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The tie and the kirby grip aren’t so trivial
So farewell, then, to the tie. Last week the editor of Tatler magazine reported that Sir Andrew Turnbull, the outgoing cabinet secretary, made a speech in which he welcomed a future without ties and hinted that civil servants will soon be wearing open-necked shirts. If Turnbull was right and not momentarily maddened by the exceptionally hot weather then perhaps the disappearance of the tie may finally be upon us.
Perhaps civil servants all secretly wish they were Tony Blair, with his open-necked shirts and exciting sex life. On the other hand it may simply be that they have realised they don’t matter much or at least that nobody trusts them much any more and so they don’t need to bother with this last accessory of respectability.
After all, the people who started the trend of going tieless were people whom nobody trusted in the first place — artists, film producers, media executives and junk-bond traders. The few people whom we need to trust — our doctors, lawyers and accountants — still have to wear ties (unless they are women). But no doubt even this is disappearing and before long our consultants will examine us in blousons and bomber jackets and undertakers will dispatch us in sober designer casuals.
I find myself oddly sorry. It’s not that I particularly like ties. I had to wear one for many years at my secondary school, with a high-collared pinstripe shirt, and I know how uncomfortable they are. In weather like last week’s it is cruel and unusual to expect a man to wear one, or a schoolgirl for that matter. What’s more, many ties are irritating, carrying silly secret messages that I can’t decipher about clubs and sports and things to which I wouldn’t want to belong even if I knew what they were.
Besides, though they may often be a mark of belonging and superiority — Guards, Eton, high fashion or whatever — they are at the same time an emblem of repression as well. The tie is the outward and visible sign of an inner and internalised middle-class submission. This, incidentally, includes all those Guards, Etonians and others who are not in fact middle class or would not like to be thought so. I mean a submission to a grown-up and bourgeois sense of duty, to an idea of respectability. Putting on a tie was a sign of identification, right down to the level of Mr Pooter, with people who matter. People who did not matter, such as women and proletarians, went tieless.
So there’s an obvious sense in which it would be absurd to regret the passing of the tie. Besides, an overpriced coloured ribbon round the neck is not the only, or even the best, way for a man to look cool and couth. Men can look wonderful in classic suits with ties, but I prefer the deconstructed men’s suits that appeared in the 1980s in beautiful materials, worn tielessly with elegantly plain white T-shirts or Nehru-necked shirts from Issey Miyake — another uniform, certainly, but much more elegant and practical.
Even so, despite logic and sense, abandoning ties feels to me like yet another abandonment of a discipline that might not matter in itself but which, taken with other rapid castings-off of similar little disciplines, is perhaps part of a more general loss of manners and civility.
You see it everywhere. There was a time in my teens when there were quite strict standards about how respectable people behaved in public. That has been largely abandoned, along with the idea of respectability itself. The streets where I live in London are swarming with people behaving badly and looking worse.
Rich or poor, educated or semi-literate, they wander about dressed like slags or hoodies or trailer trash with exposed bellies and thongs and distressing piercings, sucking obsessively at plastic bottles like babies, chewing compulsively on gum, masticating on smelly junk food from cartons that they throw onto the pavements, with their toxic chewing gum, cigarette butts and bottles, talking dirty with a ferocity once restricted to the upper classes and the racing fraternity.
Unable to endure a moment without oral or aural stimulus, they listen ceaselessly to music on their earphones, causing a maddening cacophony of hissing and buzzing on public transport, or shout about their private lives into their mobiles, quite indifferent to the assault on others of the noise they make. These are the egalitarian bad manners of advanced democracy.
This abandonment of public modesty has been rapid. A few years ago it would have been considered unthinkably vulgar for the prime minister and his wife to canoodle in public and talk about their sex life as the Blairs do. Perhaps we can look forward to civil servants doing the same.
Women have abandoned the high — admittedly very rigid — standards of Royal Ascot. Thousands of them go dressed like the silliest of slags, exposing unappetising flesh, stray bra straps and rat-eaten hairstyles and get roaring drunk. Privileged schoolgirls go about dressed like jailbait.
Nurses in hospitals have abandoned the high — admittedly very rigid — standards of matron, with hierarchical uniforms and never a hair out of place. Today their hair is uncouth and unkempt, flopping unrestrainedly (and unhygienically) over their faces and their patients. In offices, too, people have abandoned old-fashioned — perhaps rigid — hierarchies, in favour of first names and matiness and equality, which is profoundly confusing to all and sometimes rather disastrous. Nurses complain that there is no proper chain of command on wards.
