How Educational Progressives are still trying to silence those who disagree

It is great to find out that there ARE teachers and schools in the UK actually doing this :”Discipline works. No excuses works. A focus on knowledge works. Explicit teaching works. Drills and tests work. And no, it does not kill off creativity or oppress children. Quite the opposite.” As a visitor to schools, both private and public , deprived, average and wealthy in the US, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Turkey (where I have trained teachers in how to implement Philosophy for children) I have been advocating this for 30 years. I thought I was a lone voice! It is so obvious when you see a lot of schools, that the biggest difference across all cultures and in all socio-economic environments is – discipline. Where there is strict discipline the children have a chance to learn, even if the teachers are not brilliant. Where there is no discipline even brilliant teachers struggle. It is that simple! Of course good teachers also make a difference, but there is no one teaching methodology (or pedagogy) that is ‘good’. It depends upon the individual teacher.

How about making banking a profession like other professions?  Like medicine, teaching, accountancy etc.  – for they are not.

In 2007, a year before the world-wide financial crash,  I was taking part in a seminar-conference on Professional Ethics that included small group discussions among different professions. In my small group was a senior banker from RBS who told us that unlike accountancy, teaching, medicine etc., the folk who ran the banks did not have to have ANY banking qualifications or even experience in banking. His bosses did not even belong to the professional association.

He and other (real) bankers were writing to the FSA warning them about what RBS was doing, and the FSA paid absolutely no attention!

He also said that the people in the FSA were mediocre folk who could not get on in banking and did not understand the complex financial instruments being created.

They warned about the crash, as did many, many financial journalists in the USA.

So three suggestions to professionlise banking:

1) Require bankers to pass the already existing banking exams

2) Require bankers to belong to the professional association that has an ethics committee, but which at the moment has no teeth

3) Allow the professional bankers association to strike off bankers (like doctors) who misbehave

There is something important about the power of the media regarding police officers, criminal law and criminal procedures.

Most professionals dislike the way their profession is portrayed on TV and in films because it is usually so far from reality. For example doctors, teachers, lawyers et al are portrayed as having numerous romantic entanglements at work, which in my experience is totally unreal (or have I been blind?), nevermind the innacurate depiction of their work and their skills. However the public are likely to have contact with real doctors and teachers – we all went to school at least and most of us either visit a doctor or have family / friends who do.

But most people have no interaction with the police!

So their image and ‘knowledge’ of police and police procedures and even how the law works comes from TV shows and films. This has a real and detrimental effect upon both offenders and victims – in so many ways.

I have huge respect for the British police. Every police officer I have met (with the sad exception of a couple of Met officers) has been courteous, intelligent, reasonable, professional and polite. They have never sworn in my presence (maybe they do amongst themselves, but not in public). And yet the image of police officers  hammered into the public over and over again on TV ‘cop’ shows*  is that of ignorant, insensitive, foul-mouthed, aggressive people.

This causes  problems when people have no real life experience to counter this image. (tbc)