{"id":7477,"date":"2019-05-28T06:45:50","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T06:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7477"},"modified":"2019-05-28T06:46:01","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T06:46:01","slug":"you-the-politicised-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/05\/28\/you-the-politicised-students\/","title":{"rendered":"You, the students ..."},"content":{"rendered":"

As I noted yesterday,\u00a0UKSCN<\/strong> has issued an open letter<\/a> to government and educational institutions whose language contrasts with that in their 4 basic demands which you will find here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u00a0Demands<\/strong><\/em> 2 & 3 (apart from the emphasis on the\u00a0national<\/em> curriculum *<\/strong>) are mainstream in the sense that they would appeal across the middle ground of politics.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u00a0Demand<\/em><\/strong> 4 (votes at 16) is a political call, though not necessarily a party-political one.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2013 Demand<\/strong><\/em> 1, however, is overtly political as it calls for\u00a0a Green New Deal<\/a> which is a particular realignment of the economy.<\/p>\n

I can happily sign up to these in broad terms despite considerable reservations about the new deal.\u00a0**<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The open letter goes much further than Demand 1, however; so much so that it might be hard for the middle ground to sign up for it.\u00a0***<\/strong> \u00a0 Part of the problem is language. \u00a0Take these examples from the letter:<\/p>\n

\u2013 \"controlling, militarised teachers<\/em>\" \u00a0All rather sweeping, as well as rather insulting.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \"we embrace a collective consciousness and international solidarity<\/em>\" \u00a0This is straight from the People's Front of Judea playbook \u2013 or was that the Judean People's Front? \u00a0I always get confused.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \"we act not for ourselves but for the collective ...\u00a0our overwhelmingly selfless approach; we are empowered as individuals, but we strike for us all<\/em>.\" \u00a0This is just pompous.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \"Our world, our system, our future is dying<\/em>\" \u00a0This is the sort of alarmist talk that makes people feel hopeless not determined.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \"Schools ignoring the climate crisis is a deadly tradition<\/em>\" \u00a0Well, not quite yet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All that said, I do like a lot of what is proposed in the letter to government because I think it will help students learn about the world, and might even help teachers teach about it. \u00a0It is very earnest though. \u00a0This is the last sentence:<\/p>\n

\"Educate us, and educate us now: to hide the truth from us is to turn a blind eye to the power young people have to save our planet<\/em>.\"<\/p>\n

There's irony here though, as the open letter reads more like a demand that students educate teachers, schools and ministers than the other way round. \u00a0The whole thing reminded me of the 1970s \u2013 and not in a good way. \u00a0I'd be tempted to give it a mark out of 10 were it not for the fear that I be thought to \"care more about exams and mark schemes than developing curious and engaged individuals<\/em>\" which I don't.<\/p>\n

........................................................<\/p>\n

\u2013*\u2013<\/strong> A lot of effort is still going into getting UKSCN to focus demands on the school curriculum (and by implication, the 2002 Education Act), rather than the much narrower\u00a0national<\/em> curriculum<\/p>\n

\u2013**\u2013<\/strong> I doubt if sufficient economics is taught in schools to enable most students to understand the detail and the implications of the green new deal.<\/p>\n

\u2013***\u2013<\/strong> The open letter to the unions goes much further and reads as if it were written by the Socialist Workers Party. \u00a0For example,<\/p>\n

\"The same bosses who cut wages are polluting the air. \u00a0The same bosses who tried to stop workers fighting for their rights are heating up the planet. The same bosses you fought in the past are the ones we will defeat together. \u00a0You forced politicians to take action and so will we<\/em>.\"<\/p>\n

This is really not helpful if we are really going to have cross-party collaboration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I noted yesterday,\u00a0UKSCN has issued an open letter to government and educational institutions whose language contrasts with that in their 4 basic demands which you will find here. \u2013 \u00a0Demands 2 & 3 (apart from the emphasis on the\u00a0national...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}