When I was a teenager I was excited by the new informality. It seemed much better that people should be less formal, less inhibited. “Damn braces, bless relaxes,” as William Blake said and as student revolutionaries all quoted. Had I been a student nurse I am sure I would have been demonstrating against compulsory kirby grips on hair.
Blake was wrong, too. A civil society needs quite a lot of braces and cannot entirely relax its standards. Minor bad manners are at one end of a continuum with seriously bad antisocial behaviour and social breakdown at the other extreme. Civilisation will no doubt survive the disappearance of the tie (and the kirby grip) but it will not survive the abandonment of all the minor restraints of social convention; they are not as trivial as they seem.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 26, 2005 | Comments (1)
Explaining the inner death of a good man
A biographer in search of a subject must usually cast about among people who have achieved something. The lives of people who have achieved absolutely nothing in worldly terms, who have known little but misery and chaos and who leave almost no traces of themselves behind them might seem much less promising for a biographer.
People like that are usually consigned to the fiction shelves or the sociology department. But the book that nearly won last week’s Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction was the story of just such a life and it is one of the most remarkable and touching biographies I’ve ever read. It also raises more urgent, contemporary questions about the human condition than almost any other biography I can think of.
The book is Stuart: a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters. Stuart Shorter was, when his biographer first saw him, sitting on a square of cardboard on a pavement in Cambridge at Christmas time in 1998, an impossible man of 30, broken-toothed, hairy, filthy, weird looking, the sort of man people edit out of their consciousness.
When Masters, his future Boswell, bent down to hear him speak, Stuart whispered: “As soon as I get the opportunity I’m going to top myself.” He explained an elaborate plan to make his suicide look like a murder: he was going to taunt all the drunks coming out of the pub until they’d have to kill him to get a bit of peace. It had to be murder, Stuart explained, slurring his words. “Me brother killed himself in March. I couldn’t put me mum through that again. She wouldn’t mind murder so much.” That was both true and also typical of Stuart’s gallows humour.
Stuart Shorter was, or became, a junkie, dosser, alcoholic, thief, convict, illiterate self-harmer given to black mists of rage, and a violent sociopath with delusional paranoia and a fondness for what he called little strips of silver, meaning knives. He even held his small son hostage with a knife during a police raid. He was also, or had been, as his biographer slowly discovered, funny, sensitive, courageous, unimaginably resilient, imaginative, witty, thoughtful and intelligent, although years of drugs, drink and liquid coshes in institutions had scrambled his brains. He collaborated with this biography but told the writer to “make it more like a murder mystery — what murdered the boy I was?” He did not live to see it: he fell under the London to King’s Lynn train one night in 2001 near Waterbeach, where he came from.
Who or what murdered the boy he was or might have been? Or was he, tragically, born to become what he did? Reading his story, the most ferocious of biological determinists might pause; at every stage of Stuart’s life bad things happened to him and nature was probably not much kinder to him than nurture. The biography is told backwards, just like a murder mystery in which we know the terrible denouement but we don’t know how everything got so tangled up.
According to his mother, Stuart was a happy-go-lucky little boy, chatty, curious and determined. Life seemed quite good, if poor, in a Cambridgeshire village with his brother Gavvy, a married mother, a good stepfather and two tiny step-siblings. But biology gave him a violent alcoholic for a father, long gone, and a form of muscular dystrophy that made him walk in a funny way. It would give him life-long pain and a serious heart disease.
Horribly bullied about his “spaggy” walk, Stuart was suddenly and for no apparent good reason sent on a daily “spaggy bus”to a school for children with severe disabilities. Bullied wherever he went, he was repeatedly sodomised for years by his older brother Gavvy and another boy, as was his little sister.
At one time Stuart begged his mother, with violence, to be taken into care and he was. Gavvy later killed himself out of remorse, not long before Stuart met his biographer. At the special school he was buggered and abused by the charismatic head teacher, who was later jailed. Quite enough — although there was a great deal more — to explain Stuart’s mystery.
