Monday 22 April 2013

A new role for schools : getting ready for OFSTED

Now that I'm ancient and to an extent befuddled, the only real recreation I have is enjoying conversations with people. In the days, months and years  before I became a shirker living on my gold plated public service pension I was a teacher and a social worker. I have kept in touch with many teachers. A number are still prepared to hold conversations with me.

Naturally I want to know how things are going on for them as teachers.  I don't know about you, perhaps you've asked a teacher about this too recently, but every time I ask a teacher how things are going on at school they don't talk about the kids they are teaching or about a great lesson they had the other day when the children discovered exciting things about  the link between energy on earth and the sun's rays. No, each one invariably answers, "It's a bit stressful just now, I'm getting ready for  OFSTED".

Forgive my naivety but I always thought that a school was a place where children could discover and learn things but now I find it is a venue for teachers who constantly have a need to prepare for  OFSTED.

Please accept my apologies. Things move so quickly these days. I just can't keep up with these new fangled ideas. I hope the kids approve of it all. 

Monday 15 April 2013

The BIFF BAM POWer monster is very much alive



One of the problems for us ordinary folks is that we can gain so little access to where the power is.  If we did have access then we might very carefully begin to dismantle piece by piece the state which the excesses of the political and power systems of every ilk have brought many of us to, that is : our tolerance and acceptance of the abject poverty suffered by most of our fellows.  It always seems that things are reduced to there being a few winners and a lot of losers.

Looking towards the horizon, change does not seem to be approaching and things will stay as they are if we continue to allow ourselves to be governed on the basis of there being, first: a small group of very powerful, very wealthy winners; second: a greater number – I am ashamed to admit I would place myself in this group  - of those who though they lose most of the time are nevertheless silenced by being allowed the occasional win and so have just sufficient reward to live tolerably while they are  hoodwinked  by an education system which invariably serves the status quo, and,  third : by far the largest group in number, whose members are never allowed to win, can never flourish and who are denied the opportunity of any effective form of expression.


It is evident the powerful few have a hold of both the political system and the media and they use them very effectively as their form of expression. Well, there are the occasional spats, which are sometimes investigated and usually followed by a few show trials of dispensable people. These happen in order to kid us that we really are free but pretty soon things fall back into their old place.   We merely cultivate frustration and despair if we allow ourselves to be duped by the notion that we enjoy freedom of speech or freedom of the press. This has been rather comically demonstrated by the BBC’s censoring Judy Garland’s song, “Ding, dong the wicked witch is dead” following the death of Margaret Thatcher.  This public broadcasting organization, the British Broadcasting Corporation which is supposed to represent the expression of everyone in the UK is so fearful of losing its place close to the vicinity of power, so running scared of being diminished or closed down by a political body which finds the BBC’s notional independence a nuisance, that it kowtows in a subtle but nonetheless cowardly manner to the political and financial power bases. The “Biff, bam, power monster is very much alive.”

This “ding dong” is one of the sideshows which has arisen in the fairground that has been constructed in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death.  The irony of “the iron lady” is that she is revered mainly by a certain kind of man because she  represented not the “wicked witch” but the Biff Bam Power monster they would have so liked themselves to be.  In this sense Margaret Thatcher was an anachronism. She was a woman who exercised her power in the way all the infamous power mongers  - who were and are overwhelmingly of the male sex - exercised power.  It is a way which says that, “It‘s OK to look after number one at all times and to knock out anyone who tries to get in the way.” It is a philosophy – if it can be called that  - which allows us to understand how the financial crisis of the last decade came about. It shines a light on why powerful and wealthy people invariably look in askance and can’t comprehend when someone suggests that their inordinate affluence and influence could possibly be the cause of the vast amount of poverty so many of their fellow beings are suffering.

People who protest about these matters are frequently described by politicians, and by their buddies in the "free" press as moaning and envious lefties who, when they are not demonstrating or rioting, talk ad infinitum about inequality and poverty, without ever offering up any remedies.  The plight of the protester is not so much what seems the sheer impossibility of persuading the rich and powerful that poor people are fellow members of our human community and we should all help them and support them in getting themselves out of their unhappy and intolerable situation.  It is not so much persuading the powerful to yield up, no, to share their power, to give up much of their wealth and to distribute it fairly.  Of course all this must be done but the real plight for the protester is persuading those of us who  just about get enough out of the financial and political system to keep us silent about the need to start dealing with the issue of  undue inequality in the distribution of the world’s resources.

We should all move towards acknowledging that each one of us owns every single square inch of our planet.  No doubt cynics as well as many of those who consider themselves realists will think these ideas an escape to Planet Krypton but nothing ever gets changed for the better if we don't start trying to achieve it.

We should access and unite our individual power and our different and unique talents to move towards a fairer human community. Let’s change the nature of the Biff Bam power monster.