The Corruption of The Curriculum.

I read this rather clear and yet short piece, on the 'corruption of the curriculum' and it's a damning indictment of Educational policy and tinkering with teaching practice, learning 'styles' and course content.

It states the following :

 "The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students."

The article then outlines in concise language some of the 'corruptions' and their adverse effects.

The describe 'educational apartheid' (subjects excluded for some students based on income and class), 'history without dates' (without a coherent narrative), a policy of behavioural change that reduces

It's well worth a read, and I would like to put it in context, "join-the-dots" so to speak. To go further. To clarify.

After all, it was issued by Civitas, who are pretty much a right wing think tank, and why would I be impressed by what ever spewed forth from such an establishment. So I gotta put that right. I am not at all impressed, because the article itself is tinkering, and while it makes a critique that has some substance, it fails (as intended) to set things in context.

Has anyone mentioned to you that it is known, and proven, that State Education was initially instigated by intensive and long-term lobbying from business? 

"
Perhaps the greatest of school's illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families—to level the playing field, so to speak."

It was of course,  presented as philanthropy,  the trojan horse of modern social engineering effected by the use of wealth, by stealth. And yes some people really did believe they were genuine seeking to help others and to help 'mankind'.

In fact there was close to a century of lobbying at  local, national and international levels of Industrial Society, and a huge, vast amount of money was spent over that time in this project to introduce Compulsion Schooling for all children.


"The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...
Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...


The primary driver was of this project was the power and control of business, mostly the coal business, which with coal being the first fossil fuel, has a certain resonance with corporate power play within Governance by the
petroleum industry. that we know today ... the coal and steel business was or became the central power in 'Civilisation' and one of the most aggressive in terms of 'expansion' (globalisation) and in terms of infiltrating Governance. The project to compel all children into education started in the 1750s.

And what has happened is that for a while it worked, as all training does, then some people started to see through the system, and found ways to use it as the basis for real learning outside the system, and began to resist the indoctrination and worse, actively self organise.

Power cannot allow that. For two reasons.

!. To many power players is dangerous if they are all equals.  There has to be manageable limits.

2. "If some 'poor' people learn to do what we are doing, we are out of business. So let us 'educate' them such that they cannot really learn, but can remember what they have been told, and they'll confuse memorising for learning. And we will set the psychological limit within the education SYSTEM, the systemic process does the work, not merely the curriculum."

The curriculum can be tinkered with, both by Power and by those Power allows, within limits and under their watchful eyes.

The article I quoted is complaining about the tinkering, and not the system. It prefers the 'traditional tinkering'. That's as far as it goes.

Not impressive.

The SYSTEM must  remain, even as it's façade is ever changing as either genuine empathic understanding emerges (they can't fool all the people all of the time) which Power will always seek to co-opt, by systematising whatever emerges organically, thus neutering any potential threat to Power it might represent.

Any right winger knows this. Well,the ones who dictate policy. Who ever they are..

This is partly why John Taylor Gatto says we must disestablish the SYSTEM, retaining the infrastructure and applying and modifying those infrastructure so that they can be used as places of self motivated learning, where the full person is allowed to grow, as such to truly meet the needs of the children, and indeed of all of us, as natural learners.

"
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

Self motivated, self organised.
Self Governing. Common Sense. Biologically mandated.

The article is a brief overview of a book, by Frank Furedi...

'The Corruption of the Curriculum' by Frank Furedi, Shirley Lawes, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, David Perks and Alex Standish is published by Civitas, 77 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 2EZ

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Bookmark and Share

Syria, oh Syria!

All I can say of Syria is this. I know nothing of life in Syria, and I don't trust one word of what the mainstream media is uttering on it.

I DO KNOW that there are people, lovely, warm, vulnerable, open active, and that there are children and elders too, all of them so human. And that irrespective of 'politics' they will be the ones who are hurt the most of all of this. Again. It's nauseating now to me to talk of 'Libya', Syria', "Iraq', 'Afghanistan' and any other place that is labelled by some few in Power as a 'failed' or 'dictator' or 'axis of evil' or 'banana republic' State as objects, rather than places filled with real people, to talk of Britain or America (the 'bad" ruler states) and include all those people born there through no choice of their own as part of that same object, with responsibility for what that entity, The State, did? 