Driven to despair by the bullying of local boys, he finally found the courage one day to head-butt one of the biggest bullies, turned into a really scary mad bastard and remained one. But there were also powerful biological factors. The book makes a convincing case that he suffered from borderline personality disorder, which is the most intractable (and untreatable) of biological life sentences. Jack Straw, when home secretary, notoriously complained that he couldn’t force people with BPS into mental hospitals, dangerous though they may be, because they are not mad, can’t be treated and are therefore not certifiable.
One could also argue, reading between the lines, that Stuart showed signs of attention deficit disorder. Those two syndromes could work together disastrously. Some controversial American research claims that attention deficit is highly associated with crime and violent antisocial behaviour in later life and can be detected in the brain scans of very young children.
In a rather similar spirit, a confidential Home Office report revealed by this paper last week argued that children as young as three can be identified as potential criminals by their behaviour in nursery schools or by a family history of criminality. Nursery staff should be trained to spot children born to be hanged, as the old saying had it.
Perhaps it is, or might be, possible to spot future troublemakers, and certainly one of the many questions raised by Stuart’s life is how to protect people like him, and the rest of us, from their blighted future. But it seems unlikely in practice, no matter what scientists of every ilk might discover, that any proper use will be made of such knowledge. Straw’s notorious response should warn against the most scientific sounding of solutions.
So, too, should the tragic persistence of human error. Again and again a little common sense might have rescued Stuart, but common sense is rare. Getting the simplest thing done always seems strangely impossible. We understand much better why bullying is so psychologically disastrous, but schools still cannot control it. In the face of such intractable problems one can only say, with Arthur Miller’s character in Death of a Salesman: “Attention should be paid.”
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 19, 2005 | Comments (0)
Follies of Contrary Mary and ‘our crowd’
Of all the exotic beasts in the British bestiary of public life, there is no more flamboyant specimen than Mary Warnock. Even at 81 this furiously energetic creature is still rattling cages. It is quite clear she loves the attention. Some, including Lady Warnock, have argued that elderly creatures should be put down once they become a nuisance to themselves or others, but it would be a pity to deprive the public of such an entertaining spectacle as Mary and her many mood changes.
It may be that she is one of the last of an endangered species, an evolutionary subset identified as “our crowd” by one of its astutest members, the late Lord Annan. And if we mourn the extinction of even the nastiest little Indonesian gnat, why should we not value the existence of the last few specimens of the 20th-century liberal mandarinate? There is a case for saying this remarkable creature should be cloned before she expires, which as an advocate of human cloning in extreme circumstances, she might perhaps endorse.
There do, however, seem to be some who would happily exterminate Warnock and her kind, if their consciences would allow them. Last week she enraged many, including me, with her recantation of her earlier views about special needs education. She and her commission of 1978 did truly terrible damage to children, families, schools and education generally over more than 25 years.
They decided that children with disabilities should be educated in normal schools alongside normal children and that the distinctions between very different disabilities should be blurred. Indeed she was responsible for introducing the catch-all, right-on term “learning difficulties” for all problems, from permanent intellectual impairment to minor problems with reading.
When all this was translated into the 1981 Education Act, special schools were — and still are being — closed, regardless of their merits, often against the anguished protests of children and their parents, and hugely to the detriment of normal classroom teaching. It has been a national scandal.
Now Warnock admits she was wrong. She admits her policy has had “a disastrous legacy”. She says the idea of “inclusion” — the ideology that drove her committee’s findings — “was sort of a bright idea in the 1970s but now it’s become a kind of mantra . . . but it really isn’t working”.
“Bright idea”! How frivolous and amateurish that sounds, as if the back-of-the-envelope bright ideas of the great and the good — of “our crowd” — had some special validity. Warnock has also said governments must recognise that “even if inclusion is an ideal for society in general, it may not always be an ideal for schools”. But what about the child? What’s missing here, in a tellingly collectivist remark, is an ideal of the person, the little person, or rather the millions of them, who have been sacrificed to this “sort of bright idea”.
This is the unmistakable voice of the bossy amateur reformer, the do-gooder equipped with a formidable sense of entitlement and of her own ability, born and bred to bully people, in Jane Austen’s immortal words, into peace and prosperity.
Who is Warnock and who does she think she is? She is a successful philosopher from a driven middle-class family. “In my family,” she once said, “we were brought up to believe we were the best. There was simply no doubt about it.” Always, by her own account, desperate for success and desperate to be famous, she made her way into the ranks of the great and the good — that exclusive mandarinate of the quangocracy who appoint each other to create the country’s moral and social climate. “Rarely,” another quangocrat said of Warnock, “can an individual have had so much influence on public policy.”
