Back to basics

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
Wednesday, 23rd September 2009
http://www.melaniephillips.com/

A set of must-reads that shed light on both Britain today and what to do about some of the worst effects. In the Daily Mail, a blistering series of pieces by Harriet Sergeant has painted a devastating picture of the extent to which civilised norms of behaviour have been extinguished amongst teenage boys at the bottom of the social heap, and why. As she says, the reason is that the institutions that previously socialised and directed young men - the family, the church and school - have either lost or given up their authority. Here she describes Britain’s ‘feral’ youths; here how the welfare system has underpinned the catastrophic collapse of the family and helped deprive these young men of their fathers, the core reason for their descent into under-achievement, drugs, crime and anarchy; here she describes how the schools are failing to educate these boys even to the most rudimentary level; and here she looks at the rise of gang culture that fills the void in their lives.

To me, the most shocking aspect of all this was her description of what happens to these boys in school. Most of them are illiterate, and she rightly fixes on this as the trigger for lives of under-achievement and crime. For many years, the government has paid lip-service to ending illiteracy by tackling the truly fantastic reason for it: the fact that many teachers simply stopped teaching children to read. Yet the equally astounding fact is that whatever schemes the government introduced to get the primary schools to teach children to read, the teachers either subverted them or refused point blank. I have written about this repudiation of education by the teaching profession for more than twenty years; in 1996 I wrote about it in detail in my book All Must Have Prizes and was denounced by virtually the entire education establishment; in 2009, precious little has changed.

Sergeant writes of the teachers who refuse to teach phonics, or the decoding of print through matching sounds to letters and their combinations – the tried and tested method of teaching children to read that was memorably dismissed by the education establishment as ‘barking at print’ --:

They prefer pupils to try to pick up the meaning of words from looking at pictures. Or, as a school inspector remarked: ‘The child is put in a corner, surrounded by books and assumed to be able to read by osmosis.’

...Like phonics, the concept of sitting pupils in rows of desks facing the teacher is widely considered too didactic. Now, most primary schoolchildren sit at tables scattered about the classroom, as I saw for myself when I sat in on one class for a week in the East End of London.

On my table, the three children giggled, kicked each other and chatted. Their attention lay on what was immediately in front of them: themselves. Somewhere on the periphery of our vision, the teacher walked about, struggling to keep order. Somewhere else, behind our heads, hung a white board with work upon it, gleefully ignored by my table.

When I blamed the children’s poor discipline and concentration on the layout, the teacher looked at me with horror. ‘The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,’ she said emphatically. Children are now expected, for example, to be ‘independent learners’ in charge of their own education. (‘Why do teachers keep asking me what I want to learn? How am I supposed to know?’ one boy asked me in exasperation.)

... Bright boys from chaotic backgrounds are almost totally dependent on their teachers for that first step to a different life. Yet, shockingly, some teachers saw their educational and social status not as a cause of inspiration to their pupils, but of shame. ‘My main focus is not to offend my pupils,’ said one. ‘I don't want to push my middle-class values on them.’

The result of this inverted class war is that these boys are simply abandoned by such teachers to lives of ignorance, illiteracy and disadvantage from which the only escape appears to them to be into gangs, drugs and crime. The result is rising numbers of wrecked lives and terrorised neighbourhoods. In many such places, the police appear to have given up and ceded the streets to the gangs. But as fundamental as these social problems are, the police can still have a dramatic effect on crime levels if they follow the simple insight of American ‘broken windows’ strategy – that crime can only be tackled effectively if all disorderly behaviour, however apparently trivial, is stamped out.

A report in today’s Guardian suggests that the Kent police have used that insight to great effect. Both crime and fear of crime have dramatically fallen as a result of tackling what the police call ‘low-level antisocial behaviour’, vandalism, petty offending and ‘nuisance’ issues. Older and wiser police hands might well sniff that this is merely re-inventing the wheel; the core aim of policing in Britain, after all, has always been the preservation of public tranquillity, and not the achievement of government targets on domestic violence, hate crime or other ideological offences, the pursuit of which has done such terrible damage to the ethos of policing (not to mention the core principles of British society). But we are where we are, which is not a pleasant or comfortable place at all; and that wheel most certainly needs to be re-invented. Along with teaching five year-olds to read.