Re: The Anti Grammar Grammar Book Pdf
Celena Holtzberg
The big question is whether those well-intentioned educators were throwing away the baby with the bathwater. It would take a lot of research to know whether reduced emphasis on grammar hurt students. And all I have is anecdotal information about how the students educated under this philosophy have fared.
In an overheated classroom one winter morning, a black student at my school was struggling to hear what someone was saying to him. I was 14, it was 2005, and my classmates and I were making the most of a 15-minute morning break. Some were sitting at their desks eating their sandwiches early, checking their pockets for change for the visit to the tuck shop that they would need to make later. Others milled around among the rows of chairs and tables, chatting. Cheap metal chair legs scraped against the wooden floor.
Both sides have convincing arguments. But they also completely ignore the most important question: what is the effect of grammar schools on those who attend them? This week is anti-bullying week, and in schools across the country teachers will be handing out advice on what victims of bullying should do, while warning others not to bully. But what about the system they work in? Is it able to prevent it?
Of course, the ethos of Reading School was, is and always will be against such abuse. But the wider system it has always championed may still help foster abusive attitudes. And worst of all, an apparent inability to prevent those responsible from continuing such abuse indirectly helps sustain it.
If you' had a similar experience at your school (regardless of whether it was a comprehensive, grammar or private school), or are experiencing abuse now, we'd like to hear from you. Please get in touch at m.be...@independent.co.uk
Secondly, the remaining grammar schools have proved remarkably tenacious, surviving left-wing, right-wing and coalition governments and finding support from local politicians of all persuasions too. We need to think about why, and we also need to ask whether yet more campaigns in favour of abolishing grammar schools will simply end up as a virtue-signalling waste of effort that could have been better spent on other issues that might do more to improve our education system.
Fourthly, I share the distaste experienced by so many when politicians condemn academic selection for children as a whole while choosing to send their own offspring to schools that select on academic ability and / or wealth. Having one rule for the few and another for the many makes political debates uncomfortably raw, deepens societal divides and makes policymakers look like hypocrites.
The new paper by Iain Mansfield for the Higher Education Policy Institute helps clarify the whole issue in a new way. It shows the public may well be right to regard grammar schools as contributing to social mobility more than the experts have recognised. Without these state-funded selective schools and with all other things being equal, Oxbridge would have even fewer students with Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. In addition, the Russell Group would have far fewer students from the bottom half of the income distribution. With prestigious universities, rightly or wrongly, maintaining their role as a gateway to highly-paid and prestigious careers, the benefits to such students are unlikely to end there. It may even be the case that the superficially regressive policy of expanding grammar schools may end up being rather progressive.
Perhaps access to higher education is a poor test of the value of school selection. After all, our test is whether selective schools get pupils into hyper-selective universities. Perhaps the universities should change instead?
But one of the oddities of the anti-grammar school lobby is that they never seem to be opposed to academic selection on principle; they just seem to be opposed to it at age 11. As an experiment, try asking anti-grammar school campaigners when selection becomes acceptable. Whenever I have done so, I have never had a straight answer. They will generally refuse to tell you just when it is between the ages of 11 and 18 that selection becomes acceptable (14?, 16?, 18?), only that it does. Private schools and University Technical Colleges assume age 13 or 14 is a good point of transition. The law allows for more selection at 16 than at younger ages. But are these numbers more sensible than 11 or just as random?
It remains unclear why anti-grammar campaigners have rejected the more radical and logical option: changing our higher education sector so that it matches our mainstream school system. In other words, accepting that if the comprehensive ideal is right for schools then it may also be right for higher education, and universities should become more comprehensive in approach. If they did, the arguments for maintaining and expanding existing grammar school provision might largely fall away. If it seems a fanciful or silly idea, remember the Open University has long accepted all-comers and that, in some countries, a pass in the school-leaving exam is enough to secure a place at a local higher education institution.
11 plus tests have varied over time and local authority. There can be an emphasis on content styled as non verbal or perhaps a bias in favour of number crunching or general knowledge. The arbitrary content and design which the 11 plus shares
As a Mission Grammar community, we want to acknowledge the pain and loss in our Black and Brown communities that has been occurring far longer than just recently. Our hearts are aching for the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade and so many others. We care deeply about the impact this has on our community, especially our families and our brilliant, loving scholars who are the future. It is central to our mission that we stand firmly against racism. As a Catholic school community, we bring an added set of values to the discussion, namely the values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ which we share with our families and our scholars each day.
Our Director of Scholar and Family Services Ms. Zuleika Andrade (some scholars call her Ms. Z) is available to share resources and referrals to mental health supports as well as other needed community supports. She is also here to have individual and group discussions as needed. We will always take a trauma-informed approach to healing and recognize that these traumatic events impact our families and scholars, not just emotionally, but physically as well and these physical stressors make our community even more vulnerable during a pandemic where communities are already disproportionately affected.
Our next coffee hour on Thursday at 1:00pm will focus on holding space for this topic. If this time does not work for you and you would like to attend, please email Zuleika Andrade our Director of Scholar and Family Services at zand...@missiongrammar.org and we will add additional times to come together.
We will continue to pray for these families and for peace during our daily morning prayer. We understand that everyone grieves and experiences events differently and this might be too heavy a topic for some to share in a group setting. We are here for you whether you choose to attend an individual meeting, a group meeting or do not attend either.
How does one think about the translation of anti-gender politics when it moves from the societal realm into state policy? I will address this question by looking at the Brazilian experience between 2019 and 2022 when anti-gender ideology was systematically embedded into state grammar and public policy.
Cohesion, capillarity, and temporality are therefore key features to better grasp the contours of anti-gender ideology penetrating existing rationales of governmentality. Furthermore, institutionalization also required basic instruments of governance, as for example, bureaucratic agents and structures able to re-design and implement anti-gender infra-legal norms adopted between 2019 and 2002, such as decrees, protocols and ordinances, as well as to manage key institutional processes such as financing. The latter resulted in the recruitment and commitment of technical personnel able to translate anti-gender ideological frames into concrete policy measures.
Damares Alves, the chosen Minister, was/is an evangelical fundamentalist pastor who brought to the Ministry other people belonging to this religious camp. However, many high-level ministerial posts were occupied by ultra- Catholics, such as Angela Gandra, the National Secretary of the Family, as well as right-wing militaries and figures linked to the so-called traditionalist stream led by Olavo de Carvalho.[3] Further, a few actors connected to neo-fascist formations were initially contracted for relatively high-level positions, but were dismissed in 2020 when their links with these formations were openly disclosed.[4]
The Dial 100 Hotline was initially established in 2003 by the first Lula administration[5] to receive reports of human rights violations. Subsequently, it became a crucial public policy instrument because it allowed for the systematic compiling and processing of data on these violations. However, the system was entirely disfigured under Damares Alves as the head of the MMFDH.
The MMFDH has also induced and funded conservative knowledge production on family structures and relations. This goal was announced and appraised by Minister Damares Alves in a public conversation with Bia Kicis, an ultra-right woman MP in the following terms:
The first aspect to be noted is the ideological cohesion of the various and somewhat contradictory actors engaged in this kind of anti-gender statecraft. Secondly, the imaginary, semantic and affective traits of anti-gender social mobilizing, which had prevailed before 2019, were rapidly translated into public policies through solid processes encompassing bureaucratic expertise, financing and training of public functionaries at multiple levels. What was seen in Brazil also confirms what various authors have underlined: familist policy ideologies have a doubled function. They are deployed to both deflect the impacts of inequality, precariousness and the erosion of public-funded social protection, and to facilitate the implementation of drastic measures of state financial austerity.
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