Michael Rosen | ukwatch.net

How Not to Bore the Pants off Kids

JamieSW — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:24:39 +0000

Over the last ten years or so, the government has brought a regime into schools that has battened down on teachers to teach reading and writing in a way that bores teachers and bores kids.

What’s more, evidence has come out over the last few months that it doesn’t work.

The government has reduced the whole exciting, entertaining, uplifting world of books to what they call “literacy”.

Then they created a testing system which narrows this down to a set of questions about the so-called facts of stories and poems which emphasise the idea that the best a child can do with a story is to get its logic and order right.

The results of the tests (SATs) are published so a school’s worth is measured against the school’s SATs results.

The consequence of this is that schools are teaching to the SATs. When teachers look at stories and poems, they immediately start asking the children SATs-type questions – spot the adjectives in this poem, what happened next in the story, and so on.

Teachers are forced to spend less time reading and enjoying stories and poems and more time reading parts of stories and asking children “fact” questions.

This is a disastrous way to treat books and reading. Books are about ideas and feelings. We read in order to find out what it would feel like to be in this or that situation. We explore other people’s way of thinking and we look and how they and the society changes.

Reading small extracts from books, followed closely by “fact” questions, misses all this.

The government has introduced something else that detracts from what books are for – one hour a day, compulsory synthetic phonics teaching for all children between the ages of four and six.

This is to ensure, they say, that every child gets hold of what they call “the alphabetic principle” – showing children that letters correspond to the sounds we make with our mouths.

The problem with this is that English spelling is not regular. Many combinations of letters produce different sounds and a single sound we might make, can be spelt in several different ways (think of ‘ee’ in ‘sleep’, ‘ea’ in ‘lead’ and ‘ei’ in ‘receive’).

This means that synthetic phonics will never be enough to teach reading. We need other systems to learn how to read, such as learning whole words (known as “look and say”) and the only way we get the hang of that is reading from context, that’s to say, reading the words from understanding the meaning of the sentence, the paragraph and the story. The meaning is vital.

What follows is that we have to spend a great deal of time, thought and energy in working out how to make the meaning of what children read exciting, interesting and fun.

And here we have the key to it all. If we want children to read, we have to work out how to make book-loving schools and book-loving homes.

This means rethinking the whole matter of reading and writing. Schools should have the money to employ trained librarians and home-school reading liaison staff to work with parents on finding and reading interesting books.

Schools need time, advice and money helping teachers to get in the most exciting and interesting books and exploring the most interesting ways of reading them.

We need to dispense with the futile system of asking children questions that teachers already know the answers to.

Instead, we need to set up a space where we invite children to ask the people in a story questions that puzzle them and where other children can pretend to be those characters and try to answer the questions.

Books can also be seen as starting points for putting on shows, creating art, dance, music, film and

powerpoint displays. The work that children write shouldn’t be shut away in scrappy little exercise books but should be published and performed.

This way a connection is made in the children’s minds between the world of literature and their own ability to write.

The crazy thing is that we knew all this thirty years ago, but successive governments have got away with rubbishing it all. They even created the perfect democratic, professional structure (called Language in the National Curriculum, or LINC) where teachers, researchers and advisers came together to work out and publish the best kinds of classroom practice.

It started to become so successful (and threatening to their top-down, dictatorial methods) the government of the day scrapped it.

We need to fight for a return to the ways of LINC. This way teachers can research their own practice, share it with others and grow professionally as they work, rather than carry on with the present mind-numbing method of teaching by numbers.

And this is how reading and writing about our ideas and feelings can be put back at the heart of education.

Just as socialists fight for the right of people everywhere to be without war, poverty, exploitation and injustice, so we must fight for people of all ages to be able to express ourselves through what we read and write.

Regeneration Game

Alex Doherty — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:26:13 +0000

If you live in a large town or city, it’s easy to walk, drive, ride on a bus or train without knowing how the space you’re in was divided up, shared out and indeed goes on being divided up and shared out.

It often seems as if it’s just there. For years, not a lot happens – the odd shop changes hands, old buildings get knocked down and a new one goes up, the road gets dug up and filled in.

But then suddenly something big happens – there’s a plan to build a major new shopping centre, road or station. For a moment, the real owners and controllers of the places we live and work in become visible.

And yet, though they are for a brief moment visible, it’s often as immoveable giants, mystically connected to vast tracts of invisible land that lie beneath the buildings and roads.

