Education – Politically Enraged

The Stupidification of Brits

By Daviemoo

As the Conservatives push hard to renationalise imperial measures, something we’ve always had on our food packaging my entire life as an ostensible “brexit benefit” that doesn’t directly revolve around-but will likely contribute to – a poorer economy, one must wonder how it is not obvious that the party is trying to contribute to an overall shift away from the rest of the world: Little Britain will be unable to sell goods to a market that doesn’t understand the measures, or that has to do extra work to do so. But this isn’t the only way the tories are working to Break down Brits…

Imperial Measurements- an exercise in futility- Boris Johnson

Imperial units seem like some kitschy reach back into the not so distant past- some little move towards showing the world we don’t need them because we have our own way of weighing corn and meat… not one person who isn’t desperate to return to the smoky pubs and “it’s ‘ow we’ve always done it” rhetoric of the past is particularly interested in starting to use imperial measurements again, because it is of no benefit to anyone who doesn’t regularly start sentences with “back in my day…”

Imperial measurements will make it more difficult to:
-Sell to other countries
-Cook
-Purchase necessary products and ingredients

It was also never “banned” by the EU, but to fit their standardisation model it was vital that we all used the same measurements- products in the UK have always been allowed to display imperial, just not as prominently as the other units.

So why would we do it? Because as always it pleases that tiny base who will thoughtlessly back the tories specifically because of nonsensical moves like this. Looking at the outlook of those who approve of this, they don’t care about the realistic damage and annoyance this move will cause now- but you can guarantee that they will be the loudest to decry it as soon as they experience issues resulting from it.
As we fall into measuring things here, we will lose step with the rest of the world- the pointlessness of making our coexistence harder rankles, but also fits perfectly well with the desired outcome of those in charge of implementing brexit: what seemed like a silly little brag fits in with the theme of isolationism behind brexit. Measures, money… what next?

The curtailing of university entry- Nadhim Zahawi

Recently it was announced that if you do not score certain fundamental grades, student loans will not be on offer, effectively curtailing university for those who fail to achieve in the earlier exams. This is a disaster both in terms of the hangover from coronavirus which adversely affected hundreds of thousands of peoples’ education, but is also- and there is no sensitive way to write this- a stupid idea.
I’ve written extensively about the myriad different learning styles for human beings, whether that’s an ability to absorb through physical action, reading, listening, watching demos and more- denying someone access to higher education simply because they cannot conform to the archaic system of listen, repeat in a slightly different way on a written exam is a disastrous response to the educational future of the UK. People can excel at university when given access to the right learning resources, teachers and allowed to study a passion subject instead the usual proscriptions of subjects given at a young age- and even if someone goes on to work in a completely different field, the ability to obtain a degree, masters or PHD is a vital skill that should be exercised for those who can – and want to.

Zahawi’s zest for preventing students who don’t excel at exams from reaching new chances of education is a transparent attempt to gatekeep knowledge from those who need it most desperately- and he should be looked upon with shame for this transparently reductive action.

Additionally, the spectre of “left wing censorship” and deeply worrying authoritarian moves to combat this nebulous nonsense has always been touted over university: searching student forums shows right wing students asking whether they will fit in- rather than simply acknowledging that their views, as all views are, will be questioned, it’s an immediate self censorship and a lack of understanding that an exposure to a wide range of people around you is likely to change your narrow views to wider ones: university isn’t a factory for spitting out left wing Leninists, they are buildings filled with knowledge, and intersected by tens of thousands of people you may not have met and learnt from before: you are not being converted, you’re learning other people’s lifestyles and exposure to this is the antithesis of reductive rhetoric.

Other tory ministers state that children should be asked to sing unsettlin g nationalistic anthems in schools– we truly are allowing steps towards childhood indoctrination to nationalism.

Throttling the media- Nadine Dorries

Despite 96% of respondents saying they wanted channel 4’s funding model to remain the same and a wealth of evidence presented that C4 is doing well in it’s monetary goals, Dorries has stated that the government will take steps towards its’ privatisation. Dorries has repeatedly demonstrated that she doesn’t know or understand- nor despite time and prompts, care to learn, how channels in the UK are funded (she has also wrongly stated information about the BBC, ITV and channel 4’s several messups). Dorries has stated channel 4 hasn’t “helped its case” against privatisation when “one of its lead presenters is shouting fuck the tories at a concert”. That would be a sentence in and of itself enough to sink any other culture ministers as blatantly taking revenge on a channel for a presenter not slavishly worshipping the government but Dorries is too busy making raps on tiktok to feel the shame she would if she viewed herself as a huge majority of the UK view her.

