22/8/00

Well Done the Girls?

The A'level results out last week showed that, statistically speaking, our girls have beaten our boys academically by achieving higher grades. The difference is not large, but it follows the trend of the past three decades. 

Girls are edging ahead of boys in terms of their academic performance at school, and if nothing is done about this state of affairs it can only be expected that our girls will significantly outstrip our boys in the near future.

One can hardly be surprised by this given that, as Janet Daley from the Telegraph recently put it, educationalists over the past thirty years have done their best to arrange matters so that girls are supported academically while, at the same time, they have stripped away anything that assisted the achievement of boys under the claim that it was sex-discriminatory not to do so.

Thus, apart from the fact that our national exams have become much easier, the educational environment has been arranged to advantage girls specifically.

1. The element of competition has been removed - and competition is a great motivator for the male gender. One only has to observe the male infatuation with sports, games, gambling, money, status etc. to see that the thirst for competition among males continues even well into adulthood. 

2. The assessment of many subjects is now heavily based on coursework. This requires that children put in a more consistent performance throughout their schooling. Boys, however, are simply less motivated to work hard week by week and they are simply less able to maintain the docile consistency required of them. It does not suit their nature nor society's general expectations of them. 

3. Strong classroom discipline and clear organisation have been abandoned by educationalists in favour of more informal settings. This has been a disaster for boys who need much firmer discipline both because of their nature and because of their relative immaturity when compared to girls, particularly in the younger age groups. 

4. Interpretation, empathy and creative writing are now believed to have more to do with 'real' education than the development of memory, logical thinking and focused argument. But it is in these latter skills that boys tend to excel. The devaluation of their status within the curriculum has directly undermined the chances of boys doing well in comparison to girls. (It is a bit like saying that being good at the male sport of football does not count anymore educationally, but being good at the female sport of netball does.) Boys prefer to tackle hard facts, logic and rules, which need to be mastered, rather than to emote over what, perhaps, they would describe as wishy-washy speculative gobbledy-gook. 

5. The course materials that have been selected by schools are more 'female friendly' and of less interest to boys. This has had the effect of inspiring girls with a greater enthusiasm for schoolwork while at the same time putting many boys off it.

6. There is a horrendous lack of male teachers in the primary school sector and the lack of good educationally-oriented male role models is known to have very damaging effects on boys' attitudes toward schooling and education. Further, female teachers are often not able to gain the respect of boys who often resent the fact that they are 'moaned at' by women during the daytime when at school, and then they are moaned at again by women when they get back home. Boys know that they are not going to grow up into women, and, in the educational arena, they feel somewhat isolated and alienated from the adult gender (men) into which they are going to develop.

7. Many female teachers are openly hostile toward boys. As with the rest of society they have been indoctrinated with the view that males, their values and their attitudes, are worthless. Feminist teachers, in particular, see it as their job to advantage girls over boys, educationally, and they dismiss any recommendations that might help the boys to perform better. For feminist teachers, boys are the enemy, and they need to be disempowered.

8. School reports to parents of children in the state sector now say virtually nothing of interest and they do not help parents at all in assessing how well their children are doing academically. These days, school reports seem to do little but give a feeble idea of what the children 'have achieved'. Given that parents have little idea about what should be being achieved, these reports mean very little to them. Nearly all parents are told that their children are doing well, and negative statements have virtually been proscribed. Given that boys are far more in need of regular monitoring than girls in order to ensure that they are keeping up to standard - particularly given their poorer current attitudes to education, their greater propensity to be distracted and disruptive, and the fact that our educational system does so little to inspire them - the failure to provide parents with accurate school reports that show when a boy is underachieving means that by the time they realise what is going on, it is too late to do anything about it. 

9. The funding for children with special needs (and 80% of these are boys) is truly abysmal. The result has been an extremely high failure rate for thousands of boys for whom the system does not cater at all. These then seek solace, status and satisfaction in areas far removed from education. These boys often turn their energies toward activities which are hardly conducive to educational achievement, and, further, given that the most important influences on a boy's social life and aspirations are 'other boys', it is hardly surprising that any negative attitudes that they possess spread out to affect many other thousands of boys who do not have special needs. A clear example of this, observable in almost every state school, is the attitude of many boys toward boys who actually work hard. They are mocked, teased and bullied.

10. Whether it be Boy George saying that he didn't bother at school and 'look at where he is now', or Paul Merton boasting about his single GCE, or even Joe Brand making jokes about shoplifiting, media personalities have not helped to encourage children to take education, or their teachers, seriously. And, as pointed out very recently by the academic Tony Sewell, the 'youth culture', particularly as promoted by the media and the marketeers, has enticed the interests of boys away from education and toward fashion, music, clubs, alcohol, videogames, drugs and girls.

