Jim Binkley

I Believe in Angels: Real Education or Neo-feudal Schooling? Jim Binkley

Publisher Marketing: You do not have to be a pessimist or a harbinger of doom to realise the astonishing fact that this country could be teetering on the brink of catastrophic collapse. Inflation, rising crime, monetarism gone mad, incompetence, negligence, immorality, trickery, arrogance, prejudice and hypocrisy all signal the decline of decent morality and the ascendancy of neo-feudal immorality. Immorality draws the nation ever closer to the abyss and oblivion. Nothing could be more calculated to bring out the worst in people than grasping everything of worth and then placing a dollar value on it. It spawns all those behaviours that are anti - civilisation: the nation is ruled by self seeking, conceited, avaricious, sybarites bungling their way from one failure to another, completely contemptuous of public opinion, because the masses are easily subdued. The rich and powerful have created a monstrous system where ability is measured, not by occupational competence, but by the ability to create the circumstances, for the masses, where failure is certain. The mechanism by which this corrupt system has brought us dangerously close to extinction is that of neo-feudalism. That is the cultivation of all those unjust, unworthy and unhealthy behaviours that crush talent, competence, creativity, ability and resourcefulness in the name of elite self preservation, self service and personal advancement. There are few worse discouragements to angelic values than those we find in our schools today. Discouragement is built into the thought patterns of our teachers so that it can be inflicted on our children. Therefore, there is no better place to start the process of restructuring our society, on moral lines, than in our schools, and especially through properly educated teachers.