Great hulks of derelict factories, churches or cinemas sit about for decades in the heart of communities that are hard pressed for space for kids to play in, health centres, libraries and schools. Then suddenly they have owners who are able to call the shots on what’s to happen to the space you live in or walk through.

All over the country there are meetings going on between people who call themselves “partners” about what they call “regeneration” or “renewal”.

Usually these will involve some or all of the following – locally elected politicians, local full-time council officers, hired experts, representatives of major building companies, local property owners and transport companies. In short, deals are struck between the people we elect and people who make money in order to transform our urban centres.

There’s not much that’s new about this. There have been many major fights between what have been called “community activists” and some massive development plans of the past.

If you ever drive on the Westway out of London, you might sometimes be curious about the lives of the people whose houses seem to lean right up against the edge of the road. The same goes for similar roads all over the world.

Again and again the people who lived in those houses, and in the ones that were demolished to make way for the road, did all they could to prevent it being built. In the 1960s the centres of many towns in Britain were suddenly demolished, and a mix of car parks, offices, supermarkets and malls were put up.

We now have the experience of these developments in our recent collective memory. We can see that building roads that deposit thousands of cars into the middle of towns was crass.

Smashing up old houses in order to shove up buildings with a shelf life of 40 years was great for the firms that did the demolishing and the building and will again do the demolishing and rebuilding.

But it was awful for the people who got kicked out and solved none of the basic problems of life in cities – there aren’t enough affordable well-built homes within safe walking distance of parks, swimming pools, schools, libraries and a variety of shops.

Sometimes these redevelopments focus on a large old building – a disused church, cinema, covered market or the like. Activists trying to demand that our inner cities should be planned for use by the people who live and work there, are joined by those who want to conserve old buildings because they are old.

On occasions this enables the developers to claim that these conservers are posh stick-in-the-mud cranks, while they are the modernisers who will deliver a bigger and better Tesco on our doorstep instead of a dirty old derelict market.

Meanwhile, the real cloak and dagger stuff involves our councils, aided and abetted by central government, easing the path for giant corporations to make millions out of constructing buildings that will house the offices and the retail outlets of giant corporations.

Where I live in Hackney, east London, deals have been struck between the council, landowners and transport companies to sell-off rows of old shops and flats, flatten a Victorian theatre, all in order to build buy-to-rent tower blocks and chain stores.

The deal has been sold as providing a train service to the area, even though it was cabals of bureaucrats and capitalists that closed the service 25 years earlier.

The number of affordable homes in the whole development continues to go down, and the “new” library will replace the old “new” library that was built when the council pulled down some shops and flats not so long ago.

Meanwhile, other roads in the area have seen old houses taken over by the council in order to make them derelict before flogging them off to property developers. These people have no interest in providing good cheap homes with a full range of facilities nearby.

Wherever you walk in towns and cities, our locally elected politicians are cutting deals with capitalists who have no interest in improving our lives.

Once, not so long ago, being a local Labour councillor could mean fighting to provide good cheap homes, near to good local schools. Now it means reciting some slick nonsense about regeneration and handing over our localities to sharks and profiteers.

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Keeping it in the Family

Alex Doherty — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 11:54:10 +0000

When I run for leadership of either the Labour or Tory Party (either will do), please remind me to gas on about the family.

Send me briefing notes on why and how the family solves everything.

Then I can repeat these over and over again in the hope that enough people in marginal constituencies will think that I’m worth voting for, for me to win power.

The PR creeps and consultants who swarm around political parties seem to have done polls and surveys which tell them that talking family stuff is warm and comforting.

In fact, it’s a lie and the reason why it’s a lie is because of language. Language is the main way in which we divide up the world into categories. We use words to distinguish between this or that creature, this or that building, this or that feeling.

You only have to speak more than one language to discover very quickly that an enormous amount of these classifications depend on the culture you come from. In English we have the word “owl” and most of us know that an owl is one of those birds that flies about at night going tu-whit tu-whoo.

Then, if we’re a bit more interested in such things, we open a book and find out that there are different kinds of owl (barn owls and brown owls and so on) and some of them don’t go tu-whit, tu-whoo at all.

Cross the channel and you find that in France they’ve got several different words for owl. In everyday speech people don’t have to add a word like “barn” or “brown” to distinguish between owls.

Now consider the word “family”. We use it to describe every living set-up from the royal family, the Beckhams, and Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie, through to people living in the direst poverty.

