Pre-teen Christian Girls Forced to Convert and Marry

Another one for the all religions and all cultures are equal file . . .

Saba and Anila Younis, sisters from a Christian family. They are 12 and 10 years old respectively. They were kidnapped on June 26 on their way to their uncle’s house in the Punjab province of Pakistan. When their father went to the police to complain about the kidnapping, he was threatened. By the 28th, their kidnappers had married them and filed with the police for custody of them. Their husbands declared that the girls had converted to Islam.

Apparently in Pakistan if a man finds a 10-year-old that he just can’t resist, he kidnaps her. If she’s not Muslim, he wants her converted, because even though it is legal for a Muslim man to marry a non-Muslim woman, there’s no reason he should have to have a kafir as one of his wives. I’m not sure if a man has to file for custody of any of his wives in Pakistan, or if it is just for those under 13.

As reported by Ecumenical News International, a court has agreed that the forced conversion was pefectly legal. There appears to have been to no challenge to the legality of the forced marriage.

This is by no means a unique situation. In a blog describing the hundreds of forced conversions to Islam in Pakistan, there is a quote from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telling President Musharraf at a 2005 meeting that Pakistan is “a model country for the Muslim world”.

Outside

It was quite a beautiful June day here in Merry Ol’. I spent the morning with the children while the Unnamed Woman was a bit poorly in bed. I marked exams in the sunshine while they played in the garden.

They ran in and out of the house several times, and then they ran in and never appeared. Despite the weather, the draw of the TV became too much. There was much complaining when I turned off the cartoons and ushered them toward the door.

The younger child protested, “I’m boring outside!”

The One and the Many

I would not have thought Steven Curtis Chapman would be so well known that the terrible news of his daughter’s death would be mentioned on BBC Radio 2. Thus it was a double surprise when I heard it on the way to work this morning.

I don’t want to take away from my sympathy for the Chapman family nor fail to pray for the soul of little Maria Sue.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but think that there are so many other families who face the tragedy of the loss of a child. Because they are not celebrities, Christian or otherwise, they don’t have countless blogs eulogising with strings of commenters offering condolences and sympathy. They don’t have the prayers of millions.

I wonder how many families lost a child today. I’m glad they are known to God, even if they are unknown to me. May His mercy and grace, His peace and comfort surround them. May the souls of all those departed children find a place of peace and rest in the bosom of the Father.

The Spectre of Radical Christian Fundamentalists In Britain

When it comes to the mainstream media in the UK, The Daily Telegraph is about as conservative as it gets. So when it comes to running an article on conservative evangelical Christians, what sort of thing can we expect from the Telegraph? I dare say it would shock American readers.

To help promote long-time Telegraph photojournalist David Modell’s contribution to the Channel 4 TV programme Dispatches, they’ve run a story about his discovery of Christian fundamentalists. You want to scare Brits? Start an article with something like:

“They think society should be built on their beliefs. They claim non-believers are damned.”

Oooooh…. It’s like something out of horror film. Christians who believe they should have an active faith-based input into politics and they think you have to be a Christian to go to heaven. But it’s worse:

“But these radical Christian groups are not in America – they are here and are aiming to change the laws of our land. . .”

So not only are they politically active “born-again types” - they’re in Britain! And I’ve reduced the font size of these quotes from the original, just so you don’t get too frightened. But it gets worse. They even have Christian schools based on this sort of curriculum. What sort of horrible indoctrination is taking place? Well, here’s what David Modell found when he visited one such school:

One little girl has to do a science test. A classroom assistant kneels next to her, takes her hand and says: “We pray, Father, that you’ll help her check all her spellings. In Jesus’s name, Amen.”

The test is multiple choice. Question five is: “God made the world in [BLANK] days.” The options are “five, six or seven”. The six-year-old carefully writes “six”. The right answer.

This scene would be surprising enough if the school were in America’s Bible Belt, but the voices around me are English, and we’re in Bristol.