It’s not enough that we have a government backed by only 22% of the electorate; many of those in real power — the largely government-proof clique to whom successive governments outsource their thinking and their embarrassments — are the the living incarnation of democratic deficit. We are too incurious about them.
Everyone always says, for instance, how brilliant Warnock is. However, I think more scepticism might be in order about her and her like. Her thinking on disability was clearly shallow and conventional, which is to say slightly and uncritically avant-garde for the time. The notions of “inclusion”, “normalisation” and “social role valorisation” were both highly politicised and untested, based on American egalitarian social engineering and blindly adopted by liberal wishful thinking in this country.
On such difficult matters only the most rigorous thinking will do — along with a modesty in the face of the complexity of human experience. I have come across Warnock only once, when she gave a talk on Jean-Paul Sartre to my school, and I was shocked, surprised and delighted to find that, in my schoolgirl opinion, her reasoning was sometimes poor, particularly off the cuff during questions from my uppity self. Perhaps in the cosy coteries of “our crowd”, people often get a name for qualities they don’t possess. Buggins might be Muggins.
Perhaps this is unfair to Warnock. One must admire her honesty and her courage in admitting her mistakes — several on matters of life and death. One has to admit her intentions have been good. Even her constant attention-seeking and her apparent snobbery may not matter much. What’s wrong with her, oddly enough — although she seems like a cross between a Wodehouse aunt and a Victorian philanthropist, with a uniquely English dowdiness — is that her mindset is not very English.
In all her committees and her changes of mind and her alarming pronouncements — on embryos, mercy killing, cloning, disability or the uselessness of the old — she seems to have lacked a particularly English and Scottish empirical pragmatism and the modesty that goes with it. She talks that language but seems to lack that sensibility.
Generally speaking, generalisations are best avoided, especially with difficult ethical subjects. That means avoiding universal “bright ideas”, or at least avoiding imposing them on others, especially universally. I suspect Warnock’s mindset is characteristic of her species; unfortunately it is a species that is far from endangered.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 12, 2005 | Comments (0)
Focus: Loneliness and exclusion . . .and all in the name of 'inclusion'
Care in the community has failed the vulnerable, argues Minette Marrin
Life may often seem hard enough for children with learning disabilities and their families. Unfortunately it can get harder still when the children become adults. Before long, and despite the best of intentions on all sides, such vulnerable people will all too often find themselves living alone in a bedsit, bored, neglected and stuck indoors watching television. They might want to go swimming or shopping, or off for an outing, but they cannot do so without help and quite often that’s in very short supply: Britain’s social services budgets are already overwhelmed with need.
It is hard to imagine the real cost of round-the-clock support for an adult with learning difficulties who lives alone in the community but who cannot cross the road or take a pill or boil a kettle without help; not surprisingly, very few get all the help they need. This diminishes their lives; sometimes it endangers them. For example there have been several recent cases of adults with learning disabilities in hostels, alone and without proper help, running baths and then scalding themselves badly.
Nobody wants any of this; tragically it is in large part a perverse consequence of the policy of inclusion. Inclusion sounds like such a good idea for people with learning disabilities. But if you unpick the elaborate and highly politicised ideology behind inclusion, it begins to sound a great deal less reasonable, and tragically impractical.
It all began with an understandable revulsion against some of the old long-stay mental handicap hospitals and institutions, which were often — but not always — indefensible. In the worst of them, people with learning disabilities were shut away from the normal world, denied any say in how they lived or what they did and often drugged to keep them quiet.
In the 1960s and 1970s two ideological movements grew up in protest — normalisation and empowerment. The advocates of normalisation and its “social role valorisation” insisted that people with learning disabilities should lead as closely as possible a normal life within the normal community and that all necessary public services should be provided to make that possible.
This view is now orthodox in all social services departments and training. The idea of empowerment is related; it comes from the civil rights movement, and holds that people with learning disabilities should have absolutely equal rights, including the right to marry, have children, work, vote, sign contracts, and even to sit on juries.
Both theories are underpinned by a relatively new concept of disability. Traditionally disability has been considered a problem of the individual, who might be blind or deaf or intellectually impaired; this is the so-called “medical model of disability”. In progressive thinking this has been replaced by the “social model of disability”.
