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Climate Crisis (10)
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Iran (12)
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Hull CND (3)
Civil Liberties (8)
9/11 issues (6)
Go Green (3)
Interesting Articles (13)
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Closure of Primary Schools, 2006 - Six schools were closed last summer. Despite challenging views on the whole of education, the Green Party is loathe to see the resource that most primary schools represent for local areas disappear, becoming amalgamated with enlarging schools. Each one is a loss to its area. Small is beautiful especially applies in this arena. Mass education is not where it's at.
Comment - This "monster-emperor" of modern education is ‘the living-dead’.
The education system has a special message for us: Secondary schools are proof of the deeply serious rift between what should be happening and what IS happening.
This Education's Not Sustainable.
The GP challenges the dominant, if faltering, paradigm which is diametrically opposed to sustainability. The aims of secondary education in particular need tackling as a priority. We take a stand against present neo-liberal education.
Children are forced into substandard institutions, as John Holt called them, ‘dayjails for kids’. This is a blatant and legally enforced negation of human rights should be outed as outrageous.
The real aims are never brought to light because they are too shameful in the modern context where people are beginning to see that we cant continue business as usual.
Many people are now dimly aware that life has become too materialistic, but yet schools are compulsorily training children to be producers and consumers so that most will unquestioningly perpetuate a system which will destroy them and much of the natural world.
A minority will instinctively rebel, for a variety of reasons, and be marginalised or even criminalised.
Kids are ‘a subject people’ (Ivan Illich). The Green Party will champion the most vulnerable and this must mean a no-holds-barred attack on neo-lib education with the emphasis on secondary provision where the paradigm is clamped on most securely.
This "monster-emperor" of modern education is not only naked, but is in fact ‘the living-dead’.
What would young people themselves like to learn, and how?
The kids can smell the rot, but who listens to them?
Comment -
What we all are concerned about is a fair society, a proper harmony in our relationship to nature, and a much more sympathetic environment for children. We absolutely abhor the 'factory farm' model applied to conventional schooling. We have much to say about the way that children are taught and the very poor views that children think of school buildings, of conventional school routines and expectations, the sedentary approaches to education which are sapping their vitality and life forces.
Education has too low a profile. If the Green Party as a whole is being called upon to be more "aggressive" in its policies, the Party itself should take the issues of education and civil liberty more seriously.
The many ideas on the undoubted crisis in education, under-achievement and issues to do with child poverty, inner-city deprivation, attitudes to the Government's schools policy, teenage pregnancy and so on, all have valuable contributions to make on social affairs and education.
- Why do we see all these young people on our streets selling copies of 'Big Issue'?
- What about the prisons crisis and the the over-crowding that means that young men are not being given adequate education and training in prison?
- What about the drugs scene?
- What about the Government's policies on children's centres and pushing young women to go to work, thinking it can leave childcare to look after infants and young children with others, and making young children insecure and exposing them to television to keep them quiet?
- Where is the awareness that the whole concept of childhood is under threat, that 'education' is just perceived as a training for the skills of the jobs market in the national economy?
These issues must feature more highly in the national debate for the Green Party.
We have to wake up ourselves before we can wake up the country. Peter