Can you believe it? Prayer for help with spelling? What is the difference between this and children being trained as suicide bombers by Islamists? David Modell doesn’t think there is any. Besides, you start praying about spelling tests and who knows what you’ll be praying for next? For everyone to play safely and not get hurt during recess? For God to heal people and makes them better? They’ll start believing that God actually answers prayers, and then where will they be? And remember, the worst thing of all is that they are English.

American readers - at least my regular American readers and most non-liberal Christians in the US - will probably still wonder if I am making this up. I wish I was. The school in Bristol using Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum is a frightful thing to secularist, modernist Britain. After all, they, and schools using similar curriculum like the Alpha Omega based school from which I graduated those many years ago, are very mainstream in America. But then again, in America, the idea that Jesus saves is not radical, revolutionary, or dangerous.

David Modell is most worried because these people (remember, not stupid Americans, but actual British people) think the Bible is (shhh….) true. You know, literally true. “Not all evangelical worshippers hold such hard-line beliefs, but the fundamentalists will almost certainly describe themselves as evangelical.”

What’s worse (as if it could get any worse) not only are they teaching their children this stuff, they are getting involved in politics. Modell looks at Christian Action Research and Education (Care) - an organisation featured in the Independent, about which I commented at the end of March. What’s so scary about them?

The organisation’s published doctrinal basis is distinctly fundamentalist and among other things talks of “the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture and its consequent entire trustworthiness and supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct”. In other words, the Bible is the literal truth.

The Bible is trustworthy? Could British people actually believe such a thing? And these people are lobbying Parliament?

Where does David Modell think this is leading? He attends a seminar in Islamic fundamentalism. “But another thing strikes me while listening to [the] depiction of Islam as a dangerous fundamentalist belief: he could be describing the beliefs of the Christian fundamentalists I’ve met.” Yes, Britain will soon be a Taliban-style repressive theocracy. Like America, apparently.

Many Years

Today is the birthday of the Younger Unnamed Child. She is 4.

First thing this morning she declared that as she is now 4, she can do whatever she wants. I’m not sure why she thinks this now. This is no different than when she was 3.

This may be due in part because of her intellectual precociousness. She is articulate beyond her years and has the number sense to do multiplication. Or it may be because she is her mother’s daughter.

She’s spent the late morning watching Return of the Jedi. She explained the plot in detail on the way back from her birthday party, focusing particularly on all of the internal conflicts dealt with by Luke Skywalker, on pretty much a scene by scene basis. Hello Kitty just doesn’t cut it, at least some of the time.

May God grant her many years.

When Kids Get Angry

If you are a teenage girl and upset with a love rival over a boy, what do you do? Do you send nasty notes? Cyber bully? Have a chick fight in the street? No. That’s amateur stuff.

You research how to make a bomb on the internet. Then you blow up her house. Just to make sure you get her, you blow up the two houses next door and kill a neighbour.

In the States, if you want to blow up several houses, you need the Philadephia Police Department. In the UK, you just need an angry girl. And some people wonder why I say Britain is the more violent country.

The intended target of the attack, Charlotte Anderson, is in intensive care with severe burns. She’s stable and she’s conscious. Emad Qureshi had just completed a post-graduate degree. He was sitting at home next door with his parents and a visiting friend. He wasn’t so lucky.

Sixty people living in the street have had to be moved to temporary accommodation and the road has been closed to manage the cleanup. Hopefully some people have been able to return home this evening.

And all because of someone didn’t like a new girl dating a local boy.

Missing the End of the Season

I had planned to be watching football right now. The elder child and I went to the football ground about 30 minutes before the match. Normally this is plenty of time to get a ticket at the turnstile and get seated during the player warm-up.

Today’s match does even have anything riding on it. However, last week our club went and got itself promoted to the next league. Now everyone has ex post facto promotion fever. There should normally be between 3,000 and 4,000 spectators. Today the 8,000-odd capacity has been reached. The seats were all taken and the standing areas full.