But the media also does the tories job for them- all of the big newspapers lean right, from the Daily Mail and its endless campaign to blame “lefty do gooder lawyers” for everything, the Express and its attempts to copy headlines that sound similar to those written in North Korea about their own “dear leader”. Other papers are too busy trying to scratch at culture war to make sales by punching down on minorities or both sides-ing debates which are patently pointless or a nonissue. Those media that do speak truth to power are often small or sat on, or- as we saw recently with Cummings’ admissions about the Johnson administration “throwing bungs” to right wing media whilst ignoring left wing or smaller media outlets, underfunded into oblivion.

Social media has seen an uptick in the amount of people desperate to speak truth to power there- its how I have come to what little prominence I have because the only place you can speak about the disgusting state of the country with little intervention (though lots of hate mail, the odd death threat and a sprinkle of doxxing) is social media.

The only way through this mire is a multi pronged attack. Social media is hugely influential when it comes to allowing the voices of ordinary people to be uplifted above the proscripted dross of the mainstream media- a phrase I hate but will indulge in here, but large scale organisation and a flat refusal to allow the government to pass damaging legislation must also start to take place. Fighting back against tory policy must take place both in cyberspace and in the real world – lobbying the government is ineffective right now, but we cannot stop and must in fact increase our efforts to battle them in the real world including against the frightening anti protest legislation they have inducted.

They will not stop us. We are many- and there are more of us than we think. Though decades of tory policy have enforced a miasma of glibly disenfranchised brits, people can be reached with the right message -we must find this message and galvanise those who would not normally move to counter this fight. We must- for without the voices of the discontented rising in concert, the zombie moans of a nation whose freedom is dead will only grow to silence us all.

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

Education is designed to fail some of us-but denying knowledge to those who don’t excel in an archaic system is a failing of society we must fix

By Daviemoo

A famous quote (wrongly) attributed to Albert Einstein is “everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish based on it’s ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing it is stupid”. Whilst the origins of this quote are wrong, it’s sentiment is not- and to move forward as a society- and as a world. If we want the world to do, and be, better we must stop holding knowledge behind complicated wording and the paywall of profiteering.

I bought a book the other day. It is brilliant- “How to Stop Fascism” by Paul Mason. It’s edifying to read a book that confirms the crawling in my guts is justified, that my worries about society and the world at large are not unfounded and that people are putting pen to paper every day to fight back against the creeping ideologies of fascism, authoritarianism and hatred that wrap our societies in their gnarled fingers and squeeze decency out.

But the very act of buying that book, of having the time off to go to waterstones itself, then to be able to spend £20 without a second thought (though my inner child gasped at it), and then have the luxury of sitting in a coffee shop to read it, brought to me the irony of how our society is structured.

Those who need to read the message within this book, or within “Why I’m not talking to white people about race any more” by Renni Eddo-Lodge, or “The Assault on Truth” by Peter Oborne, the ones who would likely be more keenly affected by the knowledge within, may not have access to the funds, or time, or – through no fault of their own- the inability to grasp the themes, are often frozen out of the discussion.

This sounds so ridiculously entitled and tone deaf and I understand that- I know my privilege. I’m a white man, I’m a cis man, I’m a Brit who was reasonably favoured in school because I like to learn, and luckily learn the way the British education system teaches. I’m not trying to hold myself above others- but society does that for me and I think that’s disgusting, and it’s that which we need to discuss.

One of the best things I’ve read in my life is in the pages of “How To Stop Fascism: “all over the world the main driver of far-right extremism is the fear that people who are not supposed to be free might achieve freedom, and that in the process they might redefine what freedom means”. Look to this as the link- fascism is borne out of the fear of freedom, but it’s also fostered when people aren’t free to question these ideologies- not because of the dictator’s hand at their throat, but because they were never given the knowledge to fight back in the first place.

Those who are born into, and raised in a working class home, who are never taught in a way that allows them to imbibe knowledge, who are never told they are worthy of that- are kept out of the conversation, despite being a broad and diverse group of people who should have access to the knowledge around it- look at this (old but still poignant article about the rates of working class people who reach university) and when I speak about “the discussion” I am of course referencing the ever encroaching authoritarian and fascist tropes of our modern government.

This isn’t hyperbole- laws like the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing bill are authoritarian. Changing parliamentary procedure to allow a crony of the PM’s? Authoritarian. The Nationality and Borders Bill quite literally contains fascist tropes, as does the insistence of the PM that he would like Parliament to be able to overrule judiciary decisions- yes, this is fascism ladies and gentlemen. Fascism is not the sounds of boots on tarmac and orderly marches of subjugated people- that’s the most in your face, terrifying and immediate part of it. But it begins on paper, in legislation, and in the hearts and minds of voters who do not understand the depths of evil they are countenancing.