People we can so easily call the 'enemy'. People like you. People like me. Like our children. Our parents. Our grand-parents. Whole streets, estates, villages, towns, cities....

And I know too that their trauma, pain, loss and hurt is not a price worth paying to sustain the current dominant cultural paradigms. A price they did not choose for themselves. Who would?

It never was worth paying, ever. That 'sacrifice' is another false myth.

 
Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe





Bookmark and Share

More thoughts...

The egg that YOU started out as, was alive in your grandmothers womb, in your mother as she lay growing and being nurtured there. Your cells are still live in your mother as long as she lives, along with all your siblings. This is the basis for the matri-lineal reality. Nature's cycles are incremental, not repetitive. Each cycle brings new growth, new wisdom or in the case of unresolved trauma, deeper woundings, some of which are so subtle as to be almost invisible. These are the dynmaics with which we are working with, as we act to change our world.
It is not a question MORE intelligence, but of naturally intelligent behaviour that nurtures life for all life. The illusion of MORE is crafted to segregate human from nature.
Thus, the womb is intelligent. The baby within, is intelligent. Birth is intelligence. Empathy is intelligence. Self-empathy is intelligence.
The existence of poverty is proof that the current Dominant Culture is a failure of the imagination and lacks true natural intelligence. The fact that rich people pay rich people to convince middle class people to blame the poor, the wounded, the damaged for being poor, wounded or damaged and that this strategy works illustrates that fact.
A truly intelligent Society would naturally nurture all life for all life.  
What kind of community do you wish to form, to live in, to bequeath to the next generation and beyond? This is a question for each of us to consider, for we have a responsibility towards our children, all of them. Even if we consider ourselves to not be parents.
The difference between anti-authoritarian and autonomous is that the latter does not define itself in relation to authority, but in relation to self as part of the whole, based on the psychology of biological empathy.
With regard to recent repeated reports suggesting that benefit fraud is a serious problem, estimate to 'cost' the taxpayer £1 billion annually - whereas Tax Avoidance by wealthy corporations who can afford to lobby Government (paid by the taxpayer) costs £15 billion pounds annually, it is worth noting that the bulk of the so-called benefit fraudulently acquired goes back into the ecomony in rent, food, etc etc and that the bulk of the £15 billion in 'avoided' taxes goes into swiss bank accounts or is otherwise hoarded, enriching a few already wealthy people...
In a similar vein, we could say that racism is evidence of conditioning, more than it is evidence of wickedness innate in people...

"We live in a sick, or closer to the truth, a wounded society. It is based on Power, and Power is based upon fear.

It flows thus: repeated trauma can cause a loss of self awareness, as one pushes the feelings that need to be resolved AWAY if one is unable to resolve those feelings, this leads to a lack of self empathy; self empathy is the basis for true empathy with others (human or any other natural organism) which deepens the sense of disconnectedness, from all that nurtures; this creates another layer of fear and with that a need to control others. ANYTHING that is natural will resist being controlled, and this is where violence emerges, to enforce control. Violence can be physical, psychological or emotional.

A communtiy that has been traumatised and is unable, for whatever reason, to resolve this dynamic, will become ever more controlling and violent.

This is the root of the hierarchically violent society.

The psychology of any given society is both revealed and perpetuated in how that society treats the children. Change that and we can change everything. Omit that and we will repeat the patterns of violence and control."

For the majority, and for sure the hard core Establishment of Mental Health Professionals, their primary task is to 'correct' behaviour so that it conforms to Societal prescriptions, rather than to help the person to become more fully human by understanding themselves, understanding the ways in which Society distorts the natural self, because to do that would be to blow the lid on the constant oppression of the natural variety of our psyches upon which all Power is founded.

Those who, for whatever reason, resist, are labelled 'incurable'... and they are blamed for their resistance to the 'help' offered, to mask the guilt and shame that is inherent in such offerings.

"Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do" - yet they do know, even if that knowledge is buried deep under layers of academic and societal conditioning.
An insightful talk given by David Smail, on the realities of schooling as an oppressive experience.

http://www.davidsmail.info/school.htm    The Experience of School,  www.davidsmail.info
[In G. Alred & M. Fleming (eds). Priorities in Education. Fieldhouse Press, University of Durham School of Education, 1996]



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe


Bookmark and Share