I considered - and even stood in the queue for - the last of the standing ends. However, I realised that two hours of standing on one leg while pressed on all sides and the swearing in the football chants right next to the child were not worth the price of admission.

Instead the child and I sat across the street on the pavement and waited for the Unnamed Woman to come pick us up. At six years old and not from a football mad family, he’s still working out the distinction between teams that play for countries and those that play for clubs. I also tried to explain the whole promotion thing, but he’s still getting his head around it.

The elder child was disappointed to miss the last game of the season, but I assured him that we will go again next season, which begins in just a few weeks.

Crime and Crime Prevention

Today’s pustules on the butt of society are Adrian Hutchinson and Keith Buckley.

They got 26- and 28-year tariffs with their life sentences for the murder of a 62-year-old man who refused to hand over his mobile phone during their fifth robbery of the evening in Oldham town centre. As reported in the Daily Mail,

After Mr Smith refused their request for a cigarette, Buckley punched him in the face before the pair dragged him to a darkened yard, threatened him with a knife and demanded his property.

The 62-year-old had only bought the phone a week earlier and refused to give it up, but was put in a headlock and hit and kicked repeatedly, causing fractures of the skull, cheek, jaw and larynx.

Taking his phone - which was later sold for just £20 - the pair left Mr Smith dying where he lay, and his body was not found until 17 days later.

Hutchinson and Buckley aren’t teenagers - they are 25 and 22 - but their prior convictions go back before that. Hutchinson was first convicted at 11and before he was 16 he had nine convictions for arson, assault, and burglary, but never received any time behind bars. It was 29 further convictions later that he was finally jailed in 2004. He got four years for burglary, robbery and assault.

But never fear, the Government is here with a new solution for the growing crime problem. It now wants to hold schools responsible for curbing crime, as well as teen pregnancy and all other lifestyle issues. How well they meet 18 new targets for improving and policing pupils’ lifestyles and well-being will be included in their Ofstead (school inspection) reports.

Surely once schools are encumbered with even more non-teaching responsibility, the next generation of Hutchinsons and Buckleys will be redeemed. Our hope is the the expansion of bureaucracy and the micro-management of everyone’s lives.

Prayer Wars

The older unnamed child may be getting jealous of his sister doing the prayers at bedtime. There has been friction as to how the Trisagion prayers would be divvied up each night.

The older child has gotten one up on the younger. Except for singing “O Heavenly King” as the introduction to the prayers, they have otherwise heretofore been spoken. Well, the younger child may be able to do subtraction and multiplication at the age of three, but she’s never tried plain chant. The older child started chanting “Most Holy Trinity. . .” and didn’t stop until “O come let us worship and bow down. . .” He turfed his sister out.  She was not well pleased.

Notes from Hell

My most read post of the last month (and the third most read this year) was about Susan Pope, the school nurse at Malvern St James who was sacked for smacking her son once on the bottom for repeatedly swearing at her.

Today Mrs Pope has her own say, in a article she wrote for the Mail on Sunday. If you want an inside story on dealing with bureaucrats and police in the face of often bizarre accusations, you must read this. It has been nearly a year since her ordeal began and it is not over yet. Social Services are still infesting the lives of Mrs Pope and her husband, because the Popes won’t back down. Social Services have acted illegally repeatedly and gotten away with it. It is a story of abuse: a harrowing tale of governmental abuse of innocent people.

Social Services are helping to spread the cancer of family breakdown identified by Sir Paul Coleridge, the senior family court judge, as I mentioned yesterday. Sir Paul was not just concerned about marriages falling apart, but about the meltdown of parent-child relationships. Sir Paul’s views made not just the front page headline of the Daily Mail, but also the Daily Telegraph and the The Times. The case of the Popes just hightlights how Social Services can apply the blowtorch of aggressive incompetence to these relationships. Not all families are made of the same mettle. (As a side note, Al Gore will not be happy to know that Sir Paul thinks the breakdown of the family is worse than global warming.)

