The F Word

I’ll come right out and say it, so those on the left, who will simply not agree, need not bother their empty heads with reading any further. Ready? Here goes. Let’s reintroduce failure in schools.

There. Have the lefties, er, left the room? Good. Bring back the use of ‘Fail’.

Now I know what you’re thinking; you're thinking, woah there Batsby m’boy, surely schools are positively awash with failure? Well, you’re quite correct, but they haven’t called it that in a long time. The edu-nazis, their heightened, enlightened, delicate sensitivities shrivelling at the very thought, prefer to talk about ‘deferred achievement’ and so on. They may as well chuck in a few facilitations, engenderings, empowerments and ‘going forwards’ to highlight that such language is mere waffle. Because it means precisely nothing and has no useful impact on those it is designed to deceive.

I caught the last half of the BBC’s Sunday morning discussion The Big Questions yesterday and in a debate about grammar schools (Start viewing at 41:30) the loony left were out and swinging in the form of the Socialist Educational Association, an organisation which describes itself as, Labour's only educational affiliate. Oh that explains so much. (Including why they didn't employ a capitalist lacky to design a half-decent website.)

While the pro-grammar argument was intelligently presented and the message delivered in calm, measured, authoritative tones, Sheila Doré’s response was to regurgitate the dogma of her clan, not with any sort of reasoned counter-argument, just the usual clarion call to class war. Bore. In the view of the SEA, comprehensive schools are the only solution to the country’s educational needs, despite years of hard evidence that the comprehensive system just doesn’t work. Any arguments offered by the other side were utterly ignored and the doctrines chanted once again… just a bit louder.

It’s leftist lunacy at its worst and has many of the undesirable traits of religion. (Don’t get me started) A blind adherence to the belief that we are all equal is palpable nonsense. This is the thinking that prevents justice being dealt out swiftly to transgressors and generates armies of cringing pygmies crafting away to devise ever more inventive types of deprivation in order to redistribute the earnings of a diminishing working class to an ever-increasing horde of ‘deferred achievers’.

This is the politics of envy writ large and if the SEA has its way, imprinted indelibly on the impressionable minds of your children for ever more. The left simply cannot bear the thought that there is anything worthy in the principle of greater reward for greater effort or ability, preferring instead the notion of some nebulous entitlement to equality of outcome, dressed up as equality of opportunity.

That can’t work – only so much to go around – so, in the perverse logic of the left, if I can’t have a yacht, neither shall you. If I can’t win a medal, you don’t deserve one either. And if I can’t read or write I don’t see why anybody should even desire such a thing. They are doing so well with that last one that some of their supporters are not even aware of, let alone able to access, the means of their own salvation.

If you don’t tell people they've failed, how in hell can you then tell them to buck their ideas up? And as bucking up your ideas is one of the foundation stones of my great social plan, where does that leave my forthcoming reign as king?

How times have changed. Back in the day, even the Marxists at the BBC would wield the F-word with barely a flinch. See, the poor kid on the test card got an ‘F’ and I reckon if they'd just let her finish she might have even  won the game!