Another day, another story revealing what is lost by the feminist/progressive geniuses pushing mothers of young children into full-time work. It seems many parents cannot find the time to read to their child for ten whole minutes a day.
On Thursday, we were told by none other than the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, that: “It is hard, of course, finding 10 minutes when you are juggling work” to read to your child. In fact it is so hard now for the double income family to find 10 minutes in the whole day to read to their kids, ITV’s Good Morning Britain is launching a campaign to encourage parents to do just this.
Now, I don’t blame the parents that much – they have been put under immense pressure from the withdrawal of child benefit to outright childcare bribes, as well as stigmatising the role of full-time mothers, to go to work and leave someone else to do the caring.
Turns out, this makes some important aspects of a strong family life more difficult. Who knew? Family meals are out, contributing to the childhood obesity crisis, the bedtime story is dwindling and even baking a few cupcakes with mum is proving a challenge as our children now roam around the school playground ‘like ghosts’ because they spend so much time out of parental care.
These days parents can barely manage to read to their own kids for 10 minutes a day. Perhaps the policy-makers did not see all this coming because they are myopic fools.
Anyway, what is even more shocking about this story is how Morgan believes that ‘making like the Waltons’ can solve Britain’s shockingly low rates of literacy. She wants grandparents to ‘share the load.’ I hazard a guess that if grandparents are living near to our double income, full-time working family they are probably sharing quite a bit of the load anyway in terms of heavy duty childcare.
Is this really Morgan’s great plan to improve the British education system – get granny to read Postman Pat? We are doomed.
Listen up Secretary of State. The reason why “tens of thousands of 11-year-olds” are still struggling with reading, writing and maths is because of our dodgy education system that you are now in charge of and have the opportunity to change. It is because synthetic phonics are still not being taught adequately enough in schools. It is because weaker pupils are not getting the attention they need and because of ineffective ‘child-centred’ teaching that still dominates the profession.
It is shocking, and I mean shocking, that a Government minister with a budget of billions would take to the couch of some morning TV programme to tell parents to read to their kids and ask grandparents to do the job of teachers.
Why don’t you implement some policy changes and get the teachers to start teaching? There’s an idea. Because ten minutes of even the Witches, which we all love, is not going to cut it for a struggling child that does not know what sound ‘ch’ makes.