Mrs Pope mentions the subject of another popular post, former school bursar Denis Smith. It appears he was more involved in Mrs Smith’s sacking than previously suggested, whilst at the same time his own departure from the school was less honourable than reported.

The Doctor is in the House

Dr Who is back on British television screens for a fourth series under the guiding hand of Russell Davies, the third with David Tennant as the Doctor. Sadly for American fans, it will be available sometime in the future. Despite my best efforts, I cannot find out when this might be, or if it will be available for viewing on the BBC iPlayer.

With a new series will also come a new line of toys. After tonight’s episode I can expect that we will have at least one Adipose in the house. If we don’t buy it, I’m sure a well-meaning close relative will. As anyone who has seen the first episode with know, these new creatures will be the cheapest to manufacture in everything from hard plastic to soft stuffed toys. I could pretty much make one.

Family Matters

The most senior family court judge in southwest England has diagnosed the cause of the almost every evil in society today. Sir Paul Coleridge blames pretty much everything on the breakdown of the family, which he labels a cancer.

Though he is certainly an expert on these matters, this is not something that requires such a specialist to diagnose. But even though he is stating the obvious, it is something that the Government, with it’s family unfriendly policies, is ignoring. It is not just no-fault divorce. Mr Justice Coleridge includes the “meltdown” of the parent/child relations as well.

So you combine no-fault divorce with all-fault discipline (given the restrictions imposed by the law, compounded with the tendency to assume any discipline exceeds those restrictions) and you have a recipe for disaster. Disaster is certainly what we have in this country. Disaster is what we see every day in schools - with a combination of kids who can’t draw their family tree and as they are shifted throughout the week from one parent to another, or sometimes a relative, or a former partner of a parent, with no consistent structure in their life.

If that’s what it’s like in relatively sedate rural areas, think about what other educators face each day in the more urban environments. Several years ago I taught in a city of about 70,000. I was talking to a head of year who was sending out congratulatory letters to parents of children who were performing above expectations in at least five subjects and also letters to parents of children for whom significant concerns had been raised in at least five subjects. As he was looking through the envelopes, he noticed that all of the former were sent to “Mr and Mrs” and all of the latter were sent to single parents or adults of two difference surnames.

This echoes Sir Paul’s statement, “I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family.”

Why Five-Year-Olds Need Section 28

Some Muslim parents have complained about a couple of story books used at two Bristol primary schools. As a result the books have been pulled. So is this some sort of anti-Muslim rant? Far from it.

The books are characterised by the school as part of their “anti-homophobia” curriculum for five-year-olds.  One is a fairytale about a prince who turns down three princesses. He marries the brother of one of them. The other is set in a New York zoo, where two male penguins who fall in love.  Bristol City Council says they were intended to help prevent homophobic bullying.

What five-year-olds are engaged in homophobic bullying? What five-year-olds are holding themselves out as homosexual?

This is exactly the reason it was wrong to repeal Section 28. The use of these books is clearly about promoting not only homosexuality, but homosexual marriage equivalents.  Parents complained that children were coming home asking questions about same-sex relationships when there had never even been discussion about heterosexual relationships.

The schools in question are 60%-70% Muslim. Perhaps because Muslims are unacceptably unaccepting of homosexual behaviour, the school and the local council have felt the needed to force the issue on the children at such a young age. Parents complained so much the council has temporarily removed the books from the curriculum, which just goes to prove the council’s point.

The sad thing is that it is only Muslim parents that can get this done. If it were Christian parents, the council would have simply ignored them.

Family Values

15-year-old Brendan Harris and 16-year-old Ryan Herbert are killers. They so brutally killed a 20-year-old girl that emergency services could not tell whether she was male or female. Her boyfriend was left for dead, but eventually came out of his coma. Harris and Herbert brutally attacked Robert Maltby and murdered Sophie Lancaster because they looked different. As reported in the Daily Mail:

Someone was heard to shout “let’s bang him” and the Harris started the orgy of violence with a flying kick to [Maltby's] head.

