http://www.philbeadle.com Education teacher, journalist, author and teacher /images/phil-beadle.jpg http://www.philbeadle.com http://www.philbeadle.com/An-Open-Letter-to-Australian-Teachers/79/ I returned relatively recently from my seventh trip to Australia This time after a ticketed event on positive behaviour management in Sydney I returned to South Australia to work at a school in the Barossa Valley with its own winery and a school in Adelaide Irsquo;d worked at previously that I have taken to calling lsquo;happy schoolrsquo; And happiness is the subject of this letter There are probably many things that might be improved in the Australian education system; there are probably things that could be improved in any education system in the world But one thing I have noticed having spent short periods teaching in seven separate schools down under is that ndash; chiefly ndash; the children in Australian schools are happy In Sydney I warned the people kind enough to attend the event who included several experienced and senior educators about what may be coming your way: evidence-led education Their response was ldquo;itrsquo;s already here Philrdquo; Theoretically evid... blog 2024-10-19 17:48:28 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Religion-and-the-Working-Class/78/ Religion casts things into binaries: everything belongs to one of two categories to good or to evil and its function seems to this writer to disguise one as the other ndash; the battle between good and evil allows homophobes to put themselves on the side of the good and evangelical Christians in the USA aligning lsquo;goodrsquo; or lsquo;fighting against evilrsquo; with white supremacists holding guns outside polling stations ndash; and to use this to control how people behave and what they are allowed to see The universal gods of religion include contempt for the other belief in the non-existent holy wars the exaltation of childhood combined with the notion of original sin that makes the abuse of children easier to consider as a possibility submission to authority a denial of the physical and a focus on the internal landscape as a redirection technique from injustices and inequality in the external world Focus on the internal; ignore the evidence of your eyes Since the physical world ... blog 2024-10-11 21:28:39 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Douglas-Murray---039Gender-Race-Identity039/76/ Douglas Murray moves onto safer territory in lsquo;The Madness of Crowds: Gender Race and Identityrsquo; a superbly reviewed book in which he examines identity politics As this examines four different identities gay women race and trans1nbsp;his writing is better able to stand the strain here; his skills of argumentation do not have to be quite so sustained and hold up rather more seamlessly than in his earlier work Indeed so skilled is his writing that he manages the impossible at one point ndash; and this is a sentence I never thought any writer would be capable of prompting me to write ndash; he manages to cause the profoundly morally uncomfortable experience of a reader catching themselves laughing aloud at a story about rape To say he is a gifted writer is to damn Mr Murray with faint praise and his sense of humour makes Goversquo;s occasional waspish turn appear a far blunter tool He references ballet as being ldquo;tedium enactingrdquo;2nbsp;and his dismantling of the lyrics of ... blog 2024-08-01 23:21:14 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Douglas-Murray---039The-Strange-Death-of-Europe039-Immigration-Identity-Islam/75/ Douglas Murray is a highly intelligent man His skills of argumentation are developed and sophisticated and he has a very large following of people who follow his various interviews on various right-wing YouTube channels His arguments are often convincing extraordinarily well phrased and he is an urbane commentator who possesses enviable charisma and much like Gove elegant manners In 2022 he became a contributor to Fox News as well as a director of Toby Youngrsquo;s Free Speech Union He was and is anti the EU for the same reason as Gove: he holds the same belief that the integrity of the idea of the nation state has been eroded and that nation states are the safest way of organising the world Murray like Johnson like Cameron like many others that have governed us was schooled at Eton He has been trained for the role he inhabits in the world of argumentation at the most famous school in the ruling class firmament and hersquo;s been trained well His argument like Goversquo;s is for the... blog 2024-07-31 03:39:53 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Michael-Gove-and-Celsius-77/74/ ldquo;This division that goes on we see it in other sectors They try to pitch people against each other based on their identity their heritage race religion ethnicity whatever you want to call itrdquo;ET1nbsp;nbsp;Mick Lynch1nbsp;2 ldquo;Islamists have tested the willingness both of our media and our elected representatives to defend our values our culture and our freedom: above the acrid smoke of burning flags they have smelt our fearrdquo; Michael Gove3 Michael Gove is the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish processor and of a mother who eventually worked at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf His parents were Labour supporters and self-evidently compassionate people Gove was adopted by them at the age of four months having been in care Perhaps the sweetest thing one might say of Mr Gove is that the depth of love and gratitude he has