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I sent the following email to the chairman and to the secretary of the committee in response to the publication of the report. Mr Kerry Bartlett
Dear Sir, I am profoundly disappointed by the report you published on 21 Oct, 2002, "Boys: Getting it right" and think you should disown it and start again. Clearly it is a professional document judged on the standards of grammar, spelling and formatting consistency, but these are not the standards by which anyone other than a public servant would judge it. I believe the report aims to serve the interests of bureaucrats, teachers and academics while striving to avoid anything that: These aims are very far removed from the committee's stated aims. Here are just a few of the problems I have with the report: Ordinary people were ignored. Judging by how often they are referred to in the report, you took virtually no notice of submissions made by ordinary people. Instead you drew heavily from submissions made by government educational authorities, with some attention paid to academics, consultants, professional bodies and the odd teacher or two. It is hard to believe that government education bureaucrats would seek guidance primarily from other bureaucrats (whose viewpoint is presumably similar), but that is precisely what has happened. Spending money Virtually all of your 24 recommendations involve spending more of our money. There are three obvious problems with this: The value of education On pages 9 and 10 of your report you tried to prove the value of education by providing statistics which show that those who stay at school longer are less likely to be unemployed. Of course the most able and hard-working will do well at school just as they will find work more readily, that does not prove a causative link between education and employability. Those jobs that have a degree qualification as a prerequisite will obviously favour those with degrees. If you made rules that said only white people are qualified to enter certain professions then of course there is likely to be greater unemployment amongst dark-skinned people. Does that mean me we should try to make everyone white? Some people are not as academically able as others, and I don't think we would get much more out of them by trying to make them something they are not. I have heard people who can barely read and write tackle difficult subjects with a great deal of good sense. Yet educated people approaching the same subject were so encumbered by their decorative ideologies that they could not see the wood for the trees. Your idiotic report is a case in point. 24 Recommendations I believe you made a plethora of recommendations in an attempt to mask the fact that each of your recommendations are feeble and unlikely to benefit boys' education. 24 feeble recommendations do not deliver the same result as one or two effective ones, all they do is create extra work for public servants and a greater burden on the taxpayer. Summary Your report is a futile effort that does little more than serve the interests of its authors. It is so bad that I feel I am wasting my time even writing to you. You may counter by saying that any group of people asked to make recommendations on any issue would come up with a self-serving document, whether those people were politicians, civil servants, pharmacists, accountants, teachers or children. In my view that is not an adequate defence. In a democracy the buck stops with the politicians. If you can't ensure that your public servants serve the public's interests, you should step down in favour of people who can. If the problem is with the system you operate in, then you must let the voting public know that this problem exists. Yours etc, Phil Bachmann nmt 2 Dec, 2002 | |