The gang, described in court as “acting like a pack of wild animals”, then punched, jumped and stamped on his head until he was unconscious.

Miss Lancaster cried for them to stop as she cradled her boyfriend’s head on her lap.

Her plea went unheeded as Herbert delivered a volley kick to her face, with Harris joining in to kick and stamp on her head as she lay on the ground.

When paramedics arrived and found the couple lying side by side covered in blood, they could not tell what sex she was such was the severity of the injuries to her face.

The pattern of some footwear was still on her head. Both fell into comas but Miss Lancaster never regained consciousness and died in hospital 13 days later.

But of all of the information I read about this horrible case, the most disturbing was, “Police also revealed today that both the boys and their parents had laughed and joked throughout the court case.” On camera on the BBC Six O’Clock New the police talked about how both Brendan and his mother laughed when he was being questioned during the investigation.

Is it any surprise that these scum of the earth have no conscience? Scum breeds scum.

I am reminded of something I saw recently in my discovery of the parts of the Bible I’m just now reading:

Do not desire a multitude of useless children,
Nor rejoice in ungodly sons.
If they multiply, do not rejoice over them
If the fear of the Lord is not in them.
Do not trust in their life
Nor pay attention to their multitude;
For one godly child is better than a thousand.
And it is better to die childless than to have ungodly children.
For from one child with wisdom a city will be filled with people,
But a tribe of lawless men will make it desolate.
Sirach 16:1-4

Without Objection

Except for presidential politics, I tend to blog mostly about things on the eastern side of the Atlantic. That’s probably because living here, most of the things that affect my life on a daily basis are here. However, having visited the blog of a commenter to a previous post, my attention is drawn westward.

Each of Mark McGaha’s children have been declared a Child in Need of Services (CHINS) by an Indiana Circuit Court at the behest of the Department of Child Services. I can’t opine on whether they should be CHINS or not, or whether they should be in foster care.

As a lawyer I used to handle occasional CHINS cases in Indiana, usually representing the interests of one or both parents. One of my longest-running cases was a CHINS case involving what I called the family tree that didn’t fork. So I’m not denying that there can be situations whether the State needs to step in.

Unless there have been significant changes in my absence, like all buraucrats, DCS workers range from good to bad. If McGaha’s allegations are true, then there are some in Fountain County who are very bad. One thing that concerns me is that there is no mention of McGaha’s lawyer. He needs one. If he is doing this on his own, sadly he is fighting at a severe disadvantage.

This may be why the Fountain County Circuit Court judge got away with an outrageous unconstitutional act. She issued a restraining order preventing WXIN in Indianapolis from showing McGaha’s face or even allowing him to make his complaints against DCS. As one of my old law professors commented to the Indianapolis Star, “I don’t know what’s more outrageous: the judge ordering this and not knowing it violates the Constitution, or knowing and still issuing the injunction.” He described this as bordering on judicial misconduct. “Quite simply, a judge does not have the authority to stop the press from publishing or airing a story. Any person has a right to contact the press and say a public agency is not treating them right.”

Because of the inherent power of the bureaucracy, the press is one of the only checks upon it. That is why it is so important that access to the press not be denied. The greater the power, the more important the power to question it and challenge it. The more important that it stay on the straight and narrow. Otherwise rights get trampled upon. Otherwise democracy is meaningless.

A Real Disgrace

For the glory of a man is from the honor of his father,
And it is a disgrace for children to dishonor their mother.
Wisdom of Sirach 3:11

The truth of this verse was made evident by the elder son of Susan Pope. Mrs Pope was until recently the senior nurse at one of the most prestigious private girls schools in the country, Malvern St James. She was sacked for gross misconduct.

