The Ian Mikardo school, the site of more progressive educational failure.

Although I didn’t watch the programme ‘Too Tough To Teach’ because as someone who for a short while was brought in to babysit some of the failures of progressive education I felt I didn’t need to. I’ve been there, done that and printed the tee shirt. The description on the Brietbart site of the educational practises used in The Ian Mikardo School in Tower Hamlets

shows that failed progressive educational policies are still being used, and are still failing.

Despite the accolades heaped on this school and this programme by left wingers and deluded progressive educationalists, it is plain to see that giving children, who have probably had no consistent discipline at home, a school environment where there are hardly any rules and zero consequences for breaking them is going to fail. These children and young people are going to go out from their rule-free school into the wider world where there are both rules and expectations of behaviour. How are the policies of the Ian Mikardo School going to address that? I can’t see how this school is preparing their charges for the outside world. However, it is providing employment to ‘teachers’ whose brains are so addled with ideology that they are virtually useless as teachers.

The Breitbart site said:

“A London school for pupils with behavioural problems has scrapped rules and punishments, preferring to adopt a border collie puppy named McFlurry instead. The Ian Mikardo School in Tower Hamlets, East London, a special school for boys with severe emotional and behavioural problems, featured in a Channel 5 documentary last night called Too Tough to Teach?

Claire Lillis, the school’s head, said to the BBC that the dog has a “calming effect” on pupils. The school also includes a salon where the boys can get their eyebrows shaped and a mocked-up flat to teach cookery.

Coverage of the school in The Guardian notes that “pupils and teachers are on first name terms…if you swear (the boys do, a lot) you will be challenged but there are no sanctions; if you walk out of class no one will force you back in”.

The cheerleaders of the progressive educational establishment – memorably dubbed “The Blob” by Michael Gove – are having a field day on the Twittersphere. Get Outta the Gang, a London youth charity, could barely contain its admiration, tweeting “We need more schools like this.”

No. No we do not.

Is it responsible for a school that educates disturbed, sometimes even violent, young men to tear up the rule book in favour of a petting puppy, a manicure salon and some platitudes about empathy pinned to the classroom wall?

The school’s website says that it specialises in the education of boys with “complex social, emotional and behavioural problems”. Perhaps these have roots in drink, drugs, domestic violence, bereavement or gang warfare; many of the boys have been expelled from mainstream schools.

When they leave the school at 16, the boys will enter a society with rules, expectations and social structures that Ms Lillis and her colleagues will have failed to prepare them for.

The boys are smothered by misplaced love. But their teachers’ buried cynicism comes to the surface in that Guardian article. They readily describe their own pupils as “unteachable”.

Ms Lillis’ educational philosophy has been warmly endorsed by Ofsted, the Blob’s private cult, who have graded the school as outstanding. Their inspection report includes language that is as cuddly as McFlurry the dog: the pupils “make exceptional progress from their starting points”. Whether their finishing point would cut it with any employer is carefully omitted – Ofsted’s mangled newspeak neatly gets the teachers off the hook.

It would still be a tragedy if this ideology were confined to just one school in the loonyLondon Borough of Tower Hamlets. But this is the dominant mode of thinking among academics responsible for brainwashing the next generation of young teachers.”

Read the rest of this excellent article and read some of the comments about it here:

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/10/07/The-Ian-Mikardo-School

Progressive education policies have ruined the lives of millions of Britain’s children. The Left thought that a fact-free, content-free, rule-free but propaganda-heavy environment would benefit children, but as we observe too often the opposite has been the case. Britain has slipped down the international league tables for subjects such as Maths, English and the sciences mostly because of progressive education policies.

Britain has suffered for at least 50 years from the effects of a teaching profession dominated by the political Left and by social and educational liberalism. When will the teaching profession wake up and realise that not only are progressive educational policies not working, but that they are also doing great damage to both the current and future generations of children.

The damaged children who are ‘taught’ at the Ian Mikardo School are the products of parents and grandparents who were often educated by those eager to put progressive educational theories into practise. The result has been a shocking growth in the number of those who are now considered as ‘unteachable’.

The educational Leftists have failed us all dismally and it is time for a change. All parents should pay close attention to how their children are being taught and challenge progressive educational orthodoxy whenever they can.

I fear for the next generation because it is likely that they will be even less educated than the current generation. Progressive education is a corruption of the idea of teaching and needs to be rooted out wherever it is found.