A Piece of Paper

In the absence of any concrete policy to argue about, the subject of qualified teachers raised its diversionary head again yesterday as opposition MPs confused Michael Gove’s quest for educational excellence and competence with socialism’s insistence that all must have qualifications, titles or some form of accreditation – yes, we are all winners. Curious then, how they seem less concerned that parents, who produce the offspring that the state must then attempt to educate, should be suitably vetted and certified and examined and qualified. Of course, the last thing we need is politicians deciding what qualifications would be suitable to judge people fit to breed. But it’s not a bad idea, is it?

We routinely and robustly proscribe all sorts of natural human activity on the basis that it is counter to civilised behaviour. Humans steal almost by instinct – you have to actively teach children that theft is wrong, yet our supposed rulers regularly demonstrate that crime goes effectively unpunished. Maybe MP criminality is more acceptable than proletariat wrongdoing? Humans also cause intentional harm to each other with an astonishing regularity; you could hardly credibly state that murder is dying out, for instance. And one of the most basic drivers of human violence is the competition for mating rights. Surely, in the quest for responsible parents there should be obstacles to surmount, exams to pass and qualifications to be attained?

Of course, as in all things, one of the most difficult of human instincts to suppress is the opportunism – red in tooth and claw – that ensured our very survival as a species. Introduce a legal requirement for a parenting diploma and in the twenty years or so before ministers wake up to the abuses reported to them from day one by a multitude of whistle-blowers, bogus bratting colleges will spring up and award undeserved degrees in getting up the duff. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if an awful lot of lecturers will happily help their paying students with their ‘homework’. Yes, you say, wagging your finger at me, you would paint humanity in such a sordid light but, you see, unlike politicians, I am not seeking election and can therefore tell the truth.

And the truth is that no matter how you layer on the veneers of civilisation the animal within all of us will find ways to scratch it off and reveal the crude plywood beneath. It seems to me that some regulation is needed, but you can only go so far. You can prohibit the physical aspects of racism, for instance – making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of differentness and punishing verbal and physical expressions of the same – but you can’t eradicate antipathy; we haven’t yet perfected thought control. You can also mandate the acquisition of paper qualifications, but you’re on a hiding to nothing if you believe that everybody can justify holding them or demonstrate the actual worth that such parchment purports to confer.

But for some reason, despite all the millennia of evidence against, our rulers are obsessed with putting barricades in the way of reason and are too quick in creating structures open to abuse. Insist on teaching qualifications for all and I guarantee you that standards will not only not improve, they will probably go down as the unworthy will find ways of obtaining the closed-shop entry ticket, while assessing their actual competence will take a back seat for a while. It is as clear as day to those of us who live in the real world; why is it so difficult for governments to understand?

Testing times...

Maybe, rather than MPs insisting on forever regulating the rest of us, the rest of us should be quietly regulating them. Next year, if you hadn’t noticed, there is to be a general election. But why should we have to put up with candidates selected by obscure and often hereditary processes to fill party ambitions? I propose that only suitably qualified candidates be allowed to stand – no diploma, no hat in the ring. That gives them all a year to stop meddling, put in some hard graft, hand in their homework for scrutiny and revise for the big day. And we will all be marking the exams.

Metric, my Arse!

"Morning, squire! I'll have half a brace of a quart of milk, if you don't mind,  a stone of spuds and a cubit of those sausages, thank you very much." Oh, happy days, when we Brits could speak in metric tongues and diddle the foreigners out of a tanner in change before they'd even noticed we'd weighed out only fourteen ounces to the pound.

Of course, the younger reader - anybody under, say forty - would struggle to compute in avoirdupois, given the egregious invasion of the decimal system, with its inhuman adherence to the base of ten. Pah! In the nineteen fifties any child could add tuppence, three farthings to half a crown and work out how many ha'penny chews he could nick from the tuck shop and still have change from a bob... as I recall. (The answer is, obviously, half a chain.)

But it's so much easier now, they say? Is it? Because, curiously, half of our current metric system is still in Imperial units. Hold on (you're thinking) metric is kilograms and millimetres and stuff isn't it? Well, no, because 'metric' really means 'pertaining to measurement', so any system of weights and measure is, by definition, a metric system and ours - as with many other countries - is a mixture of old and new, casual and legally enshrined. (And, in any case we can't base all of our quantities on the metre - from which 'The Metric System' derives its name - because we also have to deal in other quantities, such as mass.)

