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June 16, 2006
Social engineering .....
Since the mid-nineteenth Century there has been a movement based upon the liberal intelligentsia (mainly the middle class professional types with inherited wealth, education and time on their hands!) dedicated to "engineering" society into a "free and fair meritocracy". According to the thinking behind this, if one removes from peoples thinking the idea that competition, hard work and respect for authority are good, and replaces them with concepts that everyone is "entitled" to the same rewards regardless of effort or merit, if one "redistributes" the trappings of wealth (not theirs of course, just everyone elses!) and undermiones respect for authority, this will, somehow, create a levelling in society so that the wealth of the nation is equally shared between all comers. Of course, in this wonderful Utopian society, someone will have to be at the top - to make sure the rest of us all "share equally" - and naturally, "they" and their friends and famillies will need to be the people at the top redesitributing the fruits of our labours. It frequently amazes me at just how far they have managed to push this concept - and even more amazing is how stupid and gullible so many of us are that we fall for it!
All power then to the gentleman academic who has blown the whistle on the Education system and how it has been feminised to the extent that boys are now physically disadvantaged by it. Competition has been suppressed - exams are "competitive" so they are replaced by course and project work which have a bias towards the preferred female learning process. Games have been suppressed - usually on health and safety or on Techer's Rights grounds - and the boys now have no outlet for their energy - other than in disruptive behaviours outside of school. Many of todays parents are guilty of collaborating in this, by accepting the dictats of the social engineers and applying them at home. What the gentleman concerned has flagged up is that the education system is now so hideously biased in favour of advancing the preferred learning methods for girls, that it does not address the needs of boys. This is one very good reason why boys are failing to achieve in education - a second is that they are bored silly by the culture of protection that forbids them to engage in any activity perceived by the nannies as a 'risk' or as 'too macho'.
Naturally he has been immediately attacked by the liberal establishment - after all they are threatened here, since if the sham that they have perpertated on us for the last hundred and fifty odd years is exposed for what it is - they stand to be exposed as frauds and charlattans. All their cosy little power base could vanish as people eject them from their comfortable positions of dictating what we think, where we live and how much we can earn. It won't happen overnight, but once a house of cards such as this starts to collapse, it accelerates fairly rapidly. That is why we now have the defenders of the "status quo" they have built for themselves are throwing up the usual smokescreen of "women are dstill disadvantaged" and "boys are improving their performance now that the system is beginning to change them" are all being trotted out.
What a pity that this is all given the lie by the biggest success in book sales - a book for boys entitled "The dangerous book for boys". A sort of updated "Boy's Own" it is stuffed with activity ideas, facts, ideas for adventurous things to do and general "boyish" things. I expect it will be withdrawn soon because it promotes "maleness". Its become an unexpected best seller - all the local news agents and bookstores around my area have sold out and the printers are trying desperately to get reprints out of suppliers. That surely, must tell us something?
The sad fact is that our civil service, our Parliament and our entire education system is in thrall to this concept of a socially engineered society in which "violent" males are feminised out of their maleness, in which women are promoted as being the "peaceful and fair" sex, the natural rulers. Well, perhaps its time to disabuse ourselves of this nonsense. Life is not fair, it does not operate on an equal playing field and it cannot be "engineered" in that direction by meddling with peoples lives. It really is time to ditch this garbage and get back to allowing people to be people, to allow them to develop equally and fairly without the constant tinkering and tampering of the few whose contact with the realities of life seems to be viewed through rose tinted spectacles and from behind several layers of glass!
Time to kick all social engineering into touch and apply straight forward commonsense rules for dignity, fairness and support for the less able! All of us are not equal in ability or in physical prowess and we need to stop pratting about with the nonsensical idea that we are - or can be 'educated' into being equal! All this is doing is guaranteeing mediocrity in every sphere - and preserving incompetents in positions of power.
Posted by The Gray Monk at June 16, 2006 08:25 AM
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