This view places the responsibility for disability on society; it sees disability in terms of the oppressiveness of people without disabilities and their failure to remove the social barriers that exclude people with disabilities from lives as full as their own.
Most people, wondering about the future of their intellectually disabled son or daughter, know and care little about any of this. But it has profound — and I would say perverse — consequences for them personally. It is this thinking that has driven some of the rapid and painful changes of recent years. It has forced the emptying of all the long-stay mental hospitals and larger homes — even those which residents and families loved, and which could have been refurbished; the anguish this has caused to elderly parents and middle-aged children has been unspeakable.
Regardless of this anguish, this ideology has thrown thousands of vulnerable people into care in the so-called community, particularly after the Care in the Community Act of 1990, and not always with proper support. It has shut down many special schools, some of them, again, much loved by children and their families. It has led local authorities to take a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to adults with learning disabilities, regardless of their wishes.
The orthodox model is a small, perhaps single-person flat or house in an ordinary street; other ideals that have worked well for some, such as larger group homes, or somewhere in the countryside, are anathema. Homes like this have been broken up over the past 25 years, often much against the wishes of the families. With them have been lost all the economies of scale that meant more staff support, more friends, more outings and better facilities.
Although some experts have belatedly realised that these other ways of life can be very good, and although the government issued an important white paper in 2001 called Valuing People, admitting that different arrangements can be excellent and that families must be involved in choice, local authorities’ social services departments are still very resistant.
I did a written survey of all of them in England and Wales about a year ago, and while all acknowledged their statutory obligations to offer choice under the white paper, at least half were not really prepared to allow or to pay for anything but the orthodox model. So much for choice.
The tragedy is that people imbued with this thinking talk of choice and empowerment, but in fact what they really mean is the opposite; the vulnerable must be “empowered” to “choose” the right thing.
What’s also very sad is that although the theory is that people with learning disabilities should have the chance of making normal friends in the normal community, subsequent research suggests this doesn’t actually happen — as one might have predicted.
According to Professor Eric Emerson, one of the leading experts in this field, when people move into ordinary houses in the community, they do see more of people without disabilities. But this increase is due either to more visits from family or to brief contacts in shops and so on. Almost none of the increase is due to independent adult friendships developed with neighbours or normal friends. What this means is loneliness and exclusion, and all in the name of inclusion.
Even more striking is another finding from a study in 2002 that people with learning disabilities are happier when they have a larger number of people with learning disabilities in their social network. This hugely undermines the value of the care in the community experiment. And it means there was little or no justification in closing down other services, against people’s wishes.
Tragically this ideology has coincided, quite mistakenly, with cost-cutting. Both Labour and the Conservatives quite wrongly thought care in the community would be cheaper. More recently there’s been pressure for people to move into what’s called supported living, which is very much like care in the community. That’s mainly because the way it’s financed looks cheaper for social services departments.
Amid all these mistakes, something more sinister has developed in the name of inclusion and normalisation.
Parents have legal control over their children. But when children with learning disabilities become adults at 18, their parents cease to have any legal authority in their lives. These grown-up children will need to make many choices about their lives, throughout the years ahead, and because of their disabilities they will have grave difficulties in choosing, or even understanding the options. So who really chooses, effectively?
That is a grey area in law, but one thing is clear. The parents can effectively be cut out of the loop, and sometimes they are. Social services can do so with little difficulty, if they see fit. If this happens, parents and families of vulnerable adults, who care most and know best about them, are powerless. The new Mental Capacity Act, which parents hoped might somehow empower them to make important decisions with their disabled adult children, has done nothing whatsoever to help.
The act should be radically revised to give some decision-making powers to families, and all people with learning disabilities should be granted direct payments, to be able to choose and pay for their services themselves.
The Sunday Times | | Comments (0)
Spelling out why black schoolboys fail
Rejoice, rejoice, as somebody once said. Last week saw two major victories in the long war against institutionalised prejudice and wilful ignorance. Two important truths were finally accepted and proclaimed from the heights of the new Labour establishment. Those of us who have been saying these things for years must resist the temptation to sneer about reinventing the wheel.
The first truth is that though black boys are doing badly in school compared with other children, the reason is not racism. The second truth is that the only sure way to teach children to read is the simple old-fashioned method of sounding out letters, as in c-a-t says cat, which is now unattractively called “synthetic phonics”. Both these truths have been obvious to the open-minded for years. They are also, I believe, closely linked.
