The minions on @toryeducation have none of the above. They are grotesquely impolite trolls. And their leader gets ruder with every keynote speech.
Here he is again unleashing another one at something called the “Social Market Foundation”. It’s called “The Progressive Betrayal”. Mercy! I bet we hippy liberals are in for both barrels, for the usual thudding, binary oppositions. You know how they go.
Traditional good! Progressive bad! Academies good! Comprehensives bad! Fifties good! Sixties bad! Dryden good! Plan B bad! Virgil good! Tarantino Bad! Matthew Arnold good! Michael Rosen bad! Him right! Us wrong! That area.
But this harangue has added malice. We liberals have, apparently, betrayed the working classes: “Labour is the Downton Abbey Party.”
We have, pipes the great sage, always wanted them to “stick to the station they were born into”. Well, you do your best. I tried to keep the blighters below stairs for yonks. We did Forelock Tugging in registration and Curtseying in Deference classes, but none of it really took.
He becomes more accusatory. We progressives refused to teach proper grammar or the literary canon. Well, he’s wrong! Merely wrong. I even did ablative absolutes and the likes of Dickens, Dante, Brontës and Fielding. The Nod plods on.
We also had contempt for the “traditional”. Everybody craves it. Especially the rich and famous, like Bryan Ferry, Mick Jagger and Polly Toynbee (poor old Pol!) and the Notting Hill set. Their precious mites had to go private to get it.
Well – no more! They can now get it at my old comprehensive school. Why? It’s gone Govean, fifties traditional, corporate Shard. For years it was “an academic basket case”. Now it’s a fabulous glass palace of treadmill learning.
Dear me. Generations trashed at a stroke. And isn’t he a mite insensitive towards nutters? Is there no end to his rudeness? Of course there were things wrong with my old school, but there was also much right. These are hugely complex issues, which can’t be so brutally simplified. I even agree with some of Gove’s drift. But dialogue is impossible. He never listens to us. He is the Bully of Humility – an academic basket case.
His supporters are no better, denouncing anyone who dares to disagree. Like the Guardian’s Suzanne Moore, who recently savaged Tory policies. James Delingpole congratulated fellow scribe Toby Young for trashing her article, for “giving her such a seeing to, she’ll be walking bow-legged for months”. Charm? Intellect? Manners?
- Ian Whitwham is a former teacher at an inner city comprehensive school. At the Chalkface: Great moments in education, a compilation of Ian's best ever columns, is available now.