Oh believe me the depths of both extremes have been plumbed.
Thirty years in an education system and I've seen every possible way
of avoiding actually describing a student as either dim or malevolent
(or, gawdelpus, both). Mealy-mouthed euphemisms such as
'intellectually challenged'; the entire concept of 'multiple
intelligences' ('cos we all have to be smart at something, hey?) with
no empirical basis whatsoever (merely soft plausibility);
instructions to pass students who frankly couldn't pass water; the
tendency to measure a school's performance by the number of students
who complete high school 'successfully'; the refusal to admit that a
pass in home economics is perhaps not quite as worthy as a pass in
physics; the inability to accept that perhaps some staff are the
product of this same system and are just clueless to the point that
they don't know that they don't know.
And of course the polarisation this produces with staff muttering
about the decline in standards which never actually existed; the
constant stream of new education policies and philosophies which try
to provide for the entertainment of students in classroom seeing they
can't be educated in a real sense; the slew of underfunded remedial
programs to...
Oh hell...<ENDRANT>
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 30/12/2007, at 12:08 PM, Winsor Crosby wrote:
> About the only time you hear a whine about
> political correctness, it is coming from an Archie Bunker type who
> just wants to be himself.
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