Thursday 24 September 2009

I'm trapped in a nightmare and I can't wake up

Grit is thrashing around suffering from maladies. Her head is become a rotten cabbage of a place, swilling about with all manner of fevers and maggoty rubbish.

She imagined, for example, in the midst of her delusions, that Ed Balls said how whole swathes of experienced teachers, like deputy heads, were no longer needed. Now schools can be run by executive superheads, zipping up and down the expressways of England, managing their institutions like giant corporations.

And we will watch and we will like this future. TV programmes will fawningly follow those bullish management styles, we will delight in producers lickspittling behind flyaway managers who, with reforming zeal, sweep away ancient rules, staffrooms, and worn out teachers.

Look! The superhead drops in from a helicopter, barks results and flies away again! Proof to all citizens in the Great Leap Forward! Schools are the best new corporates, advancing annual reports, balance sheets, profit and loss, investment opportunities, dividends for the achievers, the intellectual supertop who wave paper passes to prove it all! You too could aspire for your child to become the new super elite!

Now, in Grit's diseased brain, there aren't people in these places at all. They are just input/output corridors, linked to exits and entrances by conveyor belts. Products pass to be neatly corporately branded and packaged; they're stamped on the forehead; certificates pasted on their backs.

These strange delusions and imaginings in the Grit brain are not in anyway softened by the fantasy that a real, live, person emerges - worse, a feeling person with emotions and a face and a heart that speaks to her real moving hands and thinking brain - and says, Heck! A child beaten up! I'm going to stop that!

Of course the system must react! Of course this person must have Failed an Assessment Qualification. What has gone wrong? She cannot have been reeducated on the training course! If she had successfully phased through that system, with the approval of her superiors, she would have made the automatic deference to the institutional hierarchy with the line Must report all visual incidences to line manager for appropriate handling and publicity requirements.

There is no alternative. There are policies in place to deal with human behaviour. In the great endeavour of the new corporates she must be excluded. She must lose her job, she must be cast out of all enterprises requiring complete submission.

Because we must not forget that schools are now corporate institutions. Staff are hierarchised to become delivery components. Each job is allocated specific descriptions and responsibilities to streamline the effective management system. Any item not allocated a place within the appropriate order in the delivery system must be passed to another human-type unit who is trained and qualified.

And more. We must not forget the image is now all important, and more important then any individual child; we must enforce brand loyalty, brand identity and maintain that brand value at all costs.

And what is this thing called community? What world is that? The Grit brain is in a mangled place now where it knows the Labour government has put into place all procedures by which schools must adopt corporate identities and deliver the output with league tables, performance targets, national curriculum tests. There is no such thing as community. There are institutions and there are whistleblowers - a word once used for people who informed on secret controlling institutions but who now are people who step away from the designated mark to simply say what is happening to children.

Children? Children? Who mentioned them? In the Grit brain all is awry and gone bonkers. Because children are messy, scruffy, inquisitive, demanding, objectionable, rampaging, delightful, spontaneous, creative, irritating, unpredictable.

But these are not allowed! The input/output institution might crash to the ground if it has to deal with these creatures! The corporate state cannot effectively deliver the product if it is dealing with maverick creations like this. They must be eliminated.

Well the Grit brain is well and truly malfunctioning now, so she is going to lie down in a dark room and hope that when she wakes up, it is all gone away.

Because it cannot be true. Soon I will wake up. If I do not, next I might dream this Labour government is in charge of when I am conscious and when I am not.

4 comments:

Angela said...

Just calm down, dear Grit. It was just a bad dream. Your dealing with stupid authorities has made you think the whole world has turned crazy, but no. Children are like you described them, and well so! And parents love their children and will wiggle through. You are doing a great job, I can`t repeat that often enough, and your own children are happy to have you defend them against bureaucrats. But these guys will never take over! Here in the former DDR they also thought they could rule the whole society, and they failed!!!!!

Grit said...

Angela, thank you. I know there are so many thousands of people out there who are also hating this invasion into our lives. Sometimes it really does feel like our right to live a peaceful life is being deliberately and systematically broken up.

Maire said...

It certainly does feel like that Grit. The fact that they have now money seems to make not one jot of difference to their ambitions. One can only hope that the come to the same sort of sticky end that we would if we behaved in the same way.

sharon said...

All being well, things will change again after the next election. In fact, in the name of The Market Economy, it's quite possible that almost all children will be compulsorily home educated as there will be no money left for state education!