However, as has become increasingly common in this country, she was not sacked for anything she did or didn’t do at work. She was sacked for something that happened at home. The facts are not in dispute. Her ten-year-old son swore at her, and after giving him a warning that he would get a smack on the bottom if he did it again, he called her bluff. She was true to her word and applied the mildest discipline to his buttocks over his trousers.

Now most decent reasonable people would immediately recognise that she made a mistake. The warning was entirely out of order. He already knew that what he was doing was wrong. He had already made a conscious decision to curse his mother. This is unquestionably one-strike-and-you’re-out territory.

So all you need now is another rebellious son and a society in complete disconnect with reality. Mrs Pope has both. Her fifteen-year-old snatched his younger brother from the house and called the police. She was arrested and spent 32 hours in police custody. Not only that, her husband was also arrested and held for 32 hours and he didn’t do anything at all. That didn’t stop police questioning him for four hours. She was only questioned for 90 minutes. (I know, I know: on top of all this you are wondering why they were held for 32 hours to be questioned for so little time. That’s the way police do business in this country.)

Someone at the Crown Prosecution Service wisely decided not to charge Mrs Pope with any offence. But as I’m sure you know, Newton’s Third Law of Bureaucratic Motion requires that for every wise action there is an equally stupid reaction. Worcestershire County Council social services stepped in and put both the ten-year-old potty mouth and his eight-year-old sister on the Child Protection Register. They have been on the Register since this occurred last May. According The Daily Telegraph:

sources within the department indicated the Popes had not yet satisfied them that they had met the welfare criteria laid out when the children were placed on the register. “There are issues that still need to be sorted, it’s not simply about a child being smacked,” the source said.

In case you need a translation from the Bureaucraspeak language, the source said that the Pope children are still in danger because bureaurcrats do not believe the parents have accepted the re-education required of them. The State has decided how its children are to be raised and parents must realised that they are merely agents of the State.

So finally, you would think that a posh private school steeped in tradition would be above such things. Well, no. You would think that they would be aware of the character of their employee, but that’s not the issue. Denis Smith, the school’s bursar made the real issue plain in his letter to Mrs Pope informing her that she had been sacked:

The school’s reputation could be significantly damaged in the event that parents or potential parents were to discover that your children are on the Child Protection Register.

We do not believe that the school needs to accept this very real risk to its reputation, which has arisen directly as a result of your conduct.

That’s a lot of words when just two were required: pride and money. But if he wanted to be verbose, he should have just been honest and written something like: “You innocence is irrelevant. We don’t care if social services are completely off their rocker. It is all about appearances and the wrong appearance could cost us pride and money. We care much more about our pride and our money than we could ever possibly care about you, our devalued employee.”

The only positive outcome from this would be for the school’s reputation to be significantly damaged as a result of their conduct. If the values demonstrated by Malvern St James in sacking Susan Pope exemplify what parents want for their children, when they ship them off to be raised by this boarding school, then they should go ahead. Otherwise, they might pause to consider first whether they want their child to be inculcated with the opposite of the Golden Rule. They might further pause to consider whether the way the school treats its employees will be reflected in the way it treats its pupils. Before making a £25,000 per year gamble with the life of a child, perhaps that’s much more worthy of consideration than whether the school nurse smacked her sons bum when he swore at her.

After all, their child may come home thinking that it is okay to destroy the parents’ career if they don’t like being disciplined. Seems like there’s a lot at stake here. I hope the bursar at Malvern St James finds out they gambled the wrong way.

It Could Be Much Worse

I may complain about the general unruliness with which I deal on a day-to-day basis. In my subject, even dealing with pint-sized atheists hour after hour and their same little arguments (though honestly, most of the time that is a very generous term) can be wearying.

A survey by one of the teaching unions, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, as reported in The Times, notes:

Most teachers said that pupil behaviour had worsened in the last two years and many said that low-level disruption – such as pupils talking, not paying attention and refusing requests to turn off mobile phones – was now the norm in classrooms.