So what the word does is obscure some crucial differences between the ways in which people live together and provide for themselves.

The palaces that monarchs and film stars live in are stuffed with servants. All the jobs that most people in the world do themselves – cleaning, cooking, washing, wiping kids’ bums, getting up for them in the night, taking them to school, talking to them and so on – are carried out mostly by other people.

Compare the lives of rich parents with poor parents, rich kids and poor kids and you find completely different patterns of life, different day to day events, different relationships, and different kinds of work.

You really aren’t talking about the same kind of living arrangement at all. And yet we only have the one word for it – “family”.

Now this has several consequences. When David Cameron and the like start talking up family life, they’re not doing it in order to encourage the aristocracy and the super-rich to stay together, have breakfast together and go to the seaside together.

They say it purely and simply to police the lives of the poor.

And yet, they do so, without acknowledging the massive difficulties poor people face, the mountains of unassisted work required in order to live as a family.

So, just as the mountains of assisted work that the super-rich have at their disposal is conveniently invisible, so the unassisted work of the poor goes largely without acknowledgment, recognition or help.

At the very moment, a politician sounds off about families needing to stay together, the parents in millions of families are working long hours, miles from home to pay their massive rents and mortgages.

And yet if you want safe, contented, clean, well-fed kids, this too takes hours and hours a week of shopping, washing, cleaning, helping and so on.

If you have no, or very little, assistance, the strain is immense.

Everyone knows that in the face of this mountain of repetitive and often boring work, it’s very hard for the two parents to go on giving each other comfort, care and love. They ask, when, where and how are they supposed to find the time and space for that too.

And when people start to feel isolated and uncomforted or that their hours of work goes unnoticed and unappreciated, sometimes it can feel like it doesn’t make sense to carry on in the set-up you find yourself in.

Inevitably, some people will end up blaming each other, rather than being able to live with the fact that it’s the system that’s largely responsible for driving the wedge between them.

And then on top of this, you have some toff (without his army of servants in sight) coming on the TV telling you that you should stay in your family.

He doesn’t say, “When I come to power, I will offer voluntary, universal, free professional childcare from the cradle up until the first year of fulltime school.” He doesn’t say, “I will guarantee that every school is staffed with trained people running high quality after-school clubs and activities.”

No, that would cost money, and it would mean altering the priorities of the whole system.

That would be instead of waging war in other people’s countries and ordering up new and useless nuclear weapons, and supporting billionaires to run the world as they think fit.

You’d have to start thinking about how we could all live better and more fulfilled lives in whatever living set-up suits us best.

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Selecting for Failure

Alex Doherty — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:46:07 +0000

In the coming months were going to have quite a fight on to defend what remains of the comprehensive education system, or indeed, to make some advances. As we now know the government is hellbent on bringing in a whole new way of running secondary schools.

As we also know, all so called new ideas rest on the shoulders of old ones and whats taking place has its roots going back as far as 1944.

It was at this moment, with most of Britains inner cities in ruins, a government in power that had its hands on most of industry, finance, the distribution and selling of goods and a tremendous mood of popular optimism that a group of people came up with a plan for education.

The system the government came up with was the tripartite system. There would be three types of secondary school grammar, secondary modern and technical.

The spin of the day said that these would be equal but different. The grammar school would be a route into university, training college, and higher grade white collar work.

The sec mod would be for boys to become blue collar workers and the girls to learn a mix of home skills and/or low grade factory work.

The technical schools would be for kids with an aptitude for science and technology. These technical schools never got off the grounda testimony to the backwardness of British capitalism and the intellectual elite in its attitude to technology and education.

The selection for these schools would take place at the age of 11 when everyone had to sit a series of tests in English and maths including an IQ paper.

What was concealed was that the grammar schools would receive twice as much money per pupil as the secondary modern schools and something like 5 percent of girls were prevented from taking up the places they had earned by passing the exam. It was institutionalised discrimination on a national scale.

At the time, there were people who hailed this as a great advance, and, importantly for us now, there are people who would have us resurrect the system.

On Question Time recently we had the particularly unsavoury sight of Edwina Currie lecturing black parents on how successful her community had been in getting her through the grammar school system.

The media is littered with people who sing the same song If it wasnt for the fact that I got into a grammar school, I would be in a council house with coal in the bath.

The lunacy of this line of argument is revealed by the simple fact that we dont hear from the majority of people (it was around two thirds) who had to go to secondary modern schools.

