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April 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Suzanne Moore
16:05 EST, 31 March 2012
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16:05 EST, 31 March 2012
I got told off by a teacher a while back for saying that inconveniencing working parents with strike action may backfire. Even though I did support the strike and went to the picket, she was very angry: ‘Do you think teachers are basically babysitters?’
No, but it is undeniable that working parents use schools as ‘childcare’.
Now some will be delighted with the approaching holidays. Lie-ins, late nights, walks in the park.
Falling behind: Many children are left with nothing – or just an Xbox – to engage them during the long holidays
Others will be even more frazzled than usual as they fashion a patchwork of childcare to manage work.
Some will structure their child’s day with expensive educational activities, some children will be in front of an Xbox for two weeks. Others will run wild.
Last summer, some kids ran really wild during the riots. The long summer holiday was seen as a ‘cause’ of the chaos. While many parents, and I include myself, look back at their summers with a nostalgia for a freedom we don’t allow our own children, the reality is that many kids are simply left with nothing to engage them.
Educational experts think that the long breaks further fuel inequality.
Basically, some children continue to learn even during holidays while others fall behind.
The premise of the summer break (originally to gather the harvest) no longer makes sense, but trying to change it is controversial.
The academies and free schools are pushing for change – there are calls for five terms with shorter breaks. Teachers in Nottingham are threatening strike action as a result.
Out of control: Last summer, some kids ran really wild during the riots., and the long summer holiday was seen as a ’cause’ of the chaos
How we organise school days and holidays, though, is not written in stone. Most learning takes place in a couple of hours a day at most. The rest is crowd control, if you ask me.
As we move towards increasingly authoritarian regimes borrowed from the private system, we are responding far more to parental insecurities than to children’s needs. Punishing parents for taking their children abroad for two weeks does not stop truanting.
Making the start of the school day earlier and earlier (which actually means very long days for some kids) may work for teachers but not for everyone.
Having sacrificed my own children for the sake of my political principles – I love saying that, as though state schools were akin to child abuse – I would like more flexibility in the system. But we are getting less and our attitudes to holidays reflect a cultural shift in how we treat kids.
My long weeks of building dens, discovering science fiction, roaming ‘the heath’, stealing and reselling golf balls, running away from the man we all knew was a bit strange, riding my bike into gorse bushes, falling, plotting and dreaming existed at a time when no one cared if I was bored or not.
Now adults fear both feral youth and their own children’s boredom.
The mums of mumsnet are permanently outraged about the cost of family holidays and the price we pay to entertain our kids. Well, we could just stop. Indeed, I think teachers and children do deserve a long break.
To learn that days with no structure can be worth so much more than those that are time-tabled is something worth knowing. To discover that you can learn without being in a school is a truly valuable lesson for all our children.
Film stars like Anne should be paid to act, not starve
Anne Hathaway, all of size 10, is now eating less than 500 calories a day as she attempts to lose 16lb to play the ‘dying prostitute’ Fantine in the film of Les Miserables.
Anne apparently looks too fit and healthy. Hello wardrobe? Make-up? What kind of insanity is this?
Cast someone who actually looks like a dying prostitute? Not so difficult in Hollywood, surely? Or simply accept that actors act.
Method acting: Size 10 Anne Hathaway is losing 16lbs to play dying prostitute Fantine in the film of Les Miserables
The ugly side of Gorgeous George
In a week when the news seemed largely
made up – pasties made out of petrol-guzzling pensioners – the Tories
looked incredibly out of touch.
We all have an idea of what Cameron
really eats, so the fake pasty stuffing – rather like the
hot-dog-munching with Obama and porridge-slurping with depressed Scots –
is all for show. Still, pasty passion took our minds off the poor
economic growth figures.
The real shock, though, has been what
George Galloway, with his famous reticence, called ‘the Bradford
Spring’. Obviously, winning a by-election is the equivalent to an
international movement – the Arab Spring, where many are still dying –
in his peculiar moral universe.
Strange moral universe: George Galloway described his by-election win as ‘the Bradford Spring’
This huge swing to him, though, was
certainly a vote against the tired three-party system. But he is a
cynical opportunist whose ‘I’m not a Muslim but…’ shtick may
prove only self-serving and divisive.