I would say that this is true even where I am. However, there is much to said for teaching in the hinterlands.  Not only have we not had a teacher assault this year, I don’t think there is any pupil in the school who would dare such a thing.

Speaking ahead of the union’s annual conference in Torquay today, Ms Bousted [ATL general secretary] said that one in ten teachers had received physical injuries in the classroom.

Twelve per cent said that they had needed to visit a doctor and eight per cent had taken leave from teaching as a result of pupils’ aggression.

Three per cent of teachers said that they had been involved in incidents involving knives, two thirds had been punched, nearly a half kicked and a third had been threatened.

The Government has a unique approach to dealing with a norm of classes full of unruly children. Schools minister Jim Knight said that classes of up to 70 pupils are perfectly acceptable. All you need are a couple of teaching assistants.

When You Pray

We have a bit of a competition in our house. I don’t mean the kind where there is an eventual winner. Rather, each night there is a dispute at bedtime prayers as to is going to pray the Lord’s Prayer. The younger unnamed child can almost say it without any prompts. The older child doesn’t like to be left to only Lord have mercy and Glory be. I need to work on him picking up “Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us / Lord be gracious unto our sins . . .” or the “Oh come let’s us worship and bow down . . .” triad.

This doesn’t mean that we always avoid a recalcitrance to pray. We all have that sometimes - it’s just that it’s more noticeable when someone actually whines vocally about it. We all need to be reminded that prayer is not an option. Jesus never said, “If you pray. . .”, He only ever said “When you pray. . . ” He also never said, “When you pray, do it your own way.” He said, “When you pray, say:”.

Does that mean there is no place for spontaneous praise or petitions? Of course not. But it is also a reminder that we worship God as He wants to be worshipped, not as we want to worship Him. We are not the centre of attention. Suggesting that we don’t need to pray, or even that we don’t need to pray the Our Father, is directly disobeying God.

As always, and like most Orthodox, I hope to pray more during Great Lent. Pray for me, that I might succeed in a small way.

How Does She Know?

While shopping at Asda, I heard a parent discouraging their child from a particular cereal:

“Darling, you don’t want those. They taste like old people.”

No Teachers’ Day in the UK

I found out from Wikipedia that today is Teachers’ Day in Albania. In fact, many countries have a special day for recognising teachers.

The UK does not have such a day. We are not particularly set aside for respect. Rather, this country see teachers has needing lots of regulation and quality control. Most of use are told what to teach by the government, because we can’t possibly be competent professionals.

We have little power left to maintain discipline. The government has determined that many of the methods that formed useful citizens, including most members of the government, are cruel. In a classroom environment, the thing I am most aware of is avoiding proximity to any pupils. This avoids jail or lawsuits. Not that there is a recourse if they get in our face.

We are suspect, so we need hightened background checks which not only include criminal records but any allegations, hearsay or rumour that a police officer wants to put in it. We will be among the first to be biometrically tagged to the national database.

We also provide a dumping ground for people who want someone else to raise their children. Sadly, despite our best efforts, the acorn usually does not fall far from the tree. At a recent parents night, the parents of a disrepectful Year 8 pupil were instructed to use the appropriate entrance to the school. I watched as the dad (all six feet and more than 250 pounds of him) just bullied his way past a female member of staff and ignored her insistence to use the other entrance. Is it really a surprise that his son tries to treat staff the same way and sneers at them with disrepect or laughs in their face when given instructions in school?

At least those parents came to parents night. The ones who don’t are mostly the ones who need to be there. They can’t even be bothered to find out about their child’s progress or lack thereof - and they especially don’t care about how their child is negatively affecting other children’s progress. I don’t think they would particularly care to observe a Teachers’ Day.

Final Instructions

Our puppies are leaving for new homes.

The older unnamed child asked when we were going to baptise them.  The unnamed woman had to explain that even though we think of them as members of the family, animals don’t get baptised.