11. 'Language' and 'academics' are almost synonymous in the educational sphere. It is clear that the best cognitive predictor of a child's future academic performance is the child's ability to deal with language. Girls have a definite inherent advantage in the language sphere compared to boys, and this is evident from the age of two. Despite this, no significant additional help is given to boys. Were this inherent advantage the other way round - and girls were the disadvantaged group in language terms - there is no question that the government would have poured in huge amounts of extra resources to counter such a disadvantage.

12. For thirty years our educational establishments have used one of the poorest methods of teaching reading one could possibly devise e.g. see Lerning to Reed. Despite all the evidence showing that this was not a good way to teach children to read, the feminist-indoctrinated educationalists - believing that girls were stronger than boys in right-brain functions - determined to advantage girls by forcing children to use right-brain, 'holistic' methods when learning to read. (They are currently doing the same sort of thing in the area of Maths.)

The result has been that the reading abilities of all children have been retarded by some two years. But the aim of such educationalists was to advantage girls relative to boys, not to maintain high standards of reading achievement.

And this, they have certainly achieved

Furthermore, those children with special learning difficulties (mostly boys, by far) have had imposed upon them teaching methods that will simply exacerbate their problems.

Given all the above, it is hardly surprising that boys are doing less well than girls and that they are also less enthusiastic about achieving high educational standards. The most important factors known to influence educational performance are nearly all stacked against them.

Indeed, what is surprising is that many bother with education at all!

Amelia Hill's recent report in The Observer perhaps highlights the realities of our educational system and its failings much more succinctly ... 

... Children taught at home significantly outperform their contemporaries who go to school, the first comparative study has found. It discovered that home-educated children of working-class parents achieved considerably higher marks in tests than the children of professional, middle-class parents [this alone is astonishing] and that GENDER differences in exam results DISAPPEAR among home-taught children.

14/05/04

Boys are continually being short-changed in western educational systems by being denied access to curricula that contain much that is of interest to them. They are also being forced daily to deal with their school work through a feminine and feminist perspective.

But it surely makes no sense at all to disadvantage educationally the very group of people - males - upon whom virtually the entire progress of the human race has depended, and upon whom, clearly, it will continue to depend.

Here is the outline of a conversation that I had with a bright, keen ten-year old boy only a few days ago.

"How's school going, George?"

" It's OK."

"Are you getting on well?"

"Yep: I'm in the top group for everything."

"That's great. Well done. What's your favourite subject?"

"Maths."

"Are you good at Maths?"

"Yes. Quite good."

"And what about the language work - the English?"

"Mmm. It's OK."

"Do you like it?"

"No. Not really."

"Why not?"

"We have to write stories."

"Don't you like writing stories?"

"Nah."

"But surely you can write whatever you like - most of the time?"

"No, we can't. We have to keep writing about people's feelings."

And the following is a true anecdote concerning a young fellow who was being taught by my missus about 4 years ago. This was one of the brightest children that she had ever come across. He ended up being offered scholarships in all the top London schools to which he had later applied.

At age 10.5 his Maths performance levels were about the same as those of an average 16 year old. His reasoning ability was easily in the top 0.5% of children his age. He was also a very hard worker. And do you know what he did whenever he had to write a story?

He cried. And he cried. And he cried.

And, without any exaggeration, it could take him an hour just to write four sentences of 'a story', so upset, so resentful and so helpless did he feel at having to do what, for him, was virtually an impossible task.

Well. How many boys are going to end up making a living writing stories in which they have to describe people's feelings?

Hardly any.

So, what is the point in forcing all of our boys to spend so much of their precious educational time (starting usually at about age 7.00) doing such things?

Where is the benefit? - given that it has such a negative affect on the attitudes of boys toward education.

And if there are, indeed, any good reasons why boys should be given some insight into the art of writing stories that require the analyses of 'feelings', then why can this aspect of the curriculum not be delayed until the boys are about 13 or 14?

And if teachers think that they really must get boys at a very early age to think about 'feelings' during their lessons, well, that's fine.

That is not the problem!

The problem is that they are forcing boys at an early age to spend hundreds of educational hours devoted to something that, by and large, has an extremely negative affect on all of their education and, for the vast majority of boys, there does not seem to be any benefit to be gained from doing this.

Indeed, there is no valid objective research yet carried out to demonstrate that getting young boys to write about their feelings or anybody else's feelings is of any value at all! Further, of course,, if it was natural for boys to want to write about feelings whenever they create their stories then, presumably, they would happily do so!

It is also worth noting that our politically-corrected teaching profession has for some time been advocating strongly that children should not have their spellings or their punctuation corrected (especially with red pens) in their creative writing because this might discourage them from being creative.

