Yes, I know that every word in that triad is misspelled. But who cares?
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson certainly doesn’t. It’s those hallowed concepts that matter, not how you spell them. Whatever the orthography, the new triad of DEI should replace the old one of 3Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic.
Now, Mrs Phillipson is a good-looking woman, which would normally rank her high on my list of human attainments. But then I look at her plans for Britain’s primary schools, and she not so much goes down to the bottom of the list as drops right off it.
However, I wonder if she too is a chess player like her accomplice Rachel Reeves. Mrs Phillipson’s thought follows the impeccably logical path from the general to the specific. Like the champion junior player Rachel never was, Bridget first lays down the overall strategy and then looks for the best tactics to carry it out.
Can’t fault her on that. I can, however, lament that such a sound intellectual apparatus is put to the service of wicked goals to be achieved by subversive means.
The strategy is easy to discern. Mrs Phillipson and her accomplices don’t care if children learn how to read, write and add up. As far as they are concerned, the purpose of education isn’t to educate. It’s to indoctrinate.
To that end, she has announced that all pupils will get compulsory ‘citizenship’ classes. My first reaction was positive, although we are really subjects, not citizens. Still, no doubt children should study the nature and history of the British constitution, learning the roles played by the crown, the two Houses of Parliament and the judiciary.
But then that’s not what Mrs Phillipson has in mind. Citizenship to her means learning the sacramental significance of DEI (however spelled), media literacy (whatever that means, but don’t tell me — I’m happy in my state of ignorance), gender studies (and she isn’t talking about grammatical categories) and climate change (caused by Brexit, the Tory establishment and Nigel Farage).
I’m appalled. Such subjects will take up precious school time, which is already crammed to the gunwales with sex education, condom studies and birth control techniques. Oh yes, the three Rs will suffer too, but do remember how Mrs Phillipson et al. define the goal of education.
In pursuit of her real objective, Mrs Phillipson will abandon several Tory policies that she is certain amount to nothing short of child abuse. Specifically, she’ll scrap the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), what with its accent on such obsolete subjects as maths, science, humanities and foreign languages.
Such subjects, she believes, do untold harm to children’s education. If they do maths, they’ll be able to figure out that Labour’s spending plans don’t add up, and what kind of citizenship is that? Learning science may make them see the whole net zero brouhaha for the scam it is. If they really get into British history, they may find out it’s not all just racist colonial oppression, which discovery may traumatise them for life.
And yes, Mrs Phillipson would dearly love us to re-enter the EU, but a Briton doesn’t have to know foreign languages to be a true European. All those continentals speak some English patois, so why bother?
She also wants to simplify grammar, and I’d suggest that the best way of doing so is to abandon it altogether. However English is spoke, that be fine, innit?
However, it appears that Mrs Phillipson isn’t quite prepared to go that far yet. All she wants is to get rid of posh-toff grammatical terms, all those subjunctives, predicates, adverbs and some such.
At first I wondered whether she advocated an extensive use of structural grammar techniques, which indeed dispense with much of the traditional terminology. But no, what she means is an emphasis on practical, as opposed to ‘theoretical’, grammar.
As a former teacher of English in the neolithic past, I sympathise with my British colleagues. Their task has just been made well-nigh impossible, but that’s no skin off Mrs Phillipson’s shapely posterior.
While lackadaisical about pupils’ basic education, she is touchingly concerned about their mental health. To that end, she is reducing the amount of time spent on GCSE exams, those tortuous ordeals subjecting tots to intolerable pressure.
Exams will be greatly simplified to make sure everyone passes, if not always with full marks. Children don’t need to learn how to handle pressure because they’ll face none in grown-up life. No, scratch that. The real pressure will come from assorted conspiracy theories, and trust Mrs Phillipson to teach pupils how to recognise and reject those.
What kind of conspiracy theories? Need you ask? Things like global warming denial, that infernal plot to undermine Ed Miliband’s net zero fanaticism.
Speaking of Mrs Phillipson’s accomplices, one such is Labour MP Helen Hayes, chairman of the Education Select Committee. (Sorry, I’m one of those fossils who find ‘chairperson’ jarring and who regard ‘chair’ as strictly a piece of furniture.)
She supports the new curriculum implicitly. Explicitly, she said:
“I welcome the proposed changes to the curriculum, which are designed to ensure access to a greater breadth of subjects including within science and the arts, and that children and young people leave school with the skills they need to succeed in the modern world, particularly the focus on citizenship, digital and media literacy, climate science, oracy and enrichment.”
I’m confident that the new curriculum will teach pupils how to express themselves with Miss Hayes’s coherence, lucidity and, well, oracy. They could then look forward to lucrative careers as welfare recipients, Labour voters, net zero activists and tireless fighters for gender rights.