He was soon bungled out of the Patterson family’s California home and into a taxi on the way to the airport. He was being “gooned” – forcibly transported to a place aimed at correcting naughty children’s behaviour.
Within hours he had arrived at Agape, a Christian boarding school in Missouri that promises to turn around “rebellious boys”.
Parents blocked from checking their child’s trans sex education lessons
Watchdog rules parents of children at Hatcham College do not have right to see teaching materials taught by external providers
So the sex education material asks the pupils to “Pupils are then told to write down “a list of words that could relate to sex E.g., stroke, wet, hard” and then to “try reading them out loud looking in the mirror (or on a video call with a friend)”.” at which point you can just imagine teacher playing with summat behind the curtain, can’t you?
The mistake here – if mistake it is – is that Sex Ed is supposed to be teaching about, not to.
But the specific here. The folk doing this sex ed insisted that their materials are copyright, so the parents can’t see it. To do so would be to breach their copyright.
Which is fun, innit? Copyright actually applying to copying not reading. Still, nice attempt at insisting no one to ever know what they’re doing.
And also a tactic just used by an American co. doing the same thing. The American courts told ’em to bugger off….
A statement from the union circulated on social media said that staff were unaware of the links when they published the review and that it was being withdrawn as it was not “consistent” with the NEU’s view.
It’s not the content of the book, it’s who the book is associated with.
The review in the NEU’s Educate magazine said that the book answered questions about sex and gender in an “easy to access, non-threatening way” that was useful to parents and teachers.
OK
The review was welcomed on social media by Transgender Trend, which said that they were “thrilled”.
But the connection between the book and the group, which campaigns for evidence-based healthcare and scientific teaching in schools, led to backlash from trans activists.
Who it’s associated with. Not OK.
Teachers should be wary of logical fallacies like poisoning the well and at hitlerium, no?
The University of Oxford has renamed its Oriental Institute over “unfortunate connotations” of colonialism and imperialism.
A review ruled that the name of the Faculty of Oriental Studies was “outdated” after an 18-month consultation with students, department members and other interested parties.
It has been renamed the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Its headquarters, known as the Oriental Institute since 1960, has also changed its name.
The department said the term “oriental studies” was “felt by many to be outdated and to have unfortunate connotations of colonialism and imperialism”.
Thought these were supposed to be the bright people?
The term “Occident” derives from the Latin word occidens meaning “west” (lit. setting < occido fall/set). The use of the word for "setting" to refer to the west (where the sun sets) has analogs from many languages: compare the terms "Arevmutk" in Armenian: արեւմուտք (Armenian Arevmutk means "West" or "Sunset"), "Ponant" (< French ponant "setting"), "Zapad" Russian: Запад (< Russian zakat Russian: закат "sunset"). In Arabic, the Maghreb "maḡrib" Arabic: مَغْرِب (< Arabic ḡarb غَرْب "to go down, to set") literally means "the sunset", "the west". Historically, the Maghreb was the southern part of the Western Roman Empire. Another word for Occident in German is Abendland (rarely: "Okzident"), now mainly poetic, which literally translates as "evening land". The antonym "Morgenland" is also mainly poetic, and refers to Asia. The opposite term "Orient" derives from the Latin word oriens, meaning "east" (lit. "rising" < orior " rise").
Presumably the Portuguese need to rename the Algarve now?
In which I am a little radical:
We need something more radical, which creates the right incentives. The simplest way of doing this is to remove the threshold for repaying tuition fees. The moment you start earning after graduating, whatever your job, you start repaying the cost of your degree, and without any writing off or loan forgiveness down the line. On the other hand, any tax you pay at the higher tax rate (the current 40% one) is treated as a repayment of your student loan. That you are paying higher rate income tax is proof perfect that society values your skills and output. You have put that three-year training to good use and are adding value to society.
Unfortunately the editing process left out my two uses of the phrase “modest proposal” which would have alerted at least some readers to the idea that this is not wholly, purely and entirely a serious suggestion for public policy.
Universities have been accused of continuing to offer “Mickey Mouse” degrees in subjects that will see students earn less than their non-graduate peers, despite Government scrutiny.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance has found 10 examples of undergraduate degrees in subjects such as “wildlife media” and “tourism studies” which analysis shows expected earnings five years after graduation will be below average earnings of £26,000 for non-graduates in England.
The obvious method is by price. People tend – tend, it’s not an absolute – to not do things which make them worse off, to do things which make them better off. The current system says that if your degree makes you spit then you don’t have to pay back the fees – loans are only repaid if you’re on median earnings or about.
So, change this system.
If we actually want the kiddies to study degrees which make society as a whole better off – ie, not waste resources on these M. Mus things – then we should invert that repayment system. Those who do grievance studies repay their entire costs, plus healthy interest. Those who do finance and go into high paying jobs get their loans written off.