The younger unnamed child is still intent on sending them on their way properly catechised. Teaching it the etiquette of veneration, she was sitting on the sofa with one of them over the weekend crossing it and telling it, “The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, bow”and pushing it’s nose down slightly. The puppy didn’t seem to mind, though if you ask me, it was really just going through the motions.

Absence of Conscience

It wish this would happen to a Government minister, rather an a Tory frontbench spokesman. Then something might happen, if it isn’t just completely too late. From the Daily Telegraph:

An MP was stoned by a gang of youths after challenging their behaviour.

Tobias Ellwood spotted the group of 10 teenagers climbing into an elderly woman’s garden and using it as a lavatory.

When he stopped his car and confronted them they responded by hurling missiles at him and delivered a torrent of abuse.

Mr Ellwood, 40, a 6ft 3in ex-soldier, said he was deliberately polite as he asked the youths to leave the garden.

But when he threatened to call the police, four or five of the gang started hurling stones, some of which hit him and his car.

He called the police and officers searched the area but the youths had fled.

The Tory MP, who is shadow minister for tourism, had been driving past a housing estate in his Bournemouth constituency at midnight when he saw the youths getting off a bus.

They were aged between 15 and 17 and had been drinking. The most aggressive person in the group was a girl, he said. “They had no understanding of right and wrong,” he added.

“They couldn’t comprehend why a member of the public should challenge them. It was an eye-opening experience.”

Despite his experience Mr Ellwood said: “I would urge people to confront youths who act in this anti-social way.”

Return from a Brief Hiatus

I just got back from London. My wife doesn’t like me blogging about my family, so I won’t say who I was with other than it was with a woman and two small children.

Government Not Helping Children

A two-year review of primary education by Cambridge University has discovered that starting school at age 4 is not helping British children. Even though they don’t start school until age 7, children in Sweden and Finland outperform Brits by age 11. In other words, British children are learning less in seven years than Scandinavians in four years.

This is also despite being tested more than in other countries.  Everyone recognises that emphasis on testing is way out of whack. Everyone except, of course, the Government. As a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said, “The idea that children are over tested is not a view that the Government accepts. The reality is that children spend a very small percentage of their time in school being tested.” I mean, technically, the DCSF spokesman is correct. The tests themselves take very little time.

But as the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers said, “When it comes to testing in England, the tail wags the dog. It is patently absurd that even the structure and content of education is shaped by the demands of the tests.”

Or as the DCSF spokesman said, “Seeing that children leave school up to the right standard in the basics is the highest priority of government.” The Government sets “the right standard”, which is a particular test score. Therefore the priority of the Government is that children achieve a certain score. The only way for children to achieve this score is to stop teaching them how to read and write and instead teach them how to take the test.

Schools that assume that teachers should teach lose. Schools that keeps kids mentally goose stepping toward achieving test results win.

The more government gets involved in education, the worse it gets. The results get manipulated to show the government and its policies are making progress. Thus, what was already a flawed means of assessment becomes fraudulent product of the need for political spin.

The only problem is that children at the real losers. They get the damaging stress of the examination environment together with a (when compared to the rest of the world) substandard education.

Teach Your Children Well

Muslims may think that the Bible messed up the true revelation of Islam, but they seem to follow Proverbs 22:6 just fine. “Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.”

When I saw in the Daily Mail that al Qaeda were training up ten-year-olds (and perhap younger) to carrying out kidnappings, assassinations and suicide bombings, I thought well, yeah, that’s the Daily Mail. So I looked to see if anyone was carrying this story. Everyone is carrying this story.

But is it really surprising? These are type of folks that are happy to strap explosives to women with Downs Syndrome and turn them into killing machines by remote control.

The videos of children undergoing training were intended to be used encourage other children to join the cause. Of course for children to see these, their parents would either have to provide them or send them to a madrasah that would considering them appropriate viewing. It is so unfathomable to me as either a father or a teacher.

So when you think about these people, remember that these are their values.