Crap: A Guide to Politics - The Blog

More on Educashun: Misleading (or worse) Crap from the Cameroons

I have heard from more than one person that the Cameroons are a bit upset at the timing of the latest mega-scandal – the loss in the post of comprehensive data on 25 million people.  Why? Because it meant that the Tories’ spanking new policy for schools didn’t get the coverage it deserved.

Having read the policy document, if I were a Tory I’d be glad that the public eye was diverted.  It is an ill-though-out, even deceitful, document - a bit of tinkering dressed up as a revolution, just like the Cameroon plans on the Welfare State, highlighted in Chapter 12 of my book as nothing more than a bit of re-routing of taxpayers’ money.

The present document  trumpets:

“The country that provides the closest model for what we wish to do is Sweden”.

Oh yeah?  The main feature of the Swedish system is an education voucher available to the parents of each child to spend on education.  The voucher, which is a specific amount equating to 85 per cent of the per-pupil cost at state schools, can be used at any school which accepts vouchers, including fully independent schools, new or old and profit-making or not (company owned schools are the most common independents), as well as state-run municipal schools.

In contrast, the Cameroon proposals do nothing of the sort. They will encourage the building of new academies (which they call “independent state schools”) in deprived areas which will “depend for their funding on the willingness of parents to send their children to them”.  It is crystal clear that this does not enable individual parents to select the school of their choice, private or state.  The money will not follow the choice of the parent, yet the document says:

“This is a per-pupil grant, which follows every pupil to the school that he or she attends”.

All this amounts to is the building of more state schools to give parents a marginally more meaningful say than they have at present, which is almost negligible.

To talk of this as following Sweden is a travesty – and Sweden itself is probably behind Denmark and Holland on providing choices to parents.

Oh – I nearly forgot the Pupil Premium – a bizarre proposal for the taxpayer to spend more on “educating” those who come from “disadvantaged” homes. And either they do or they don’t; there’s no scale of deprivity, or should I say depravity? The likeliest indicator of this yes or no deprivity for the purpose of the Pupil Premium is guess what – qualification for free school meals! 

If the Cameroons win the day (60 years into the modern Welfare State, with no reduction in deprivity to show for it) a fiasco much bigger than the tax-credit scams is on the cards.

Fashionable Crap on Educashun

The Times of 15th November reports that Britain’s leading independent schools are preparing to abandon the national curriculum because recent government reforms place too much emphasis on “fashionable causes”.

In itself that is excellent news.  In Chapter 10 of my book (Fashionable Crap), my  response to a report that schools would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum was as follows

“I feel more comfortable with that. There won’t be so much crap for parents to de-brief!” I went on to say that “the real problem is the idea of a national curriculum in the first place. To anyone who asks ‘should there be sex education (or whatever else is the flavour of the month) in our schools?’ another question is in order: should there be pizzas in our restaurants?”

(It won’t be long before Big Government takes the latter on board too!)

State “Education” is a disaster and it’s no wonder that people of modest means are deserting it in droves, even though their taxes still pay for it. Its history is peppered with failures and U-turns.  My book cites selection, special needs, reading methods, discipline, sex education, exams, and Standard Assessment Tasks (SATS), and it invites you to make up your own much longer U-turn list.  (SATS is under a U-turn at present).

Will anyone take a bet against my prediction that before independent schools have got very far away from the national curriculum, they’ll be smacked firmly back into line, by force or fines. Or even a prediction that they face straightforward conscription into the arms of the State, with even higher taxes as the inevitable result.

Sicko and Free Markets: Fashionable Crap

Michael Moore’s film Sicko, now showing in the UK, slams US Healthcare and eulogises the “free” universal healthcare which the NHS is supposed to provide but doesn’t.  The US system should indeed be slammed but for reasons diametrically opposed to most of what Sicko implies, namely that the US system is based on free markets.

It most emphatically is not.  Rather it is a supreme example of the corporatism exposed in Chapter 10 of the book (Fashionable Crap); the unholy alliance of Big Government and Big Business – such that Steve Holliday, Chief of National Grid, can say “I love the fact that we have seven regulators”.

There has been no free market in US healthcare for the best part of a century.  The easiest way to see this is to realise that less than a fifth of health expenditure is paid by patients, (including only 3 per cent of hospital costs and 11 per cent of physician costs),while getting on for half is paid by government, predominantly through Medicare and Medicaid, where no free market whatsoever exists.  Elsewhere, markets can barely breathe under the enormous structures of subsidies and regulations – for example employer-paid health insurance premiums are subsidised and insurers are forced by law to create cross-subsidies from the healthy to the sick.  Thus on the website www.marketmed.org one reads that two very clear advocates of the NHS- style universal care  that Sicko promotes (Alan Sager and Deborah Socolar, 2000) concede that “nothing close to a free market exists in [US] healthcare”.
QED!