Accommodating all (well, 3% of all)

The reductio ad absurdum of multiculturalism. I refer to the new "guidelines for schools" from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). It tells the schools of this country how they should adapt to meet the "needs of Muslims". That is, how 97% of the country should adapt to 3% in almost every aspect of school life: collective worship, PE, dance, swimming, exams, school meals, sex education and parents' evenings.

Schools "should accommodate" Muslim girls so they are allowed to wear "a full-length loose school skirt or loose trousers, a long-sleeved shirt and a head scarf"
Boys should be allowed to wear beards
Primary schools should use portable partitions in changing rooms and all schools have "individual changing cubicles"
Sports involving physical contact should happen only in single-gender groups
Schools should limit certain activities during Ramadan. They include science lessons dealing with sex, parents’ evenings, exams and immunisation programmes.
School trips should be made single-sex
All British children should learn about Islam, but Muslims must have the right to withdraw their children from RE lessons dealing with Christianity and other faiths.

And so on and on. I could exclaim, What gives them the right?! But of course, we have,with the idiocy of multiculturalism. I might wonder, What about the Sikhs, Hindus, Rastafarians, Jews and, dare I?, Christians? But, of course, they don't for the most part make these demands. Maybe they should, and we'd have a school year consisting of 2 days, one for the boys and one for the girls.

These 'proposals' should be rejected out of hand. Inoffensively, of course.

Foolishness

In October, fearlessly throwing down the gauntlet to fortune, I passed on some snippets of good news. Among which, there was this: Hamilton College, long a flourishing centre of the Higher Cant, was to house something that sounded suspiciously like education - the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization, which would seek “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture.”

Well, that was then; this is now. The faculty would have none of it and demanded "that the center be subject to faculty oversight" - in other words, that it propogate the same PC buffoonery that the faculty do. Faculty oversight and excellence in scholarship being mutually exclusive, the Alexander Hamilton Center will not be.

To add derision to defeat, Dinocrat pointed me towards this credo by a certain Shelby Grantham, who teaches Writing at Dartmouth.

I teach writing. It's the second-best way I know to figure things out--such as what to do about racism, how to make non-violence a national priority, why so few students think they can make a difference, what poetry is good for, when and how to resist injustice, ways to share the planet with other species, and what gender has to do with anything. Seeking words to make such questions ring and their answers sing is what my English 5 sections [the required first-year writing course] are about.

I bow my head and crawl back into the closet.