Why is it then that the fact that boys are hugely discouraged from the whole subject area by having to attend to 'feelings' both in their writing and in their reading does not seem to trouble the teaching profession at all!?

It is hardy surprising, therefore, that the UK currently has 7 million functionally-illiterate adults in its midst - mostly male - that it has a fair percentage even of graduates who seem remarkably unable to read or write decently - once again, mostly male.

10/02/03

Readers must ask themselves why it is that the educational establishments have, for so long, refused to teach reading using the best methods. And part of the answer to this is as follows.

1. The vast majority of 'research' conducted by educationalists is nothing more than politically-correct hokum. It is not 'research' and it is not scientific. It is, by and large, waffle and drivel. 

To give readers some idea of how bad this is, here is an anecdote.

When I first embarked upon my research for a PhD in the area of brain functioning and language development - some 28 years ago - I was somewhat put out by the fact that the research in the reputable experimental Psychology journals in my particular area was a bit thin on the ground, to say the least. There were, perhaps, some 50 papers in all that were relevant to understanding the development of reading skills. And there were about 50 papers that purported to be relevant to the topic but were, in fact, too tenuously connected to the issue to be of much value.

I was positively overjoyed, therefore, when I ventured into the library of the university's Educational Department and found row upon row of journals and books entirely devoted to 'Reading Research' and 'Language Development'.

For about two weeks, I read paper, after paper, after paper. I studied the experiments, the protocols, the methodology, the Maths. I looked very closely at all the books.

And, in summary, about 99.99% of what I read was utter garbage.

It was so bad that, without exaggeration, I was almost put into a state of shock. Never before in my life had it ever occurred to me that such wishy-washy balderdash could be sitting on the shelves in a library of a prestigious Education Department and that it was actually dominating the way that the nation's children were being taught.

It was like discovering that the nation's Office of Medical Health was testing pills solely by asking people to describe how they felt about their colour.

And a lot of people who now sit at the top of the educational hierarchy have taken part in the production of this balderdash, and probably often gained promotion on the basis of it, and so, needless to say, they are somewhat resistant to the notion that they, the 'experts', might have been wrong for all of these years.

2. The feminist and Marxist influences within the educational departments of universities are not directed at helping children to learn. The feminist aim is to hold back the boys relative to the girls, and the Marxist aim is to make everyone the same by keeping everyone at the lowest level. In general, the aims of the educational establishments in the universities are political rather than educational. And their resistance to anything that will improve the educational standards of children is partly due to the fact that the better is the system, the wider will be the performance gaps between the children and, hence, the resulting adults.

Look at it like this. 

If the speed limit is 30 miles per hour, then it does not really matter what size is the engine of your car.

If the speed limit is 150 miles per hour, then it does!

And Marxists do not like the thought of some children driving faster than others - so the speed limit is kept at 30.

3. The feminist influences - which are extremely powerful - are always to the detriment of boys. For example, in the UK, currently, some 18% of young men are functionally illiterate. They cannot read or write properly. And one of the reasons for this is because the feminist-indoctrinated teaching establishments managed to persuade teachers to adopt a very inferior method for teaching reading. 

It is sometimes described as the Look-Say method.

The idea behind this was to give girls an advantage over boys by teaching all the children to approach their learning through more holistic, right-brained methods as opposed to allowing them to use their left-brained functions - logic, analysis, sequential processing etc.

The fact that this policy continued to result in a deterioration of language skills for both the girls and the boys over three decades was immaterial to the feminist groups, whose only concern was that girls would be better off educationally than boys. And this is why governments both in the UK and the USA are nowadays trying to force - with difficulty - the educationalists to teach reading using more effective phonological methods.

And it is worth pointing out that even in the area of Mathematics the feminist influences continue to be detrimental to the boys.

For example, in the case of some new basic Maths procedures now being taught in the UK, the children who will be the most successful with them will be those whose handwriting is neater, who have fewer laterality problems, and who are more compliant, more focused and more organised when it comes to keeping pencil on paper. 

In none of these areas do younger boys do well when compared to the girls.

To give you some feel for this; a rough equivalent in, say, Geometry, would be for the children now to be assessed on how accurately and painstakingly they draw a triangle to work out its angles, instead of using algebra and the mathematical relationships of Sin, Cos and Tan to figure them out.

What the feminist-controlled educational academics are purposely doing through their universities is  bringing in new teaching methods in Maths to ensure that the girls outperform the boys. The progress of all the children will be retarded when it comes to basic Maths, but it is the boys who will lose out the most.

And this is not just a coincidence - a happenstance. 

We already know that feminist ideology pervades nearly all government departments. And no departments are more ridden with this sex-discriminatory ideology than are those in the world of education.

