sunday sales seminar

Via Europhobia, Austin Mitchell MP on the government sell for education reform:

We should call meetings in the school with Head, Governors, and parents and tell them that the reforms will:

1. Put parents at the heart of running schools
2. Tailor tuition to the needs of each individual child
3. Reform schools to give them the freedom and flexibility they need
4. Give teachers a positive right to discipline
5. Give local authorities a strong new role.

Who could possibly object to any of that? Motherhood and apple pie had to be omitted because we're talking about kids under 19 threatened by an obesity epidemic.

It then goes on; In << SCHOOL NAME >> you know the hard work everyone puts in to improve results by <> and transform the <>.

There’s more, and it’s equally depressing. Inter alia, this is a bit like the Chinese government paying cadres to put its point of view across on bulletin boards and in chat rooms. Except that, unlike the Communist Party of China, the UK government doesn’t trust its MP’s enough to let them do it in their own way:

Ma Zichun believes that compared to the Internet commentators drawn from public employment notices in other areas, Suqian's Internet commentator team will be easier to manage and they are more unified. Since the Internet commentators come from the propaganda system, they are "politically trustworthy, dependable on working on their own and therefore conducive to letting each perform in their own effective way."

In other news, Alex the Yorkshire Ranter has a Robbtastic rundown of UK/US withdrawal strategy in Iraq. Killer point:

British forces are currently covering the southern end of that route and the border with Kuwait. We can't leave until everyone else has, short of leaving the US to negotiate a deal with Iran to get out and accept that the NOIA will do exactly as it pleases, which would be a military disaster, lead to the immediate elimination of the Iraqi government and probable further intervention by the neighbours, and also be equivalent to terminating the Atlantic alliance.

Comments

[Shuggy]

"Who could possibly object to any of that?"

Um, me. For example:

1) Some parents clearly had no business breeding in the first place but now that they have we can minimise the damage and make sure they're not allowed anywhere near a school, never mind being involved in running it, for goodness sake.

2) Are we going to get smaller classes/more time to do this? Didn't think so.

3 and 5 are mutually exclusive in my experience.

4 would be desirable. So are we to be equipped with water-cannons and other fun stuff? Need to wait and see on that one...