often expressed towards his parents is both beautiful and touching It is also worth noting that he seems to be quite profoundly competent and that he com... blog 2024-07-30 08:21:30 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/A-Caring-Profession-On-Sheep-and-Wolves/73/ There is a certain kind of person who might be termed lsquo;high conflictrsquo; Irsquo;m not going to say the real name of their condition their disorder out loud but if you know you know Because of something that happened to them as a child they are unable to cope with feelings of shame they project their own behaviour problems onto others and are capable of substantial cruelty Once you become fully aware of this condition once you have properly researched it you notice how prevalent it is in people Ultimately there are sheep and there are wolves The soppy old sheep expect everyone to be like them but not everyone is a sheep and because the sheep live in a fluffy world where they expect everyone to be as nice as them they have absolutely no idea how very many wolves there are And there are a lot of damaged people; there are lots and lots and lots of wolves They are everywhere hiding in plain sight pretending that they are not wolves and if you are a sheep they can do you an enormou... blog 2024-07-26 07:36:15 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Where-Should-Education-Go-Now/72/ In lsquo;The Brothers Karamazovrsquo; one of the characters tells the story of the little onion In it a nasty old woman with no redeeming characteristics at all dies and is descending into hell She has a guardian angel and the angel searches its memory for something anything that might save this meanest of all humans from the flames In desperation she finds something At one point in life the mean old woman had given a beggar a very small onion The angel reaches down and holds the onion out to her The woman grasps the onion and she is saved from hell Primo Levi describes this story as ldquo;revoltingrdquo;1 I started this book determined to find a middle way one in which the achievements of the last decade could be kept and its aberrations swept away but in the process of writing it it became apparent that certain recent practices in terms of the way that human children are educated may well be abhorrent but they are not aberrations The system is infested with totalitarian abuse and ... blog 2024-07-23 03:07:22 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/The-Destruction-of-Teacher-Autonomy/71/ ldquo;Teachers too have their language policed and managed through the use of lsquo;question flow chartsrsquo;: tightly structured classroom scripts and procedures for how to respond to lsquo;errorsrsquo; and lsquo;misconceptionsrsquo; which are designed to enforce standardised pedagogiesrdquo;1nbsp;Ian Cushing Irsquo;ve recently been mentoring a young teacher not called Peregrine Carmichael he chose this name himself Peregrine is in his second year of teaching is a wonderful personality and wonders whether he has what it takes to be a good teacher He has all the moral qualities required is quite a serious intellect and inhabits the realm of joy easily and without artifice He has everything a class full of children might want him to havenbsp; The pedagogic structures at the school were quite restrained as wersquo;d had two poor Ofstedrsquo;s the first of which felt entirely undeserved I wasnrsquo;t around for the second and the head teacher wanted a rising tide to lift all the bo... blog 2024-07-22 12:26:00 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Garreth-Southgate/70/ Irsquo;ve been advising Garreth and the head guys at the FA for a number of years now I wasnrsquo;t allowed to talk about it and have always been completely respectful of this But that time has passed The time I was brought in to talk to senior members of the set up before the U21 Euros has passed The time I was brought in to talk to all the age-area coaches has passed The time I deliberately set up the groupings so that Garreth and I would have time to briefly chat about metacognition has passed It was a defining privilege In January I took the England coaches through a three-hour session on behaviour at Wembley on how one to manifests empathy and why empathy is so deeply important and the following happened Irsquo;d been invited to the afternoon session I felt like a bit of a spare part made my apologies to my mate Lee and left after an enjoyable lunch with lovely people As I was leaving Garreth said ldquo;thanksrdquo; I trudged off happy that my invoice to the FA having wor... blog 2024-07-17 09:45:12 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Michaela-and-Charter-Schools/69/ Let us say that the thing that appears to differentiate Michaela from some of the previous iterations of charter schools in the glossy videos and puff pieces on social media and countless articles in the press is that the children appear to be happy and the collective expressions of human misery do not appear to be coming out from the schoolrsquo;s alumni though it may be that since non-compliance will result in punishment the compliance shown by these children is neutral that they have become apathetic as a ldquo;necessary mechanism of self-defencerdquo;1nbsp;and they are suffering from the emotional death of the hostility of suffocation; also theyrsquo;ve only had a few cohorts go through the whole school experience at the time of writing: theyrsquo;re all still children But there is substantial evidence of some of the techniques that caused the expressions of human