And if you doubt this, just imagine what an outcry there would be if it was the case that girls were significantly less able to manipulate their writing implements but that, henceforth, the Maths curriculum was being altered to favour the boys who had better skills in this area.

(Penmanship There are exceptions, but here is the rule: Boys are graphologically challenged. That males have many more problems with penmanship than females is "not even a question," according to University of Maryland special education professor and distinguished scholar Steve Graham. "It is one of the better established facts in the literature." Professor Christina Hoff Sommers)

4. Teachers are not rocket scientists. They will listen to what they are being told by the university professors when they are in training, and they will have trust in what they are being taught by them. If the professors themselves are bathed in ignorance when it comes to understanding complex processes (such as those involved in learning, perception, memory etc) which most of them are, and/or they are far more concerned about politics than about anything else, there is not much hope that the student teachers are going to learn anything of value from them. The consequence is that on entering the profession the teachers end up employing teaching strategies that are partly based on the wooly nonsense that they have been taught, and partly based on their own whims. And, having become accustomed to both of these things, and the freedom that this gives them, they are somewhat reluctant to accept that there are specific ways of teaching certain topics - such as reading - that are particularly beneficial for the children.

...................

Hurrah!

At last! ...

Teaching Reading Using Phonics Eleven-year-olds in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, who used the "synthetic phonics" method were three years ahead in reading. ... A seven-year study by Hull and St Andrews universities also found pupils were on average almost two years ahead of others in Scotland at spelling. 11/02/05

Well.

What a surprise!

The failure of the teaching profession to employ phonic methods for teaching reading over the past few decades has resulted in inestimable damage.

Despite all the evidence (and there are mountains of it) accumulated over the years demonstrating that non-phonic techniques were decidedly inferior methods for both sexes - but particularly for boys - the educationalists demanded that phonics were not taught at school.

Not mentioned in the above article was the finding that an 18-week phonically-structured approach to reading led to the children immediately being 7 months ahead compared to where they would otherwise have been, and that by the time they were 11 years old this lead had increased to three years!

Yep: Three years!

(This would have happened because by learning the phonic approach children can develop their own reading skills as time goes by.)

Furthermore, not only were the boys now found to be equal with the girls when it came to reading performance, they had actually edged ahead of the girls when it came to spelling.

But the most important thing that readers must understand is that the diabolical way in which reading has been taught for the past three decades led to a large decline in the reading skills of both boys and girls, and that the feminist-indoctrinated teacher-training colleges nevertheless insisted on pursuing this course exactly because the boys would be significantly disadvantaged compared to the girls.

Some of you might think that this claim is an exaggeration. But it isn't.

Think about it.

For over three long decades the educational establishments have watched the reading ages of children decline following the politically-correct exclusion of the phonic method for teaching reading.

Why was there no outcry?

Well. The reason that there was no outcry was because the boys were performing worse than the girls.

But can you just imagine what kind of almighty hoohah would have been created had the girls been doing worse than the boys under this method of teaching? We would never have heard the end of it. And the government would have been forced to do something about the situation.

The teachers would have dropped this 'new' method of teaching reading like a shot.

Don't ever kid yourselves that feminism is about 'equality' or making the world a better place.

It is nothing of the sort. It is an ideology based almost entirely on male hatred. And feminists will do almost anything to disadvantage males relative to females, even if both genders have to lose out; in this case, in their education.

Here is just one tiny example of this which I have taken from Melanie Phillips' brilliant book called All Must Have Prizes.

She is quoting Margaret Meek whom she describes as "the immensely influential educationalist from the London Institute" - a woman who was very much involved in determining how reading should be taught.

"The powerful literacy of the great literate tradition in English is still exclusive. Those who complain about standards sit within it and know that their education keeps them in the top stream."

In other words, a main priority of this highly influential educationalist was to dumb down the syllabus and, I imagine, to help scupper the "patriarchy" - as has been the attitude of thousands of feminist-indoctrinated academics in the teacher-training colleges for three decades. And one damn good way of scuppering the patriarchy is, of course, to deny a decent education to those who might eventually be its main supporters; i.e. boys.

The degradation of the education of boys was no accident.

(The vast majority of teachers themselves, of course, have been mostly unaware of this 'conspiracy'.)

In the 1960's, there was increasing belief in the notion that boys were more left-brained, and that they approached the learning of reading by using a sequential, phonetic route. Girls, on the other hand, were believed to be more right-brained, and they would therefore attend more to the overall shapes of words when learning to read.

(One piece of evidence for this notion was that men who had suffered damage to the left sides of their brains were more handicapped thereafter with respect to language than were women with similar damage. It was concluded that women used more of their right hemispheres for language processing.)

