Silver Bling Thing
Ministry of Truth » Silver Bling Thing Until I read the above blog article, I was planning to write an entry about how I supported Lydia Playfoot’s campaign to be able to wear a...
Category: Education
Who said evolutionists are liars?
New Statesman – Time Out with Nick Cohen: Steve Jones Nick Cohen interviews Steve Jones, professor of biology at University College, London (the same professor who did the anti-Creationism speech at Hay on Wye...
Imam training and terrorism
'Imams are not the solution to terrorism' – Education Guardian An article which appeared in today's Guardian Education supplement, featuring an interview with Shaikh Ibrahim Mogra, on why government funding for imam training may...
“Cultural separatism” and the Islamic studies conference
Islamophobia Watch – David Cameron accuses Muslims of 'cultural separatism' David Cameron gave this speech at a conference on "Islam and Muslims in the World Today", hosted in London by Cambridge university earlier this...
Times: rotting in failed schools
Minette Marrin: Sentenced to rot in their failed schools (Sunday TImes) A case against another of this government’s stupid recent ideas: keeping kids in school until they’re 18. Theoretically, this is supposed to include...
Rebuttal to Daily Spew and response to Harry’s Place
Five Chinese Crackers: More bullsh*t from the Express Thanks to Osama Saeed, a comprehensive rebuttal of the garbage on the front page of yesterday's Daily Spew regarding the MCB's report (PDF) about how British...
The social engineering of integration
Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, today called for schools with an overwhelmingly Muslim pupil intake to be closed down and replaced with large academies serving a mixed community. In an interview with the Financial Times (apparently not online, but there’s a synopsis here), he claimed that the present situation of there being schools with an overwhelmingly Muslim intake and pupils who speak a foreign language, like Bangla, at home, “it has become a real strategic security problem”. “They would be much more likely to collaborate with the police and tell them people within their own community are doing things they shouldn’t be doing if they were better integrated,” he alleged.
In praise of hypocrisy
This morning the Daily Mirror reported that the former Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, had sent her dyslexic son to a special private school because she felt that the provision in her area, Tower Hamlets...
Time for a new way of funding religious societies
With the controversy over Nadia Eweida's cross having now led to British Airways reviewing their policy on staff uniforms and religious jewellery, a related controversy, over funding of student religious societies, continues to make...
Pros and cons of compulsory schooling
Pros and Cons of Compulsory Schooling This is from the Society supplement in today's Guardian, in which a former headteacher discusses the case of "Charlie", "a determined 15-year-old truant" who has been working, illegally...
Answer to Rod Liddle on home schooling
Last Sunday I blogged an article from the Spectator by James Bartholomew (now back behind the Spectator’s paywall, but you can find an unedited draft at his own blog) in which he announced that...
In a class of her own
In A Class of Her Own from this week's Spectator (free registration required; goes PPV when next edition is out). The author, James Bartholomew, explains why he is taking his daughter out of school...
Don’t ban packed lunches
Last year Jamie Oliver, a famous young British TV chef, was credited with bringing about a massive improvement in the quality of school dinners after running a TV series exposing the rubbishy quality of...
Sookhdeo on terrorism and Islamic schools
This afternoon someone from the Evening Standard sent me a copy of an article the paper had printed by the infamous Patrick Sookhdeo, an apostate given to writing inflammatory and inaccurate articles about Islam...
Review: Shoot the Messenger
Shoot the Messenger was on BBC2 last night; it featured David Oyewolo (from the drama Spooks, British slang for spies) as Joe, a young black teacher who entered the profession after attending a meeting to discuss the chronic underachievement of black boys in British schools, at which one lady announced that what was needed was more black male teachers to provide positive role models.
Inconveniencing the disabled
My work as a delivery driver often requires me to lift heavy items up several flights of steps, repetitively. It’s a huge inconvenience and annoyance, and the buildings involved are often quite new, leading...
Cross country abuse?
A silly story hit the papers over the weekend about a document which numbered cross-country school runs among forms of child abuse ([1], [2]). The document, entitled Your Legal Rights, was distributed to 14-16...
Guardian: Israel boycott debate triggered email attack
The Guardian's Education section today reports on how recent debates on boycotting Israeli universities produced a flood of often abusive emails: Following a heart attack earlier this year, Paul Mackney, then general secretary of...
Ben Marshall on Runnymede and Islamophobia
In this month’s New Humanist there’s a one-page article by Ben Marshall (a freelance journalist) on Islamophobia, in which the author “embraces his phobia”, defending it as “an entirely reasonable and honourable intellectual position”. The magazine is a bi-monthly, founded in 1885 as the Literary Review, and claims that it “has distinguished itself as a world leader in supporting and promoting humanism and rational inquiry and opposing religious dogma, irrationalism and bunkum wherever it is found”. A typical issue will feature ridicule of some aspect of religion – the present issue has a short piece about Malaysians discussing where to face in prayer when in space, for example. Marshall starts off by attacking those who try to defend Muslims from Islamophobia, including the Runnymede Trust (a race relations body which published a report on Islamophobia in 1997) and the blog Islamophobia Watch. He also makes it clear that he is generally anti-religious and, like a lot of secular humanists, lumps religion in with superstition.
Kira Cochrane on the C-word
Kira Cochrane, the recently-appointed women’s editor of the Guardian who wrote the piece on sexual harrassment from which I got my “Holla Back” link from a few weeks back, has written another article (with strong language) in the New Statesman on a similar theme: the wide spread of the C-word in popular culture.