misery in the USA are used in the school and it is not impossible that a collective sob might be heard at some point do... blog 2024-07-17 07:00:26 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/On-039Battle-Hymn-of-the-Tiger-Teachers039/68/ ldquo;No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distanced from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models among the oppressorsrdquo; Paulo Freire1 And here we are It was inevitable that we would have to land here at some point I had no wish to I take no joy in this at all I have absolutely nothing personal whatsoever against the teachers at this school wish them and their students well and congratulate them on their wonderful academic results While Michaela Community School welcomes visitors when one is potentially seen as a lsquo;detractorrsquo; though I donrsquo;t recall ever made public mention of the school itself till now entrance is not worth attempting to obtain though Irsquo;m not without friends who have eyes ears and notebooks But there is plenty of video one can watch as the head teacher clearly enjoys a substantial public profile and should you so wish you can waste hours of your life watching countless interview... blog 2024-07-16 08:26:31 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/039No-Excuses-Discipline-Changes-Lives039/67/ Draconianismnbsp;hiding behind anbsp;mask of rhetorical logic is found in its fullest form in Jonathan Porterrsquo;s lsquo;No Excuses Discipline Changes Livesrsquo; Porter is undoubtedly a very clever man: he has an MA in theology from Cambridge and is at the time of writing deputy head academic at Radley College the fees for which are a couple of grand south of fifty thousand quid a year His essay in the follow-up book lsquo;The Power of Culturersquo; is evidence of a serious intellect: the work of an opponent you could learn from and might enjoy grappling with He spent I think seven years at Michaela Free School and during its earlynbsp;incarnation wrote the lsquo;No Excusesrsquo; essay It is a clever piece of work intellectually a great deal more sophisticated than thenbsp;usualnbsp;unwanted patronising advice from people with little experience of teaching or of having ever been to a state school At the time of publication Porter whose writing contains all the awkward structural dev... blog 2024-07-14 07:16:00 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/The-Characteristics-of-a-Cult/66/ Robertnbsp;Lifton in his book lsquo;Losing Reality: On Cults Cultism and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotryrsquo; lists the characteristics of a cult There are eight: Milieu control Mystical manipulation The demand for purity The cult of confession The lsquo;sacred sciencersquo; Loading the language Doctrine over person The dispensing of existence nbsp; 1 Milieu Control A cult leader or guru seeks to havenbsp;completenbsp;control of their environment They have a version of megalomania over the smallest and most dismal globes Among the things the cult leader seeks control over is how cult members interface with the world outside of the cult: what gets out of the cult expression is controlled but this is presented as free speech and what information gets in In totalitarian environments the leader seeks total control over the information that gets into the cult The guru seeks to own the thoughts of the people under his or her influence; they seek a ldqu... blog 2024-07-10 09:24:38 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Zero-Tolerance-in-the-United-Kingdom-2/65/ In the late 1990searly 2000s the language of zero tolerance started to appear in British education We were told to have ldquo;zero tolerance for low-level behaviourrdquo; I wrote a satire of the concept in the educational free-sheetnbsp;SecEd debating whether the low level was as it appeared to be a spatial concept and that teachers were to be intolerant of any movement a child made below the desk It also looked at tolerance itself to see whether it might have been somewhat unfairly maligned So what then is tolerance Tolerance is an abstract noun It means among other things ldquo;respect for the beliefs and ideas of other peoplerdquo;1nbsp;One might conclude from this definition that the zero-tolerance brigade have very little tolerance for the idea of tolerance itself It also means ldquo;the ability or willingness tonbsp;toleratenbsp;the existence of opinions or behaviour that onenbsp;dislikesnbsp;ornbsp;disagreesnbsp;withrdquo;2nbsp;So it is to allow the existence of other opinion... blog 2024-07-09 10:13:21 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/Zero-Tolerance-in-the-United-Kingdom/64/ ldquo;Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly however tending rather to camouflage it ndash; sometimes unconsciously ndash; by presenting themselves as defenders of freedomrdquo;1nbsp;Paulo Freire ldquo;Provocateurs oppressors all those who in some way injure others are guilty not only of the evil they commit but also of the perversion into which they lead the spirit of the offendedrdquo;2nbsp;Primo Levi Ted Wragg used to say that every school thinks it has a real and significant behaviour problem; few of them do To give you an anecdotal insight into this I spent two summers about a decade ago as the guest of an elite private school in Sydney Knox Grammar There I formed a life-long friendship with Glenn McLachlan whorsquo;d earned his stripes in some of Londonrsquo;s tougher schools In the second summer my role was to teach English and to observe and support other teachers