The feminists thought that the wholistic approach to teaching reading would therefore be better for girls than for boys, and so they ensured that schools adopted this method. And the fact that the reading standards of both the boys and the girls suffered as a result made no difference at all to the feminist-indoctrinated teaching establishments.

Indeed, they even refused to talk about the issue - an issue that they walled off in a politically-corrected zone and which they used to protect by their usual tactic of intimidation should anyone question their alleged wisdom in this area.

And the reason for this intransigence became clear to me the more that I read about what was going on in the world of education and why.

Provided that the boys would be relatively disadvantaged compared to the girls, the state teaching establishments were happy.

Well, with any luck, the demand for the proper teaching of reading will now be so great that the teacher-training colleges will be unable to continue with their destructive agenda in this area.

But we must not become too complacent, because there are a whole fistful of areas in education wherein boys will continue to be purposefully disadvantaged by the educationalists - with Mathematics now being an area that is almost dying a death in the west because it is being taught so badly; once again, in order to keep the boys down.

This is not an exaggeration.

This is something that is as clear as daylight to anyone who has looked closely at what has been going on in the world of education.

For the past three decades, just about every single card in the educational book has been played specifically to disadvantage boys relative to girls, regardless of the cost to all children and to society as a whole. 

2005

New Teaching Reading Approach The government has promised a review of teaching reading in England's primary schools, particularly looking at a method called "synthetic phonics". But what exactly is it? 4/06/05

At last!

(Also see AH's Lerning to Reed.)

15/02/03

I am always going on about the appalling standards of education that now prevail in the west thanks to the educationalists adherence to the worthless ideology of Marxist-inspired political correctness.

The article that follows gives you some feeling for what nowadays counts as education in America's Universities.

USA About a week before the commencement of classes, I took a trip to the campus bookstore. There, I discovered that, of the sixteen books I was required to purchase for my history courses, ... Some of the titles included Engendering America; Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada; Major Problems in American Women’s History; and Loom & Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls. J.D. Cassidy - 8 min

And lest some readers reckon that I am often being far too harsh upon the teaching profession, below are some anecdotes, drawn from personal memory, that I promise you are completely true. 

Further, I have not chosen these anecdotes because they are extreme or rare. I have chosen them for the very opposite reasons - because they reflect pretty much what has been the norm in the UK. (Matters have improved slightly in the past two or three years - but not by much!)

The following are examples of questions that bright middle-class children aged above 10.5 years (6th Grade) living in wealthy middle-class areas and attending state schools failed often to answer correctly. (In terms of intelligence levels, I am only talking here about children in the top 10% and higher.)

Which letters of the alphabet are vowels?
How many letters are there in the alphabet?
Say the alphabet. 
How many months are there in one year?
Say the months of the year. 
How many minutes are there in one hour?
How many grams are there in one kilogram?
What is the area and perimeter of a rectangle measuring 3cm by 5 cm?
How do you spell the words, tomorrow, father, babies, Saturday?

Here are examples of questions in Maths for which they often would have to use their fingers.

What is 6x2?
What is 7+3?
What is 8-3?
What is 5x10?

If you spent 80p in a shop and gave the shopkeeper £1, how much change would you expect to receive?

And remember that these were bright, well-off, middle-class children over the age of 10.5 years. 

And to give you some further feel for this, children of the same intelligence levels being educated in the private sector (in the same wealthy middle-class areas) would have answered correctly almost without hesitation all the above questions by around the age of 7.8 years.

As a further anecdote, a few years ago, I was talking to a Deputy Headteacher of a state school who was studying closely the effects of some traditional school practice work in Maths being given to children in the private sector. Having seen the results, he eventually admitted quite openly that he would 'love' to be able to use this approach in his own school but, quite simply, he could not do this because it would not be 'politically correct' and, further, he would not even dare suggest such a thing to his colleagues.

And readers must understand what this man was actually saying. Despite the fact that he knew that the children in his school would benefit significantly from doing some of this more traditional work, even as a Deputy Headteacher he dared not even suggest the idea to his colleagues.

Politics first. Education last.

Here is another anecdote.

Somewhere around 1986, as the educational standards in the UK continued to decline and decline while the Tory government and the teaching profession denied hotly that there was any such decline, I found myself talking to a Professor of Physics at Brunel University here in London.

She admitted to me the following. 

The standards had declined so significantly that the undergraduates had to spend their first year learning the Maths and the Physics that, in earlier times not long gone, they would already have learned at school!

"Why doesn't anyone admit to these falling standards? Have you told anyone in the media about what is going on?" I asked.

"No," she replied. "If we did this then we would have to admit that we were lowering our own standards and it would taint the University."

