How not to teach kids about the slave trade
Womanist Musings: When Is A Child Too Young to Learn About the Middle Passage? This story is about an incident in which two supply teachers decided to show a film called The Middle Passage,...
Category: Education
Busybodies and common sense
BBC News – Should a teenager be left to babysit a toddler? Lately I’ve seen a few stories about parents receiving cautions or fines for “child neglect” which consisted of leaving a young child...
What’s wrong with sleepovers, exactly?
I saw an article by Amy Chua, the Chinese-American academic, in which she proclaims herself a “tiger mother” and tells the world that Chinese mothers (or maybe she means mothers from a particular group...
John Ware does hatchet job on Muslim schools
Last night, BBC1 broadcast a Panorama programme presented by John Ware, purporting to expose “extremism” being promoted through private Islamic schools in the UK, both full-time schools and Saudi-run weekend ones. He starts off...
On new unemployment laws and student protests
I read today that the government are proposing new legislation that would bring in supposedly new restrictions on people who are on Jobseeker's Allowance, in which people who refuse work or "community service" will...
When is an apology meaningful?
Earlier today I took part in a Facebook discussion about "apologies", in the context of the British government's decision to prohibit blood donations from people who had, or ever had, M.E., in which someone...
The Humanist dream school
Welcome to my dream school | Education | The Guardian This article appeared in the Guardian last Friday, but only now I've got round to commenting on it. I read it eagerly and think...
Faith schools are no menace
Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although...
Let them eat halaal meat
Yesterday the Daily Star (the Black Hole to you and me), a London tabloid from the same pig-sty as the Daily Express (AKA Daily Spew), ran a story about the “scandal” of the borough...
Slow news day: Muslim kids and music
I was just listening to the BBC London station (94.9FM) and the top story in their news bulletins at the moment seems to be the fact that some Muslim parents are withdrawing their children...
Uniforms more important than school meals?
This morning, I heard an interview with the woman who had stood to be mayor of Newham, the east London borough, in the most recent local elections (the same day as the general election)....
Why wouldn’t you want to be autistic?
Last week a number of newspapers reported that scientists were "on track to establish the genetic triggers for autism, paving the way for earlier diagnosis of children who could be at risk of developing...
The two sick ladies and me
Recently I read two blog posts ([1], [2]) about dealing with old “friends” that pop up on Facebook, and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it being a problem. There seems to...
Attempt to link Islamic societies to terrorism
Last Thursday BBC Radio 4 broadcast a Report programme in which they attempted to “investigate” the links between British university Islamic societies (or ISocs) with terrorism, on the basis that Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, who...
Supreme Court bans JFS racial discrimination
Today, the British Supreme Court ruled that the policy of the Jews’ Free School (or JFS) of taking converts to Judaism only when they had been through one denomination’s conversion ritual rather than another...
Why Tories messed up in attack on Islamic school
Why Conservatives failed the test on Islamic schools – Education News, Education – The Independent It appears that the Tories overlooked a number of things while criticising state funding for two schools supposedly linked...
The link between childhood behaviour and crime
Most UK crime caused by people with childhood behavioural problems, study says | Society | The Guardian I was quite worried when I saw this headline, and was reassured to read on and find...
The music teacher and the teenage lesbian
School teacher Helen Goddard jailed for 15 months for lesbian affair with teenage pupil | Mail Online A judge yesterday jailed a (now former) music teacher for fifteen months for carrying on a lesbian...
How can this school get away with this rip-off?
Comprehensive defends new school uniform costing nearly £100 | Education | The Guardian On the subject of Portsmouth, one imagines that you will not find much overlap between the riders on the new London-to-Portsmouth...
They love it, honest
I’ve not long finished watching a BBC Storyville documentary (see it on iPlayer here) on the scientist D. Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced Guy-du-shek), who won a Nobel prize for work on prion diseases (such as...