'Thousands of under-11s branded homophobic' shouts a headline in The Sunday Times.
Really? Like cattle?
So what's the story?
"More than 20,000 primary school children were labelled racist or homophobic last year, including children as young as four years old.
"A survey of education authorities in England and Wales by a civil liberties group under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI) reveals that children were reported for insults, including “broccoli head” and “this work’s gay”.
"The survey finds more than 1% of primary-school children in Leeds and Birmingham were reported for slurs. In Barnet, 63 children under 13 were labelled homophobic. Hertfordshire and Suffolk recorded the sixth and seventh highest number of racist incidents. One in 200 primary school children were reported in these counties..."
So their bad behaviour wasn't so much "reported" as recorded by teachers, and they weren't "branded" homophobic just because they used homophobic words.
What kind of a cunt could object to that?
What is the "civil liberties group" who conducted this "survey"?
The Manifesto Club.
Who?
Don't worry if you haven't heard of them - The Manifesto Club is yet another front organisation for the ultra right pseudo-libertarian big business-loving nutjobs at The Institute For Ideas/LM/Spiked.
This is familiar IoI territory, in what they call The Battle For Ideas.
It's all been set out ad nauseum in IoI ideologue Frank Furedi's book Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating.
And why isn't it?
It's all that "political correctness" and "soft social engineering" by a "liberal elite" in a "nanny state" blah blah blah.
Jenny Turner tried to make sense of Furedi in London Review of Books last year;
"It’s difficult to give a fair account of his argument. It’s not so much that he said anything obviously disagreeable, because he didn’t: he’s against meddling control freaks, ignorant teachers, the craven obsession with health and safety, and lots of other stuff that you would happily agree with, if only you could stop yourself suspecting that none of these issues is as straightforward as he makes out. The way he presented his argument was brain-shrinkingly vague. The focus was mainly on UK schooling, and yet Furedi hardly engaged at all with what actually happens inside British schools. There were instead grand-looking historical generalisations – ‘in the 21st century, conservation of the past is a radical act’ – and a lot of anecdotes of the sort that make people start going on about political correctness gone mad: ‘They’re even expelling two-to-four-year-olds in nurseries for racism, for homophobia, for inappropriate sexual behaviour.’ It’s significant that Furedi uses the word ‘expelling’ – no one who works in education has used this word for decades. They always use the word ‘excluded’, which is both more neutral and more exact..."
So The Sunday Times has presented a press release presenting twisted statistics in support of the hidden agenda of a tiny ultra right think tank as news.
Well done.
Thank fuck we have gay media to challenge such bias, eh?
I'm joking - of course, we don't.
The apolitical retards at Pink News have just reprinted - unchallenged, unquestioned - the IoI's right-wing bullshit in a story lifted pretty much verbatim from The Sunday Times.
How impressive to see the gay press siding with the anti-gay bullies.
Yet again!
Gold fucking star!
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