"And has the actual standard of the BSc declined as a result?" I asked. "Or do the students just end up with lower-graded degrees at the end?"

"What do you think?" she replied. "We can't give out lower grades because students will be put off from coming here."

In summary: Political correctness in education means covering up the truth about what is going on; i.e. lying.

13/10/03

UK "Novels were turned down because they didn't agree with the feminist political agenda, and political correctness meant that infant schools were buying the complete fiction catalogue of The Women's Press. "You do have to ask what on earth were four-year-olds going to do with titles like The Lesbian Mother's Handbook.

"Because of feminism and political correctness, what young men are being given to read is crap these days, ..."

Organisms!

At the risk of boring my readers - yet again! - it is extremely important that people understand that various powerful agencies are purposely causing distress in our societies in order to maintain their powers.

Whether it is the NSPCC willfully demonising men and breaking up families, or the Drugs War Nazis purposely fuelling crime, or government departments knowingly encouraging people to rely on welfare rather than employment, the fundamental principle governing the actions of these powerful groups is nothing more than pure self-interest - at the expense of the people whom they are supposed to be serving.

It is very difficult for ordinary people to understand - or to believe - that these powerful groups are actually setting out to damage their own societies in order to feather their own nests. But the evidence that this is so is positively overwhelming. And there is no escaping from it.

It is not necessarily the case that the individuals who belong to these powerful groups are behaving maliciously, or that they are even aware of the damage that they are causing, but the evidence demonstrating that their influences on our societies are largely malign rather than beneficial is almost indisputable.

I have written about this at length in the piece entitled Gaea.

It is a long piece (about 45 min) but those who wish to understand how events in the world are shaped often to the detriment of humans - or, more often, to particular groups of humans -  should settle down to read it.

But for those who do not understand how it is that these powerful groups could be so destructive for ordinary people even though the individuals within these groups might not, themselves, be wishing to be so malicious, here is some idea of the kind of thing that is going on within these powerful groups.

Imagine, for example, a team of police officers trying to figure out what to do about the use of illegal drugs. As they sit around the table talking to each other, the question discussed will be, "How can we catch more illicit drug users?".

They will not be discussing the question of, "How can we minimise the harm being caused by the use of illicit drugs?".

Of course, when it comes to facing the public, these police officers will claim that their primary concern is to minimise the harm caused by the use of illicit drugs, but this just will not be true - though this is difficult to prove because, after all, they are "trying to catch more drug users"!

The real truth, however, is that their primary aim is to catch more drug users. As such, it is in their interests for there to be more drug users about.

For example, imagine Police Officer A who is sitting at this discussion table saying, "Hey, I have got a great idea concerning the drugs problem. It will cost about £5 million to implement. This idea will reduce the number of people actually taking drugs in our locality by 100,000. It involves some advertisements and some educational stuff."

Police Officer B, however, says, "Hey, I have also got a great idea. And this will allow us to catch an extra 20,000 drug users. And it will also cost about £5 million to implement."

Well, I can assure you that the police officers at this meeting will be very interested in Police Officer B's proposition and, further, that they will have very little interest in Police Officer A's proposition - even though the latter will do great good for society while the former will do great harm.

And the reason for this is very simple.

Police officers are not in the advertising or the educational business. As such, the money, the jobs and the power will not flow their way if they promote projects to do with advertising or education.

Furthermore, any police officers who think that advertising and education are the best approaches to dealing with the drugs problem are not going to get very far in their policing careers. The upshot is that those who climb their way to the top will be those who would much prefer to catch drug users rather than those who would prefer to reduce the number of drug users.

And, of course, police officers will know precious little about the effects of, for example, education, care and treatment but they will know a great deal about catching drug users.

And the point about 'organisms' is this.

Many of them exert huge powers over us, and yet they are mostly serving themselves by doing whatever it takes to promote the perceived need for their own 'services'. And this does not necessarily mean that the individuals themselves - the individuals who comprise these 'organisms' - are acting in any malicious way. They could all be behaving in a perfectly honourable fashion and yet still be causing a great deal of harm to others by their actions.

Nevertheless, having said this, it is quite clear from the evidence that large numbers of people do, in fact, lie - over and over again - in order to achieve their aims. And they also intimidate very strongly those who try to expose them - and this is particularly the case when it comes to those connected with the government, the abuse industry, the feminists, the politically corrected etc etc.

Another example of where 'organisms' act very strongly against people without there necessarily being any malicious intent is seen in the world of education, where, currently, there is no significant representation of boys' interests.

In the west, millions of dollars have been poured annually into advantaging females in some way. And this money has funded not only feminist ideology in general, but it has also been used to promote supporters of this ideology within the ranks of the educational establishments. These are now jam-packed full of people who have been brought up almost exclusively on a diet of feminism - and who have swallowed it.