They were sent there because they didnt get the right answers in the tests they did when they were 11 years old. All we hear is that the grammar schools offered a way out for the brightest working class kids.

Well, yes, they did, for a tiny minority, many of whom had one key factor in their home background that wasnt revealed in the raw statistic things like a mother who had had higher education. This was shown in the book, Education and the Working Class by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden,

After a mix of argument and activism, the 1944 Education Act was exposed as unfair and the only fair solution was to replicate the primary school system at secondary level.

Incidentally, no one on the right seems to be able to articulate why we think its OK to have comprehensive schools up to the age of 11 but not after it!

The simple purpose of the comprehensive system is that the idea of raising standards can only be achieved if you raise the standards for everyone.

Whats more, its been shown that segregating kids by so called ability into streams, sets, or separate schools, does not improve their chances of passing tests and exams.

So, if selecting kids into groups ranked according to exam results doesnt get you better marks, why should politicians be demanding that schools offer different kinds of education for different kinds of pupils?

Essentially, its so that middle class parents can be comforted that their children will be able to get into schools with very low intakes of working class children.

This is the intention behind the academy system. A recent study has shown that the academies are already working in ways that keep out local working class kids.

Where the state used to create this segregation with a national system of tests and schools, the intention now is that this will be done locally by people with £2 million in their back pocket.

Unless we fight it, we are about to go back to the 17th and 18th centuries when the differences between schools was based on whether it was founded by a rich Protestant merchant or a bunch of Puritan shop-keepers.

Twisting Religion

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:03:06 +0000

The bombings (or attempts) of 7 and 21 July seem to have thrown commentators and politicians back yet again to endless ponderings on what it means to be British.

Into this steaming pot are thrown various statements about religion, culture, nationhood and patriotism.

And since these particular terrorists happen to be Muslims, at first glance it would seem completely appropriate to examine the Koran for any possible link to what happened.

But there are problems with this. We can quite reasonably ask the question of why Islam should be probed for its links to terrorism, when Christianity isnt probed for its links to IRA bombings and Judaism isnt probed for its links to the Zionist terror of 1946?48 in Palestine? It rather looks as if something selective is going on here.

Now as it happens, ancient religious texts are immensely fertile places to go if you want to produce arguments about almost anything. In them you can find statements glorifying the smiting down of opponents alongside others that demand we should all be forgiving, loving and merciful.

You can find laws that give permission for war, holding others in slavery and treating women as the property of men.

Alongside are others that say we should not want what others have, that if we have nothing we should be content, and indeed that the most holy of people are the ones who have absolutely nothing, not even sexual experiences.

It may well be that terrorist groups have been able to find suitable lines from a sacred text to justify bombing a tube station in 2005, a pub in the 1980s or a hotel in the 1940s.

But those lines originate in fights and battles many hundreds of years earlier. And saying that an almighty divine figure, beyond questioning, was backing them no doubt gave them resolve.

To my mind, whats really in doubt is the degree or amount of relevance of the text in question. This is because religions are much more than their originating sacred texts.

They are the total body of their believers, leaders, interpreters, holy places, pilgrimages, disputes, schisms, wars and economic activities.

When it comes to individuals and small groups who say that they are of this or that religion, the local outlook, way of life and conditions of existence are part of the picture.

In other words, any explanations of these recent London bombings, IRA bombings or the Irgun and Stern gang attacks in 1946-48 are to be found in the mix made up of the conditions of existence, the state of the religion as an institution and, to a limited extent, whats to be found in the sacred texts.

If all this sounds hopelessly abstract, then something much more concrete was expressed (so its said) during the times of African struggles for independence from British, French, Portuguese and Belgian rule. An African says, First we had the land and they had the Bibles. Now weve got the Bibles and theyve got the land.

What I love about this is that its not an argument with what is or is not in the Bible. Its not even an argument about the way in which individual Christians on either side may or may not have behaved. It cuts to the chase and points out what has happened to the means by which Africans made their living.

But very suggestively, it points out that something was going on that linked economic power to religion.

Religious conversion is what seemed to be going on, but meanwhile the really important exchange took place land.

Whats more, it even shows us that those without land or wealth so often possess sacred texts and, we might add, find consolation in them.

Meanwhile our commentators and leaders offer up hints that theres a problem with Islam, or that its some kind of enemy within while their own religions are fine and without need of any scrutiny.

