Dear friends
I understand that the upcoming Education Bill includes a policy of scrapping the teaching of humanities and sciences to certain categories of children. (ie the so-called "disaffected") These studies will be replaced with 'vocational' material.

This is a further macdonaldization of education. It hits the poorest children hardest, and is implicitly hierarchical classist and elitist. A hardening of a two tier system. What this is all about is indoctrination - the creation of a pliant and obedient workforce fit to serve behind the counter at Macdonalds. At the same time there are plans to impose business structures on schools and more commercial sponsorship / influence in line with previous policies by all the usual corporate suspects.

Sciences are important in developing an understanding of the physical world and developing capacities to reason and to analyse things.

The humanities are really important in creating rounded human beings. Imagine children with no knowledge of culture, no Shakespeare, no Beethoven, no Picasso, no knowledge of literature, or culture. We (ie society and the schools included in society) have already failed so many teenagers, but this proposal will only make things much worse.

Good grief! it is like Heidegger's Rectoral Address is now being made official government policy on the curriculum. Wiithout the humanites, these children will be completely culturally and intellectually impoverished. It is a really terrible proposal and needs to be campaigned against.

I have several ideas on how to go about this, but I would like to know what people on Indymedia think, and do you have any ideas of your own about how to go about this?

Steve Booth
Green Anarchist