Wednesday 30 May 2007

Labour lack logic


Tony Blair attempts to justify Labour's latest anti-terrorism legislation, quoted from the Telegraph:

"We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong."

Note the sudden change from 'we' to 'I'; pretty typical of Mr Blair isn't it, only he knows what's best for us.

"Do you know why only 40 per cent of secondary schools use setting and streaming even though they have been encouraged to do so by official policy for years? Because a huge proportion of the teaching profession still resists even the minimal selection process. Mixed-ability teaching remains an article of immovable faith among a huge swath of the state sector."

This quote from a columnist in the Telegraph demonstrates how flawed Labour's bizarre use of competition is. It's fine to allow competition between schools so that the worst, instead of being helped and improved, are simply run into the ground. However competition in schools is seen as some kind of abhorrent evil by Labour, does anyone else remember the school sports day where the teacher was not allowed to measure your long jump because that would be seen as too 'competitive', it was just 'well done, good jump'.

How anyone can believe that not streaming children based on their ability can possibly be a good thing is beyond me. Children can be taught better and can learn faster in groups that are sorted by ability, it's simple common sense. This Labour mindset that encourages the persecution of anyone with talent and the enforcement of mediocrity is precisely the reason we have the likes of Prescott, Reid and Johnson flourishing with their groundbreaking dimwittedness.

This is almost unbelievable as it is so ridiculous. This example is symptomatic of a culture that wants no one to be better than anyone else. There is already a massive problem with certain children at school getting extra time in exams for various 'learning disabilities'. Nowadays even the most able child can be taken to a educational psychologist and diagnosed with a mild disorder that then enables them to gain an unfair advantage over their fellow pupils. I know of cases where the best pupil in the year group has been the only one to get extra time, as a direct result of these ill thought out measures.

The motives behind these measures are indeed noble, however in practice they do not work. In trying to make the race fair, more mechanisms for unfairness have been unearthed. More worryingly a philosophy that despises achievement is being used to engineer a race where everyone will come equal first. Not only will everyone come first, but they will all come last, as a depressing world of bland mediocrity replaces a dynamic competitive environment. This philosophy leads to children becoming unmotivated and apathetic, as their destiny cannot be altered by their own actions in this rigged Big Brother game.

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