You would have thought that any comment about terrorists, religion and nationhood would, in the name of balance, include a few observations about the particular religious sect and ideological constituency that Tony Blairs ally George Bush finds so inspiring.

These people are able to find in Christian texts justification that we are heading towards a day of judgement where all the sinners (non-Christians) will fry, the predestined good (Christian) will go to heaven and that the preconditions for this are that all the Jews will go to Israel, a second messiah will come, andwell, thats it for humanity.

Now I wouldnt say that this is why Bush and Blair went to war and killed many, many more than were killed in London on 7 July or in the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001.

But whats amazing is that so few of our liberal commentators can offer even some kind of even-handedness in their look at what they think are links between religion and mass killings.

Livingstone's Battle With the Standard

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 20:35:19 +0000

So what should we make of the Ken Livingstone saga? Just so we all know how the conversation went, here it is:

(1) Oliver Finegold: Mr Livingstone, Evening Standard. How did tonight go?

Livingstone: How awful for you. Have you thought of having treatment?

(2) Finegold: How did tonight go?

Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment?

(3) Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you?

Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?

(4) Finegold: No, Im Jewish, I wasnt a German war criminal and Im actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?

Livingstone: Ah right, well you might be [Jewish], but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, arent you?

(5) Finegold: Great, I have you on record for that. So, how was tonight?

Livingstone: Its nothing to do you with you because your paper is a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots.

(6) Finegold: Im a journalist and Im doing my job. Im only asking for a comment.

Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that doesnt have a record of supporting fascism.

Old upper-class Tories like Boris Johnson and Nicholas Soames have defended Livingstones right to say this, on the grounds that hes an oddball. This is backed by the liberal, Simon Jenkins. Against Ken, we have most Labour politicians and figures from the Jewish establishment, such as Lord Janner and the Board of Deputies.

There was some confusion about who he should apologise to, some saying that it should be to Finegold, some to the Jewish community as a whole. Livingstones crime was cast as having shown himself to be anti-Semitic.

There are various grounds for this. Firstly, hes said something to a Jewish person, which, says this person, offended him. I think plenty of us have used this argument in the past in schools over what weve described as racist language.

Secondly, some say that invoking Nazi war crimes as equivalents to something that a person in Britain today has done, is an example of cheapening the Holocaust. This is sometimes termed as relativism making the Holocaust no worse than lots of other horrific acts.

Dangerous, some say, and leads to Holocaust denial and an implied anti-Semitism. A territory some of us have explored when looking at some right wing historians. If you do this when talking to someone who you know is Jewish, this, some say, is proof that its anti-Semitic.

At first glance, whatever Ken was saying would appear to be over the top. Its an example of making the most extreme comparisons in order to vilify someone. Many of us do this. Ive called people fascists when they were acting in what I thought was an authoritarian way.

We hear people invoking the names of Attila the Hun, Hitler, and Mussolini to do something similar. Its not brilliant politics, but a lot of us do it.

Lets look at what Livingstone was actually saying. His first comment is a joke, suggesting that anyone who works for the Standard must be ill. We could argue this was offensive about the mentally ill. (3) Livingstone is also some kind of joke.

He doesnt really think Finegolds German, took part in the war, or is a criminal. (4) Finegold is odd. Why or how he could be genuinely offended, beats me, unless hes offended on behalf of modern Germans fed up with being constantly reminded about the Nazi era.

I sense that Finegold is working a number If I say Im Jewish that will put Livingstone in a right old pickle. No one wants to be accused of anti-Semitism. Now we come to (4) Livingstone.

Here, I think, most of the commentators have got it wrong, perhaps deliberately. I think that Livingstone is accusing Finegold of being a collaborator, like the Jews who ended up acting as guards in the ghettos and camps. This isnt the same kind of insult as saying that Finegold is a Nazi. Its more political and more insulting. Its saying, why is a Jewish person working for a racist rag?

Its a legitimate question to ask, but, in the heat of the moment, with a journalist hoping to dig up something that could disadvantage Livingstone because hes dared attend a party that celebrated a gay coming-out, Livingstone has raised the whole thing in the wrong way.

Perhaps by the time you read this he will have apologised to the Jewish community as a whole, though in actual fact, he didnt insult all Jews.

As a result, Livingstone will find it hard to raise the question that I think was going through his mind, which is that youd hope someone of a Jewish background wouldnt work for a newspaper group that vilifies asylum seekers, pumps up immigration scares, and smears anti-racists.