The result has been that the educational establishments are now completely infused with feminist ideals and ideology. And the result has been a deterioration in the educational performance of both boys and girls, with the boys being disadvantaged relative to the girls.

Let me give you some idea of how this relative disadvantaging of boys came about.

Imagine, for the moment, that in the year 1980, 100 lofty educational 'professionals' sat around a table discussing what was best for the education of their pupils in the forthcoming year. And let us assume that 90 of them had absolutely no issues concerned with gender on their mind.

The point, however, is that 10 of them will, indeed, have had gender issues on their minds. And all of these would have been seeking to advance the education of girls.

(There will have been absolutely no-one sitting at this discussion table who will have been even on a one-day course concerned with the education of boys. After all, relative to the girls, the boys were doing well.)

Throughout the ensuing years, the 'votes' of these 10 people will have continued to push the educational establishment in the direction of advantaging girls. Furthermore, not only will these particular individuals have exerted their influence consistently in one direction over matters to do with the curriculum, they will also have been very influential in prejudicing further future appointments within the profession. And over 25 years both of these factors will have completely stacked the educational system against boys.

And this, in fact, is what has happened.

And, of course, as a result of this, there are now very few people indeed within the educational establishments of the western world who have any real concern for the education of boys.

In the world of education there is, if you like, a Ministry for Girls, but there is no Ministry for Boys. As a consequence, policies keep getting nudged in one direction - and this direction, for the past three decades, has consistently been to favour girls over boys.

And so, once again, we can see how a large 'organism' of well-meaning people can, in fact, exert huge forces which are extremely detrimental to others - in this case, detrimental to boys - and, hence, detrimental to the whole of society.

And so, in summary, it is easy to see how large powerful 'organisms' can exert enormous negative influences on people and their societies even when the people of which these organisms are comprised are not being malicious. 

Indeed, in reality, these people are mostly not even aware of the harm that they are doing.

Having said this, it is also important to stress that when it comes to matters of particular concern to the feminist-indoctrinated professionals and the politically-corrected, there is no question that a good number of them are, indeed, malicious. 

Many of them are downright dishonest and self-serving.

As just one example of this, one only needs to look at the way in which, for so long, educationalists have opposed the view that 'role models' are of any importance to boys when it comes to their education and upbringing, and, therefore - so they have argued - there is no great need to try to adjust the gross imbalance between the genders in the teaching profession by bringing more men into it.

And yet throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s the educationalists put role models at the very top of the list when it came to bringing up children. 

Indeed, throughout the 80s and 90s hosts of role model initiatives were instigated and followed through at a cost of millions to encourage girls to think more about their future careers and less about marriage and families - e.g. Take Our Daughters To Work Day.

But when the girls started outdoing the boys in the educational arena, the notion that the lack of role models for boys might be part of the problem was dismissed completely by these very same people.

Suddenly, role models were no longer seen as important.

And over the past decade or so I have watched educationalists in America, Australia and the UK actually denying that role models are of any particular significance when it comes to the education of boys.

As just one example, feminist-inspired anti-discrimination laws made it illegal in Australia to favour the employment of men over women when filling teaching posts, and these laws were used to prevent schools from trying to increase the number of male teachers working within them.

And the notion that it was important for boys to have more male role models in their schools was dismissed.

For example, ...

The Independent Education Union, which represents teachers in non-government schools, strongly opposes male-only [teacher] scholarships. It was entirely inappropriate to use sex discrimination legislation to fill gaps in the labour market, it said. ... "The IEU supports research which shows that it is NOT the sex of the teacher that matters but the approach."

In other words, as far as the IEU is concerned, having men as role models in the teaching profession is not important, and, further - if this was not bad enough - the IEU is clearly concerned only to support research which shows this to be the case!

(And the same kind of nonsense is currently being parroted by teachers unions in the UK. April 2007)

Nevertheless, in general, whether we are talking about police officers or teachers, the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of these people are not deliberately setting out to harm other people. They mostly focus on their own work and get on with the job. And rarely do they contemplate or understand how it might be the case that they are, in fact, part of a large ' organism' that is inflicting hugely detrimental outcomes on their own societies.

And the reason that I keep using the word 'organisms' rather than, say, 'organisations' to describe these large powerful groups is because these entities seem to operate and to evolve in almost exactly the same way as do biological organisms.

Furthermore, it is quite clearly the case that individuals working within these organisms often purposely and willfully collude with each other to deceive the general public over matters which should be of considerable concern.