Will he do anything for the locals of
Bradford apart from orate? Will we ever get that image of him lapping
up Rula Lenska’s milk in Celebrity Big Brother out of our minds?
A protest vote against Labour is
understandable and Galloway is right to say Iraq is neither forgotten
nor forgiven, but to fuel sectarian divides in Bradford, a place to
which he has no ties, is dangerous.
He is doubtless a brilliant
campaigner but as soon as he won, he started preaching the Palestinian
cause. I happen to agree with him but wonder if the people of Bradford
see that as a priority.
His massive majority meant that many
young people voted for the first time and, according to reports, young
Muslims turned against the advice of their elders to vote for him. In
every picture, he’s surrounded by men and preaching to men. I wonder how
many female voters Gorgeous George persuaded with his bizarre ‘I don’t
drink’ leaflet.
Labour can take nothing for granted,
even in a time of toffs and unfeasible snacks. The economy is as sludgy
as a microwaved pasty but the only Labour answer I have heard is some
whispering about Yvette Cooper – not the alternative many are desperate
for.
Like many others, I have been delighted to look up at the night sky lately. Venus, Jupiter and Mars have been clearly visible.
Looking at this does not turn me into Patrick Moore (no relation) and I need Brian Cox as I struggle with my daughter’s questions on the speed of light. I even attended a lecture on developments at CERN last week to try to keep up.
It was OK until the graphs appeared and I dissolved into antimatter. My notes on the beginnings of the universe will come in handy, though. For an hour I tussled with particle physics, only to write: ‘All stuff is made of stuff.’
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Let kids have some freedom to learn and make mistakes, after all, only duffers drown.
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School holidays are far too long and do nothing to prepare children for the world of work. The minimum allowable annual leave is 20 days plus the 8 bank holidays, children should get that as well, a week at easter, a week at Christmas and two weeks in the summer. Judging by the decline in the last 30 yaers as well it is not as though any of their teachers are doing much to earn their highly inflated sky high salaries and gold plated pensions paid for by OUR TAXES !!!!!!!
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Yes, they certainly seemed to be learning a lot last summer during the holidays, didn’t they? Isn’t it time that people like Ms Moore got out of their cosy offices and did a term as a school teacher in a ‘bog standard’ comp? Meanwhile, some lucky teacher could do a swap with her and sit there attacking their most hated working groups or with no come backs.
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Suzanne Moore says ‘having sacrificed my own children for the sake of my political principles…” Oh come on, attend a sink school in east London did they or was it a top performing state school in an expensive leafy suburb? Maybe a school like the London Oratory like the Labour politicians who pretend they’ve sent their children to a state school when in relaity its nothing of the sort? And i bet there were private tutors in the evenings? All you did in reality was just take places in a top state school that could have gone to some kid who needed the place far more and you could have easily sent your kids private. Its like the rich who could afford private healthcare but go NHS instead out of ‘principle’ (unless its life threatening of course), your selfishness just clogs up the system and deprives those who are really in need. But you can give yourself a big pat on the back and sleep well at night because of it eh? All guilt at privilged life erased? How nice for you
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I rarely agree with Suzanne Moore but she is spot on about George Galloway. He is a shameless opportunist who couldn’t care less about the people of Bradford. It is dangerous of him to fuel a sense of grievance in an already dangerously divided city.
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Personally, having found school an abomination and an assault upon my nervous system I could only sympathize with my children if they hated school. Anything else would be pure hypocrisy.
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One of the biggest problems, I maintain, is the fact that there are few opportunities for physical challenge for children. Just as the author points out, the days of bike-riding, building dens, discovering one’s limits are now gone, destroyed by the state’s anxiety that no child is harmed in the making of an adult. Our system here in NZ ensures that all children experience outdoor education for a week in summer, with white water rafting, horseriding, abseiling, tramping, and just living together with their classmates and teachers under canvas or in remote huts in the wilderness (it should be said, some more remote than others). Every year, my kids’ classes would come home with at least one casualty – broken teeth,limbs, concussion, but hey – all part of becoming a well-rounded adult. My own kids jumped from high trees into deep lakes, made rafts and sailed down into the harbour, took a packed lunch into the “wilderness”. I made sure they were strong swimmers and survivors. They are.
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