[Broadcast Stratos TV, April 14, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tEJczUSXR8 ]

Good evening and welcome to Perigo! I'm Lindsay Perigo and I'm dangerous. Perigo is Portuguese for "danger" and I want to be that to the enemies of reason, freedom and excellence. Tonight, the child-molesters of the mind who infest the state education system.

A few weeks back my attention was caught by this headline on Stuff:

Three Rs Too Much for Some Teachers.

Some teachers are so lacking in literacy and numeracy skills that they cannot write adequate reports or do primary-school-level maths … Anecdotal evidence from principals included teachers having poor reading comprehension, making basic punctuation, grammar and spelling errors, and being unable to help pupils' reading.

Now, no one should be surprised at this given the NZQA criteria for NCEA unit standards specify that “any spelling, punctuation, and/or grammar errors that do not appreciably affect the intended message” don't matter.

The education system all over the West has for decades been in the hands of state-worshippers intent on making everyone equally dumb and willing to do as the state demands: a fact brilliantly dramatised by the late Kurt Vonnegut in his short story Harrison Bergeron, where those displaying excess intelligence are zapped by special headphones at the behest of the Handicapper-General.

In New Zealand our Handicappers-General are the Ministry of Education, the NZQA, the NRO and the teacher unions. The unions have been resisting tooth and nail the introduction of national standards of literacy and numeracy. Why allow pupils to attain standards they themselves don't meet?

The tools of the Handicappers-General are things like the NCEA with its gibberish criteria that tell potential employers nothing. Weasel-words and sticky platitudes like “innovative” “creative” “across a range of" are the Handicappers' stock-in-trade. Here's the ERO, praising a particular high school:

“Cooperative, interactive class activities, such as well structured and scaffolded group activities, reinforce independent thinking.”

Scaffolded group activities? What the hell does that mean?!

It's all bollocks, of course, this mushy gibberish, and its objective is the exact opposite of independent thinking. Its objective is mindless conformity, and it has been achieved in Generations Airhead: gormless, incoherent, addicted to instant gratification ... and above all, willings serfs of the state. (And that's just the teachers!)

The Handicappers have done their job.

One of their principal tools for decades has been the Look-Say method of teaching reading. My guest tonight has fought a heart-warming battle against that crippling abomination. I hope his story will inspire you. Right now I want to put on the record again my view that the state should not be involved in education at all. Our friend Plato here believed that the state should separate children from parents at birth and regulate every aspect of a child's upbringing. Two and a half thousand years of this sort of thing, as the government extends its tentacles more and more into early childhood education, if Generations Airhead don't persuade you Plato was wrong ... I don't know what will.

That's the Peritorial. Back with tonight's guest in a moment.

ENDS

© Scoop Media