In the educational world an example of this would be the way in which teachers collude together to deny that exam standards have fallen throughout the years. They often do this for the most noble of motives; viz, they do not wish to undermine their pupils. After all, what kind of teachers would tell their pupils that the good standards that they have achieved in the exams after all their hard work were, in fact, lower than in previous years!? And so, across the country, teachers will lie about the exam standards so that their pupils are not discouraged or disheartened.

And who can blame them for doing this?

Similarly, teachers will lie to the public about the behavioural problems that they might be facing in the classroom because if they were to admit to the fact that these behavioural problems were preventing them from teaching properly then their schools would be undermined.

And, once again, who can blame them for doing this?

Nevertheless, the upshot is that there really do exist 'conspiracies' to deceive the public and, unfortunately, one consequence of this is that if these deceptions are successful then there is no need for the government or the public to address the serious problems that are being covered up by these conspiracies; with the result being that these problems tend to get worse.

(Also see Exams get easier and easier.)

Finally, look below to see what the chairman of the House of Commons education select committee said recently (March 2005) concerning the deteriorating educational performance of boys. Clearly, he has no concern about it. 

As I have been saying for some time now, our educational establishments are jam-packed full of people who have no concern for the proper education of boys ...

Dec 2007

Boys To Be Taught Netball And Dancing Schools have been told to encourage boys to play netball and take dance lessons in the name of equality.

Thousands of schools are being forced to ensure that pupils are more "gender balanced" as part of discrimination legislation introduced this year.

They must also ensure more girls study traditionally masculine subjects such as science, while increasing numbers of boys take options such as drama or dance.

Both boys and girls are hurt by the effects of progressivist ed theories: reduction of academic content, blurring of meaningful assessment, packing of classroom time with psychobabble and busywork projects. But much of the damage done by fuzzy ed theories is especially hurtful to boys, since much of the progressivist agenda is overwhelmingly skewed towards girls.

Problems with discipline ...

Throughout the 80s I was hearing story after story about the terrible discipline problems that teachers were facing in the classrooms. Even children as young as seven were telling their teachers to f*ck off and were getting away with it. 

One of my best mates told me that as far as he was concerned, if he simply managed to keep the kids in the classroom for the entire lesson he considered that he had done his job!

Teaching, he didn't bother about.

And for fifteen years I never ONCE saw the media describing or showing these awful problems that teachers were facing.

Why? - Because the teachers did not want the public to think that they were failing. And so they swept it all under the carpet.

Only situations wherein teachers who could make a class keep quiet for at least ten minutes and who could therefore risk having the cameras inside were ever shown to the public.

There was a complete cover-up both by the profession and the government.

Also, so imbued with the religion of political correctness had the teaching profession become that the staff would not permit the public to see what they were doing to children by refusing to provide them with proper educational structures and discipline.

So, I don't have much sympathy for the teaching profession's current complaints about having discipline problems, because they brought most of these problems upon themselves -  and they continue to do so.

And until the government - in the best interests of the children - recognises that it needs to attract many more male teachers into the profession by paying them more and by protecting them properly from false accusations or assaults from hostile pupils, then our youngsters - and our boys in particular - are going to continue to be educated by just about the least appropriate group of people that there is - i.e. politically corrected, feminist-indoctrinated women.

Throughout the 80's the teachers kept blaming the poor academic performance of their children on the lack of resources provided by the government. The truth, however, was that they were getting far more resources than ever before. They were just failing to teach - or even to interest - the children properly because they were using ridiculous new-fangled methods of teaching that didn't work, and they were failing to control the children - often because the headteachers - in order to please their PC overlords in the council offices - refused to do anything to support those teachers who could not cope properly with the badly behaved pupils.

Now the teachers are complaining that there is too much governmental interference in their work.

This might be true.

But the government would not have needed to interfere if the teachers had been doing their jobs properly in the first place. They were leading the country to catastrophe, and our society is still paying the price of all those lost years of education.

The school league tables introduced some ten years ago by the Tory government did stop, and reverse somewhat, the continued deterioration in educational standards, and the later National Curriculum also had a positive effect.

But our standards of education which should have been soaring by now thanks to the new technologies have been held unacceptably low because of the bankrupt ideologies to which too many educationalists still subscribe.

....................

At last, maybe more of the truth will finally get some decent exposure ...

Failing Discipline In Schools ‘Every other school I taught at reduced me to tears,’ she added. ‘I would be hoarse with shouting and desperate not to go back the next day.’ Rafael Behr - 24/April/2005

Even Soldiers Cannot Cope With UK Schoolchildren Thanks to the complete breakdown in authority and discipline, too many of our schools are now places of naked fear, with staff left at the mercy of thugs who have neither manners nor morals. Handling aggression, foul-mouthed abuse and raw belligerence have become integral parts of classroom routine. Carl Storm - April 2007