The lower your post-graduation earnings the more you get charged for having wasted the peoples’ time and money.
Like grey hairs and unexpected aches, becoming more conservative is often thought to be a by-product of age. But now it appears it may be rooted in a different cause: having children.
Researchers have found that people who do not have children tend to be more socially liberal than parents, and that having children helps explain why people tend to become more rightwing with age.
“There is this idea that as you get older you become more conservative from experience and from being bitten by the real world,” said Dr Nick Kelly, co-author of the research from the University of Pennsylvania.
“But it doesn’t seem to be the case. If you look at people who are not parents, you just do not see an age difference.”
That each child is clearly different kills off the tabula rasa idea. That all should just do as they wish without rules or limits isn’t a way to get a child past 18 months old. That actual effort has to be put into making things be as you might wish, that the wider world doesn’t, in fact, give a toss and it’s that close family that does……well, yes, we can see why children might encourage a conservative point of view.
Plus, obviously, those with children are going to meet the state in a rather more personal way – schools’n’ospitals – than the rest of us and see how well, ahem, it works.
Quite, conservatism ahoy, eh?
Still, some argue that the cancellation of just $10,000 for most borrowers would fail to substantially affect the racial disparities within the student loan system. Black and Latino borrowers disproportionately come from poorer households and, as a result, take on more debt than white Americans. At the same time, white American households have, on average, 10 times the wealth of Black households.
So a system is set up to enable those without familial wealth to go to college. The fact that people without familial wealth are disproportionately the users of the system to aid those without familial wealth is then used as evidence of the unfairness of the system.
Oh, right.
“The student debt crisis is a result of the longstanding history of racial discrimination that we have in our country, and it continues to perpetuate them,” Welback says. “So until we address student debt as a civil rights crisis, we’re not going to be able to make meaningful gains toward equity.”
And that’s a race grifter who can fuck off.
From an initial loan payoff of $75,000 per year, my debt rose to $300,000.’
But then that’s a Guardian arts graduate trying to do a picture caption. The mistake is the “per year” of course – if there are any arts graduates who read this.
Ah, no, I’m wrong. This is actually the woman with a doctorate in human resources management:
From an initial loan payoff of $75,000 per year, my debt rose to $300,000.
Well, yes, that was a mistake, yes. Going and getting that degree. And another little thing. It would appear she was 53 when she completed this doctorate. That’s not a terribly long time to earn back the cost of the degree, is it? Amortising it over that few working years. Not a good decision at all.
The actual claim here is “I made a booboo, someone else must pay!”
Which? found that unclear “unit price” information – where the cost of an item should be displayed in grams or litres to be easily comparable – had meant seven in 10 people could not work out the cheapest item from a range of real-life examples.
It could actually be in the schools. Where, you know, kiddies are told to run the world’s energy supply on rainbow coloured unicorn farts instead of their times table?
Just an idea……
Sir Tony is backing a proposal to replace the current exams system in England with a new qualification that would involve “rigorous forms of continuous assessment”, between the ages of 16 and 18.
Instead of high-pressure GCSE exams, 16-year-olds would have a series of “low-stakes assessments” to help inform their education choices and hold schools to account.
The tests would include a mixture of moderated teacher assessments and standardised tests.
Not because it will be better, but because it must be new, right? Obvious, innit?
Strangely, Finland, that supposedly best education system in the world, that age is exactly when that system is becoming very selective and test oriented……
As suspected, our fears were well founded. This cohort’s results have taken a massive hit in comparison with the teacher-assessed grades during the pandemic, with top grades (As and A*s) tumbling by 8.4% compared with last year, and more than 28,000 students set to miss out on a university place.
The number of people going to university will be the same whatever A Level results are. Sure different people going to different places perhaps, but grade offers will fall until all places are taken. Right?
Queen Mary University of London, a member of the prestigious Russell Group, has been branded the “worst university employer in the UK” after it withheld 100% of the wages of staff taking part in a national marking boycott in protest at pay and working conditions.
The University and College Union (UCU) says more than 100 staff members at Queen Mary were left panicking about how to pay rent and bills this month after the university deducted full pay for 21 days in their July pay cheques, because they refused to mark students’ work in June. The union says many staff opened payslips with nothing in them, although they still carried out the “vast majority” of their duties including teaching and research. The university is threatening 100% deductions for partial work again in August.
Strong and welcome action we might say.
No, read enough of it to grasp the complaint:
So remembered Joseph Greenwood, a cloth cutter in a West Yorkshire mill, about how, in 1860, he helped set up Culloden College, one of hundreds of working-class mutual improvement societies in 19th-century Britain. “We had no men of position or education connected with us,” he added, “but several of the students who had made special study of some particular subject were appointed teachers, so that the teacher of one class might be a pupil in another.”
