The Kids are Not All Right

This piece from Katherine Birbalsingh is simply fantastic.

Ms. Kirbalsingh, a minority teacher in England's public school system and a former Marxist, details how her experiences with leftist policies transformed her to the "right wing."

The best part of the piece:

The regular dumbing-down of our examination system is obvious to any teacher who is paying attention and who has been in the game for some time. The refusal to allow children to fail at anything is endemic in a school culture that always looks after self-esteem and misses the crucial point, which is that children's self-esteem depends on achieving real success. If we never encourage them to challenge themselves by risking failure, self-esteem will never come.

I started to climb the professional teaching ladder, rising to positions of middle and senior management. There too I succeeded but often only by fighting against people's innate liberalism. Indeed, I would sometimes find myself arguing with my own deeply-embedded liberalism: "Take pity on the boy. Don't punish him. It isn't his fault he didn't do his homework; just look at his home situation." Or "Why ask them to do their ties to the top or tuck their shirts in? What does any of that have to do with learning?"

I had become indoctrinated by all the trendy nonsense dictating that if children are not behaving in your classroom, it is because you have been standing in front of them for more than five minutes trying to teach them. If only you had sat them in groups with you as facilitator, rather than teacher at the front, then you'd have the safe environment conducive to learning that we all seek. The basic ideology is that if there is chaos in the classroom, it is the teacher's fault. Children are not responsible for themselves, while senior management fails to establish systems that support teachers and punish children for not doing their homework, whatever their home situation.

I argued constantly with my colleagues and bosses. Often, I won and, almost as if they were inextricably linked, as the innate liberalism within people waned, the department or the school would improve. In every instance, I could see for myself that a move away from liberalism was a step in the right direction, a step that brought calm out of chaos, learning in place of trendiness, and success instead of failure.