The latter leads to the former- and it will. And the way we fight against that is, of course, to address it- but not between scrivening academics giving theory and politics a ribald bashing in a page 14 spread. It’s exposing it in a clear, concise way, to those who don’t realise it’s there.

It’s too generous to say no working class people would embrace fascism. Some already have- through ignorance or, well, the fact that shitty people do exist. But to fight back against something as insidious as fascism, people must be made aware it’s there, and must be given the tools to understand it’s horrors. Those who have been abandoned by an education system that doesn’t foster alternative styles of learning are very unlikely to have picked up books on political or social theory and therefore learned about the horrors of a fascist society.

That isn’t their fault- it’s society. We continue to foster an education system that does not factor in alternative ways to teach or learn, from sensory and tactile to physically viewing and seeing things- from one on one teaching to open discourse in classrooms, peer to peer discussions… education is woeful in the UK, at serving the people it must.

This is not the fault of teachers but continuous lack of action by a government desperate to pinch every penny. Why spend money on sensory classrooms or trips or displays, when you can put in the same money and produce just enough people who can go on to university, and enough to go and fulfil menial jobs, usually unaware that they have potential to do whatever they want if they were taught in the right way.

There are a lot of scholarly articles around how to teach which vary based on subject- from anatomy to language, I’ve just read some articles and books and all of them focused on one key tenet- that the archaic system of standing before a classroom and talking without engagement does not work. Look too, to university where lectures can often be interrupted or punctuated with student to teacher discourse.

Let’s also look at the subjects we’re taught. I’ve been an atheist since I was 13, but had to learn PSRE until I was 16. And of course learning about theological ideas and the ideology around religion is, broadly, helpful in terms of understanding society- but I was never taught a class on politics or political discourse and I didn’t have courses in critical thinking until I was at college. In terms of the modern day I’m distraught I never entered into academia to study the intersection between politics and media- I studied media- because I didn’t think I was intelligent enough to understand politics. And yet here I am, after 6 years of holding my nose and quietly grumbling about politics, talking about it all day every day- internet videos, tweets, long whatsapp discussions, phone calls, and this very blog- founded on the lucky premise that what I do understand, I understand well. That knowledge, that surety, must be passed on en masse to the general public through simple, easy to grasp education around politics and wider discourse around the application of our own politics to the modern day.

If, for example, more people were educated on crime statistics in relation to refugees we would easier be able to move the discourse forward- instead of “more refugees equals more crime” we could skip the intro dialogue that, actually, the vast proportion of refugees do not commit crime, and the increase in crimes has on occasion been proven to be because native citizens have committed crimes against refugees- sometimes refugee on refugee crime, sometimes people committing crime against refugees- these things add to crime statistics. And yes, of course, more people in a country mean more people to perpetrate crime AND more people to have crime perpetrated against them. Man has, since the first time we stepped out of a cave and seen our neighbour doing the same, wished to enact violence on each other.

Think in depth about the isolation, stigmatisation and poverty that migrants face here and ask yourself whether you would be driven to steal to survive if you needed extra food because £40 a week didn’t fill your children’s stomachs. Ask yourself whether you would fight someone who called you a slur in the street after you lost your friend in a desperate journey to flee your home country and came to a place where people designate you scum just for the colour of your skin, your religion.

The overarching point of this is that education fails fundamentally to impart the gift of critical thinking and key aspects of knowledge on people who then go on to vote, unknowingly against issues they speak out against- from LGBT+ issues to the migrant “incursion” we aren’t suffering in the UK, ask yourself why people vote for harsh immigration policy then cheer Blair’s Iraq war as necessary -when that war itself destabilised the countries these migrants now leave to survive.

Also ask yourself why education never focuses on simple humanity- imparting on children at an impressionable age how important it is to imagine being in someone else’s skin, someone who is not like you, and imagine their journeys and struggles- from melanin to sexual preference and the intersections therein, from gender to sex, from ability or cognition, family situation and more. Education seems to be built to fill people’s heads with enough knowledge to contribute to the workforce and pay tax and not much else. It’s only by luck or perseverance that some come out of education desperate to continue their learning, to question society and political direction. And thank goodness for the outliers- but we need to create more.

The way we do this is not to gatekeep important information about political alignment, to obfuscate knowledge behind theory which is never explained, to sneer at those who don’t understand but who want to. We have to make knowledge accessible to the masses- lest the masses continue to vote unthinkingly for those who will chain them down whilst claiming the chains come from migrants, gays, socialists… and they will believe it.

How we go about changing the educational sphere in society I do not know. Speak more plainly, more openly is a start. But until a grassroots movement to overhaul education affects change, I fear that the roots of fascism will dig deep into a society blissfully unaware of it’s hulking weight bearing down on us.