Estelle Morris on
the importance of PSHE:
Demanding something be taught does not guarantee it will be learned. This is especially the case with areas of knowledge and understanding as difficult and sensitive as those covered by PSHE.
Doesn’t it? Yet whenever something like racism or homophobia rears its head, the cry goes up ‘We need more education on this!’ from the progressives…
The subject needs the best possible conditions if it is to succeed – and I would suggest two that are essential.
Gosh! I can’t wait to find out…
First, it needs well-trained teachers and status in the school curriculum. Yet the government allocates no initial teacher training places to PSHE – although more than 33,000 teachers find themselves teaching it – and we know it has to battle for time on the curriculum. It’s not surprising Ofsted has judged that more than 40% of schools do not have good PSHE lessons.
Ah. Of course. MOAR TEACHERS! Who will swell the coffers of the NuT…
Second, the complexity of the challenge needs to be understood. Compulsory PSHE by itself won’t protect young people from the dangers that surround them or make sure they make wise choices. It needs more. Schools don’t only teach students through what goes on in the classroom. Some develop their students’ self-esteem, extend their horizons and make them feel valued in a quite remarkable way. This is not easy to measure and is impossible to grade, but its worth can be seen in the confidence and ambition of students.
Yet, where in the system is this success recognised? Which schools excel? How can we make sure others learn from them? There are no ways or means.
It’s considered ‘success’ now to produce students woefully ignorant of reading or writing or maths but with boundless unearned self-esteem?
11 comments:
Hand out P45s to the nanny state workers who farm the helpless "victims" for a living and tell the children that they are responsible for their own bad choices in life.
Our ruling Überklass is the bastard offspring of Orwell & Huxley.
I'm actually rather glad to be the wrong side of 60, because I don't see much chance or recovering from this PC leftie nightmare...
I have little confidence in whether or not PHSE is useful because I have even less confidence in those who teach it. PHSE is one of those non-subjects that are a gift to the Lefty indoctrinators who pose as teachers.
As an aside do I recall correctly that Morris failed dismally as an education minister?
Have I missed something? What is PHSE?
It's usually the abbreviation for Personal, Social, and Health Education. In theory it's a mixture of sex education, lectures on what to eat and 'citizenship'. In reality it's the ideal vehicle for lefty brainwashing of children.
F211, that's the best definition I've heard in nearly three decades in education.
Estelle Morris was something of a chocolate teapot in her post - not surprising, given that she was the embodiment of the belief that previous academic high achievers cannot relate to the needs of ordinary school children and should have no say in educational policy (she failed her A-levels, took a BEd and became a PE/Humanities teacher).
As evidence for that attitude, I can offer the lecturer in a prestigious teacher training college who, on learning that one of his new students had a Cambridge degree, said "We don't need your sort here, thinking you know everything".
Or perhaps you might prefer the course for teachers of pupils with Special Needs where participants were obliged, on the first day, to identify and declare their own particular 'learning difficulties' - the clear implication being that, if they had none, they could not empathise sufficiently with their pupils - sorry, 'learners' - to be effective teachers.
Julia, you're spot-on with the illiterate self-esteem - it's what has made a generation of British youth virtually unemployable.
Macheath, the idiocy of the both the teaching profession itself and those who train the teachers, sorry 'learning facilitiators', never cease to amaze me.
I've recently become a father and my crystal ball is telling me that my future holds lots of arguments with teachers many of whom I would not trust to serve me the correct meal in a McDonalds.
Farenheit mate, not all of us are like that.
Some of us do our best to give working class kids a grammar school kind of education and get nothing but stick from the pole-climbing idiots for it.
I do strongly advise that you take your kids out of RE lessons though. Some of the crap forced on them about you-know-what is sickening.
Macheath said: '... the lecturer in a prestigious teacher training college who, on learning that one of his new students had a Cambridge degree, said "We don't need your sort here, thinking you know everything".
I'm surprised such a student was accepted. I remember (vaguely, so apologies if any of the fine detail is incorrect) a case from the late 80s or early 90s of a successful business woman, an Oxbridge graduate in a proper subject (something like maths or a hard science) wanting to go into teaching. In a rational world, such a person would be snapped up, but she was rejected countless times without even making it to interview, eventually being told she wasn't the right 'type'. She then submitted a spoof application pretending to be an illiterate Jamaican cleaning lady on an @'Access' course. She was offered a place without interview. You couln't make it up.
'...those who train the teachers...
As they say, those who can, do; those who can't, teach. And the mouth-breathers who window-dribblers who can't teach train the teachers.
"I'm actually rather glad to be the wrong side of 60, because I don't see much chance or recovering from this PC leftie nightmare..."
It's hard to see any way to reverse a decline like this, isn't it?
"... it's what has made a generation of British youth virtually unemployable."
It should be a crime akin to child abuse... :/
"I do strongly advise that you take your kids out of RE lessons though. Some of the crap forced on them about you-know-what is sickening."
As we've seen recently, with the Cornwall school mosque visits...
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