The whole 'Metric Martyrs' debacle was a travesty brought about by local government jobsworths inventing regulations and restrictions that never existed. So, it makes complete sense that Michael Gove now wants to re-acquaint pupils with those Imperial values that have remained with us all these years. Lest it sound regressive, consider that our standard unit of distance is the mile, we still give fuel consumption in miles per gallon and everybody knows how high six-feet is. 0.568261 of a litre of bitter, anybody?

Cue the gnashing of teeth of hard-pressed teachers, struggling to get today's students to deal with simple multiples of ten and the louder voices of their elected union representatives making a mountain out of a molehill. For, despite the pleas of Lord Howe to go all the way into the Système International d'Unités it is a fact that our world is built from human-derived units such as feet and inches and not from "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second." And besides, any schoolboy from 1948 could tell you that there are three thousand four hundred and twenty eight molehills in a standard mountain.

Proof that a £ is always worth more than a €

So gather in the sheaves, sort 'em into bushels and let's gargle a gallon of grog in celebration of our pints, gills and scruples. Lets's walk a league or two, pacing out our land in feet and furlongs, rods, poles and perches. Let's embrace the glorious heritage of measurements arising from what actual people do or did to earn their crust and let's say Imperial without any cringing fawning apologies to the great-great grandparents of today's grievance professional. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a metre!

Old Labour Hubbard

Next door to the woman who lives in a shoe, where she earns more than a doctor just for having so many children she doesn’t know what to do... Round the corner from Little Jack Horner, the union official with the plum job… Just along the glade from the hill where Jack and Jill famously earned Jack’s disability living allowance, lives old Mother Hubbard. Seeking to feed her poor little doggie, Mother Hubbard proceeded to the cupboard where the Labour Party kept all their policy ideas and what did she find? Sweet FA according to Dan Hodges.

In the past Labour has wooed voters by telling them nice things such as mountains are mounds of muffins, clouds are composed of candy floss and rain is made from Mountain Dew. And if we all think nice thoughts and wish very hard we can go on a journey and become stars on X-Fuctor. And nobody ever needs to be called scum. Even when they are the vilest scum imaginable. Because the Labour Party want to be seen as a very nice party; jelly and ice cream and balloons and everything. Everybody say, “Aaaah”. 

But now the chickens are firmly on the roost and all is not well in Miliband’s Marxist wonderland.

Multiculturalism has mangled our traditional sense of fair play and tolerance and created ghettoes and strife and fear and hate. The Diversity Coordinators have spent so long redefining their role, their aims, their purpose in life, their mission statements and their remuneration packages that they now need Diversity Coordinator Coordinators to redefine their role, their aims, etc. 

Education, education, education has been misheard as statistics, statistics, statistics for so long that the current crop of wunderkind are more like “wonder-they-can-spell-their-own-name-kind”. It’s not the teachers’ fault; after all most of them are products of the same failing system. But they are complicit in churning out a dumbed-down electorate which, despite my hearty derision of the Left, I can’t believe was the intention of any sane government.

But look, the party’s over and this time there are no goodie-bags to take home. All the money went on the trifle. And before you trudge home in the dark, it’s time to tell you the truth at last. Because being too nice to you all for too many years was slowly killing you with kindness. 

Life can be roses, but not without effort. Educational attainment can be the route to riches, but not for everybody. School can even be fun, but not all the time. Some make it all the way to the top; most by talent and hard work, some by good fortune, but the top is a very small place and to get there you have to scramble over the heap made up of the rest of us. There it is, the honest truth and reality of life as the planet’s top predator. 

So Michael Gove is surely to be lauded for telling the truth and getting to grips with a crippling national problem. Yes, the teaching profession is going to whinge like buggery but it’s time for them to admit that their fifty years of ‘progressive’ education is largely responsible for our appalling performance measured against the rest of the world. (It’s notable that the best in the world largely use ‘old fashioned’ educational methods.) 

And while we’re telling the truth, George Osborn should also be praised for daring to tell us the money cupboard is bare. So back to the Labour Party. Opposition is usually easy – all you do is gainsay every government proposal and promise milk and honey if you get back into power, but even the serial fantasists of Socialism seem to have admitted the game is up. The lack of any form of coherent opposition policy is a sign, maybe, that reality has finally dawned on Keir Hardie's clan.

Ed explains his economic policy to the nation

But, cheer up folks, there is good news ahead. There must be, otherwise all the newspapers wouldn't already be back to banging on about Kate’s particularly perky party poppers, so all’s well with the world again. Yay!