone who was thought to be mean with their money. When I later saw Old Etonian Boris Johnson referring to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, I thought back to the peers of mine who would erupt into rants filled with racist stereotypes whenever they saw the West Indies cricket team on the TV.

School? That’s to educate people. Right?

Like, educate vileness, ignorance and bile out of them? So the measure is not what they were like before….

More than six in ten teachers think that parents are seeking special educational needs and disabilities (Send) diagnoses for their children to give them an advantage in exams, a survey has found.

Incentives matter after all.

More than 100 years ago, a Māori woman packed up her life as a tour guide and entertainer in New Zealand and set off for England, where she would soon make history by enrolling at Oxford university.

In a tragic turn, Mākereti Papakura – believed to be the first woman from an Indigenous community to study at the university – died just weeks before completing her thesis, and in the decades since, her family has fought to have her degree recognised.

I’m wholly certain that women from Midlands England studied at Oxford before this lady. You know, indigenes as far as Oxford is concerned?

Anyway, on to the more important questions. What is that special little trick that moves one from indigene to Indigenous?

School absences “significantly contribute” to children’s mental ill health, according to research backed by the Office for National Statistics that shows the risks increase the longer a child is absent.

“Our research shows that the more times a child is absent from school, the greater the probability that they will experience mental ill health,” the authors, from Loughborough University and the ONS, concluded.

A correlation between the two, obviously. But causality?

The study, involving more than 1 million school-age children in England, found the relationship between absence and mental health was “a two-way street”, with lengthy absences increasing the likelihood of later hospital treatment. It also found children with existing mental health problems took more time off school.

Quite so, quite so.

After all, the idea that attendance at a British school is a necessary component of child mental health is a bit odd, no?