David Craig, on October 18th, 2014You’re probably aware that Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, Tristram Hunt, son of Baron Hunt of Chesterton, has recently returned from a trip (probably paid for by us long-suffering taxpayers) to Singapore to see why Singapore’s education system is so much better than Britain’s.
The PISA comparison of different countries’ educational performance regularly shows Singapore to be one of the best performers, whereas in the last 15 years, Britain has been falling ever further down the league tables – from 7th to 17th under New Labour’s failed “education, education, education” commitment.
Singapore’s 15-year-olds are now 10 months ahead of those in the UK in English and 20 months ahead in maths.
So, what did the great educational expert Dr Hunt learn? His main ‘big idea’ was that teachers should take a public oath committing themselves to the values of their profession. This would apparently be like the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors. Such a symbolic statement when teachers qualified would help to “elevate” the status of the profession, said posh Tristram.
Now, I don’t know much about UK state schools, but here are a few things I believe Tristram ought to have noticed:
1. In Singapore, children sit at desks which are arranged in rows, and they all face in the same direction-towards a teacher who instructs. In Britain desks are often arranged in little circles and a teacher wanders around the room aimlessly while noisy, gobby kids supposedly do ‘project-based’ work
2. In Singapore, discipline is imposed. In many British inner-city schools teachers spend much of their time just trying to get the children to calm down and stop fighting or playing with their phones
3. In Singapore, arithmetical tables are memorised and calculators are banned. Moreover, spelling, grammar and syntax are rigorously taught. In Britain, teachers seem to believe it would be an infringement of children’s Yuman Rights to expect them to learn the basics
4. Singapore doesn’t have a benefits system which encourages the stupid, obese, lazy, worthless and educationally-challenged Jeremy-Kylists to procreate like rabbits while taxing strivers so much to pay for the benefits-dependent that people with ambition for their children can’t afford to have children
5. Singapore doesn’t have a system of uncontrolled open borders which enables 46,000 largely unskilled immigrants to pour into the country each month overwhelming public services like education and healthcare and resulting in many inner-city schools where the majority of children don’t speak English
6. Schools in Singapore are not being taken over by Isl*m*c fundamentalists who teach children that they should hate their country and that girls should not be educated as they are hardly human beings
7. In fact, Singapore now has the kind of schools that Britain had in the first half of the twentieth century and that were then dumbed down and killed off by successive Labour governments desperate to stamp out ambition and ensure that we were all equal – equally ill-educated
I’m sure there are many other things Cambridge-educated Tristram could have learnt if he wasn’t so blinded by left-wing, all-should-have-prizes, Islamophiliac ideology.
God help us if Ed Miliband and his band of deluded fools ever win an election.
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Another gem Mr Craig. Many years ago I was a teacher. Without discipline
teaching goes right out of the window. I used the “3 R’s”, and then they had a firm
base on which to work.
As the parent of two teachers in the State Secondary sector, I can assure you that teachers swear a number of oaths every day, sotto voce in the classroom as they struggle to instil rudimentary discipline into the feral youngsters who confront them daily, and in full voice in the staff room, when they meet their similarly stressed colleagues!
The fact is that teachers at all levels have had their power to deal with the disruptive element they encounter every day withdrawn, in the name of the troublemakers’ “Yuman Rights”, while at the same time successive Governments have imposed ever more bureaucracy upon the country’s hard working and dedicated teachers. Both my middle-aged children routinely work 12 hour days, then work throughout the weekends and the allegedly generous school holidays in order to catch up with the paperwork.
I know two 20 year olds undergraduates, both initially keen to enter the teaching profession and with genuine senses of vocation who, after their first classroom experience, decided to direct their career aspirations elsewhere. The fact is that the UK is on the slides. Unless we deal with the benefits culture, the undisciplined and never-to-be-employable youngsters (my immediate neighbour is one such!)who see it as their right to live off me and all the other tax-payers, plus the so-called “disabled”, many of whom suffer from nothing more than gross obesity, brought on my their own self-indulgence, the UK will continue its downward slide.
I think Mr **** should ask us for expenses so he can visit a Sierra Leone school to see the future for British schools. Fortunately we can only afford a one way trip due to government cuts.
[…] Tristram Hunt, you really are a stupid ****! […]
The thing about “human rights” is spot on- in Singapore students can be caned with a one-metre stick for wrong colour socks, in Britain such a teacher would be classed as a “paedo” upon the slightest contact with his 18-year-old student.
Singapore students can see with clear vision what can happen if you don’t work hard.
And also- Singapore’s coastguard keeps a line of sight between each boat, which forms a convoy around the island. Illegal immigrants? Not given a right to family life with a cat, caned.
Short, sweet, to the point, FRElEexact-y as information should be!