Knox Grammar is a rarefied environment and even the briefest look at their alumni will revea... blog 2024-07-08 10:54:12 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/The-Crisis-at-Uncommon/63/ Ultimately Uncommon Schools an American charter school network for whom Doug Lemov was a director which was always one of the main exponents of the zero-tolerance way of managing behaviour was forced into something of a climb-down the size of which you might not anticipate from President Julia Jacksonrsquo;s acknowledgement in an open letter that there might be something of an issue in the networknbsp; Jackson post the killing of George Floyd wrote of the intentions in setting up the charter school network and that they were to battle racism to work for social justice She then made positive affirmations of the power of love within educational institutions and an acknowledgement that students need to feel safe to learn properly and well1nbsp;She acknowledged being in receipt of certain feedback and that she had been humbled by as that feedback did not match up to the original intentions of the networknbsp; In a section titled lsquo;Listening Leads to Changersquo; Jackson outlined ... blog 2024-07-07 12:02:49 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/STAR/62/ Perhaps in partial acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding SLANT perhaps in conceding that some minor errors had been committed in order to hide the systemic issues with the pedagogic regime hersquo;d helped found Lemov coined a new acronym ndash; STAR: sit up track the teacher appreciate your classmatesrsquo; ideas rephrase the words of the person who spoke so they know you were listening So the command to nod at all times initially seems to have disappeared and the idea of appreciating other peoplersquo;s ideas seems sweet but we are still in the realms of the moronic inferno; we are still enforcing complete control over the way in which children sit; we are still controlling the studentsrsquo; gazes; and the final command is again a Pavlovian instruction from a theorist who fails to understand the organic nature of classroom interactions1 What is the point of a compulsory instruction as to exactly how to respond to your classmates This is not how authentic communication... blog 2024-07-06 20:49:16 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/STAR/61/ Perhaps in partial acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding SLANT perhaps in conceding that some minor errors had been committed in order to hide the systemic issues with the pedagogic regime hersquo;d helped found Lemov coined a new acronym ndash; STAR: sit up track the teacher appreciate your classmatesrsquo; ideas rephrase the words of the person who spoke so they know you were listening So the command to nod at all times initially seems to have disappeared and the idea of appreciating other peoplersquo;s ideas seems sweet but we are still in the realms of the moronic inferno; we are still enforcing complete control over the way in which children sit; we are still controlling the studentsrsquo; gazes; and the final command is again a Pavlovian instruction from a theorist who fails to understand the organic nature of classroom interactions1 What is the point of a compulsory instruction as to exactly how to respond to your classmates This is not how authentic communication... blog 2024-07-06 20:37:16 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/SLANT/60/ SLANT is an instruction given to students either at the beginning of lessons or during transitions It is an acronym for the following set of instructions: sit up listen ask and answer nod track the teacher It was originated in the charter chain KIPP Knowledge is Power1nbsp;Schoolsnbsp; Let us first speak of the rationale behind it It reduces five instructions to just the one and is therefore lsquo;efficientrsquo; It has maximum efficiency Maximum efficiency is displayed when we SLANT The efficiency of this technique is total2nbsp;The instruction was displayed in pretty well every one of the videos of lsquo;Teach Like a Championrsquo; that I sat through so the students who clearly would have picked up what it meant through repetition could be reminded of what it means should they have had a complete memory meltdown and found themselves in any doubt The issue with it is that some of the instructions are pointless some seem bordering on abusive and some are both Sit up ndash; W... blog 2024-07-06 09:48:08 GMT http://www.philbeadle.com/On-Right-Wing-Consultants-the-Totalitarian-Movement-and-Trad-Versus-Prog/59/ ldquo;Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brotherrsquo;s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye How can you say to your brother lsquo;Let me take the speck out of your eyersquo; when all the time there is a plank in your own eyersquo; You hypocrite first take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brotherrsquo;s eyerdquo; Jesus Christ1 ldquo;Yoursquo;re a trollrdquo; ldquo;No yoursquo;re a trollrdquo; ldquo;No you arerdquo; ldquo;That proves yoursquo;re a trollrdquo;nbsp; The contribution to the sum-total of human knowledge of many interactions on Twitter2 People have made sometimes lucrative careers out of finding ways of obtaining Twitter followers and this has problematised areas of educational policy Whereas in the past governments would take soundings from senior academics or head teachers with superb records ndash; experts in short with superb histories of achievement people you might ... blog 2024-07-05 08:10:59 GMT