Greenwood’s story is one of many told by Jonathan Rose in his classic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a magnificent history of the struggles of working people to educate themselves, from early autodidactism to the Workers’ Educational Association. For those within this tradition the significance of education was not simply in providing the means to a better job but in allowing for new ways of thinking.
“Books to me became symbols of social revolution,” observed James Clunie, a house painter who became the Labour MP for Dunfermline in the 1950s. “The miner was no longer the ‘hewer of wood and the drawer of water’ but became… a leader in his own right, advocate, writer, the equal of men.” By the time that Rose published his book in 2001, that tradition had largely ebbed away. And, in the two decades since, so has the sense of education as a means of expanding one’s mind.
Last week, Roehampton University, in south-west London, confirmed that it is going to fire and rehire half its academic workforce and sack at least 65. Nineteen courses, including classics and anthropology, are likely to be closed. It wants to concentrate more on “career-focused” learning.
It is the latest in a series of cuts to the humanities made by British universities, from history and languages at Aston to English literature at Sheffield Hallam. These cuts mark a transformation in the role of universities that is rooted in three trends: the introduction of the market into higher education; a view of students as consumers; and an instrumental attitude to knowledge.
D’ye see the problem here? Back when education was a proper free market – no restrictions upon market entry – it was better than when it became institutionalised, largely taken over by the state. Therefore it’s wrong that education should become more free market.
But then of course people who can think don’t write for The Observer, do they?
Pioneering ideas of tolerance, freedom and human reason, their ethos has been encapsulated in the maxim “dare to know”.
But the great philosophers credited with leading the Enlightenment now require trigger warnings, according to one university, with students alerted to their “appalling” views on race.
Modern academics have decided that classes should be cautioned before studying centuries-old texts by some of history’s most influential thinkers, including liberal pioneer John Locke and anti-slavery writer Voltaire.
By today’s standards they are racists – or were. Could well be a shock to today’s pupils to find out quite how much too. A warning that the past is another country could well be useful.
Of course, that does assume that the warning is given then the study undertaken – rather than what’s likely to happen is that all that freedom and liberty stuff be rejected because they were racists.
Eight universities under investigation for giving students poor quality degrees
All the courses under investigation are business and management degrees,
So, Islington Technical, Fenlands Poly, Sheffield Higher Ed and which other places gave Spud professorships?
A cheating headteacher covered up 28,000 pupil absences in a five-year “web of deceit”, a tribunal has heard.
Peter Spencer, 52, ordered staff to log pupils at Queen Elizabeth High School in Carmarthen, South Wales, as present when they were missing from classes.
The distortion of data came after an inspection called for improved attendance at the 1,500-pupil school. More than 28,000 absences were altered between 2014 and 2019 before a whistleblower raised the alarm, an Education Workforce Council tribunal heard.
But Scott’s analysis also shows that going to university makes a person more right-wing on economics. Graduates are significantly less likely than non-grads to support that opening statement about redistribution.
“Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off.”
About which Kirkup wonders:
Quite why university pushes people to the right on economics isn’t clear. One theory is that graduates see themselves as more likely to lose out from redistribution, so they oppose it out of self-interest. Another is that the experience of higher education makes people more individualistic, keener for people to be able to make their own spending choices rather than let the state do it for them.
Hmm. Perhaps because they’re now educated? Better informed, all that?
Sadly, given that she’s writing in The Guardian, she didn’t in fact note anything about the economics that Paul Krugman tells us about:
made me figure out what was really important: having a washing machine in my house. They are surprisingly hard to come by in Manhattan.
That’s actually the joke that Krugman made about how he was going to spend his prize winnings…..
Etched in the memories of generations of Latin scholars will almost certainly be the phrase “Caecilius est in horto”.
But now Caecilius is in trouble with school textbooks featuring the Roman character being rewritten following complaints about his ownership of “happy slaves”.
The Cambridge Latin Course books have been used in classrooms for five decades, but will now be revised as portrayals of ancient life have proved jarring for modern pupils.
The activities of Caecilius could be toned down by Cambridge University Press as scholars rewrite course material amid concerns about the didactic character appearing to exploit slaves – a common feature of Roman life.
Good as in, a reminder that the Atlantic slave trade was merely the last major such movement of people into slavery, not a unique one.
I entirely hated doing Latin. Partly because I’d not done any until the age of 10, at which point it was assumed at a new school that I’d already been doing it for a few years. Deep end isn’t fun. I’d done Italian instead – for the logical reason that I’d been in Italy for a couple of years.
Which did mean that I had a certain fondness for Cambridge Latin, even as I hated the subject. For, it starts out with the family in Pompeii (or, at least, the course we took did) and talks about bits around the Bay of Naples. Which is where I’d been. Then the family moves to Britain. To Aquae Sulis – which is where I was from. So while I could do bugger all Latin, had a very bastard understanding through the Italian, the background scenery was always something close to home.
Nowt important about all of that of course….