13 de Febrero 2007

Gobierno omnipontente, gobierno incompetente

Sesion Dalrymple. Esta vez en abierto, en el City Journal.

Dalrymple comentá tres libros que ofrecen

an insight into the nature of the corruption that has sprung from the ever-wider extension of self-arrogated government responsibility in Britain, and they shed light as well on the effect that government expansion has upon the population

Uno de los libros, escrito por un maestro, Frank Chalk, retrata sin adornos el funcionamiento del sistema educativo británico. Comenta Dalrymple que:

In the looking-glass world of modern British public administration, nothing succeeds like failure, because failure provides work for yet more functionaries and confers an ever more providential role upon the government. A child who does not learn to read properly often behaves badly in school and thus becomes the subject (or is it object?) of inquiries by educational psychologists and social workers. As Chalk describes, they always find that the child in question lacks self-esteem and therefore should be allowed to attend only those classes that he feels he can cope with. The so-called Senior Management Team in the school—teachers who have retired into a largely administrative role—deals with all disciplinary problems by means of appeasement, for lack of any other permissible method available to them.

Nos suena, ¿no?. Más adelante:

A perfect emblem of the Gogolian, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian nature of the British public administration is the term “social inclusion” as applied in the educational field. Schools may no longer exclude disruptive children—that would be the very opposite of social inclusion—so a handful of such children may render quite pointless hundreds or even thousands of hours of schooling for scores or even hundreds of their peers who, as a result, are less likely to succeed in life. Teachers such as Chalk are forced to teach mixed-ability classes, which can include the mentally handicapped (their special schools having been closed in the name of social inclusion). The most intelligent children in the class fidget with boredom while the teacher persistently struggles to instill understanding in the minds of the least intelligent children of what the intelligent pupils long ago grasped. The intelligent are not taught what they could learn, while the unintelligent are taught what they cannot learn. The result is chaos, resentment, disaffection, and despair all round.

Termino:

Britain now has more educational bureaucrats than teachers, as well as more health-service administrators than hospital beds. No self-evident or entirely predictable failure, no catastrophe they have brought about at the behest of their political masters, ever affects their careers, in part because they move from post to post so quickly that none of them ever gets held responsible for anything

Todo aquí.

Escrito por castielero en: 13 de Febrero 2007 a las 01:12 AM | TrackBack