New Labour has finally recognised that its much-vaunted national literacy strategy (following years of disastrous old Labour experiments in teaching) is failing miserably: 20% of 11-year-olds are still unable to read properly. The strategy was bound to fail from the first, being a confused and confusing jumble of concessions to fashionable orthodoxies that paid only lip service to synthetic phonics.
Last week, however, in a breathtaking about-turn under pressure from Lord Adonis, the new schools minister and Blair intimate, a forceful select committee of MPs and a vast weight of independent evidence, Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, announced a return to synthetic phonics. She put it tactfully, of course, and has therefore called for an independent “review” — as if one were needed — of phonics in teaching reading. It will involve rewriting the literacy strategy and introducing synthetic phonics in schools by September 2006.
At the same time Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has boldly attacked the attitudes of “liberals like myself”, as he puts it, and “our historical bleating about racist teachers”. He points out that statistics don’t justify the usual presumption of racism in schools.
It’s true that only 27% of Afro-Caribbean boys leave school with five GCSEs at A to C grade, and this is far below the national average of 47% for boys and 57% per cent for girls. But 44% of Afro-Caribbean girls do reach that standard, many of them sisters from the same families. Poor Indian and Chinese boys do roughly three times better in exams than poor Afro-Caribbean boys. So another explanation is needed.
It is courageous of Phillips to admit that he and leftist orthodoxy have been wrong. He has also admitted that multiculturalism has been a mistake, as right-wing commentators have been arguing for years. However, it is outrageous of him to suggest last week, not for the first time, that the solution to the problems of Afro-Caribbean schoolboys is segregation. Apartheid! Having seen some black-only classes in America — where he admits conditions are different — he is recommending them here.
How humiliating for the children, how racist, how illegal probably, and how doomed to failure. The problem for Afro-Caribbean boys who do badly is not their colour. It’s the way they’re taught — or rather not taught — to read. If a child can’t read, he can’t learn anything at school. It must be like watching television with the sound turned off for at least 10 maddening years. His entire school career is finished before it starts. All he can see ahead is boredom, shame and failure. He will be driven with other angry and resentful boys out of school and into trouble.
Most children will learn to read anyway, somehow, especially with encouragement at home. The test of good teaching is how good it is for the 25% who do not pick it up any old how. Of that 25% some will deal with the inevitable frustrations much worse than others and will behave much worse — culture, gender, absent fathers and lack of family discipline play their part here. But none of that would matter if the child was already learning to read — early, easily and fast — in the first place.
This is why black boys are over-represented in special needs lists, exclusion, unemployment, crime and prison (68% of people in jail are illiterate). So it is that illiteracy leads straight to rage on all sides, which is practically the same thing as saying illiteracy leads straight to racism.
I passionately believe that the single most powerful weapon against racism — and the social breakdown that is part of it — is the teaching of reading. And the simple old-fashioned secret to teaching reading is synthetic phonics with setting by ability. That means putting children together according to their progress in reading, regardless of age, colour or anything else.
One of the most charismatic reformers in the world of literacy is Ruth Miskin. Once the head of a famously successful primary school in Tower Hamlets, east London, she’s now the creator of a programme called Read Write, which schools can buy to turn literacy problems round quickly and easily. She gave expert evidence to the Commons select committee that so galvanised Kelly.
Her view is that nearly every child can learn to read, no matter their background or problems. I’ve always thought that myself. As children my brothers and I taught my sister to read as we’d been taught ourselves, and she has marked learning disabilities. For nearly everyone reading is fun and easy, and teaching reading is fun and easy with simple synthetic phonics like Miskin’s.
The Ofsted reports her schools have had clearly bear that out. They back up her view that the black boys she sees doing her programme all over the country have no problem learning to read. “Black boys learn to decode just as fast as any white middle-class girl,” she says, if they are taught properly and have the joy of rapid success. There is, according to Miskin, no problem with discipline; they love learning and there is no gap between them and any other group.
This is a historic moment to get things right at last, for all children. Adonis and Kelly should tear up the useless, complicated national literacy scheme and let heads choose between the synthetic phonics programmes that Miskin and other reformers have developed. That would be a real victory against illiteracy and racism, and against injustice and inequality too.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 05, 2005 | Comments (1)
