WITH many years spent in politics and the world of commerce it has been my unpleasant duty to read much that I could, and frequently did, take issue with.
However, I cannot recall anything approaching the depths of the unmitigated nonsense espoused in guidelines for teaching young children reproduced in a magazine called Nursery World (NW). Let me elaborate.
It seems that an expert in educating young children wants teachers to avoid racial bias by not representing witches in black attire as this might persuade immature minds to think that anything black is malevolent.
Let’s ignore the racial connotations for a moment and analyse one or two of the words in this sentence.
First, in order to give the matter some context, we need to define the word “expert”. As I understand it: X is the unknown factor and a spurt is a drip under pressure.
Next, in the classical literature that involves witches and witchcraft the protagonists are always dressed in black.
In general witches are malevolent – that’s their job!
If we follow the advice of NW and dress witches in pink the entire premise of stories from Shakespeare to Pratchett collapse into meaningless verbiage.
These drips under pressure also want teachers to do away with white paper in the classroom as there are skin colours other than white and we shouldn’t, by default, convince adolescent minds that
white is good or better than any other colour.
For goodness sake what is going on in the brains of these twisted, febrile, politically correct numbskulls?
I don’t know about you but my skin tone is nothing like a sheet of white paper.
It is generally pink where the sun don’t shine with tinges of red around the proboscis (possibly due to an overindulgence of port).
Why should any infant associate your or my skin tone with the colour of the paper on which they draw?
Would it be better if children were only given black paper to scribble on?
Don’t be daft – they’d need to use white crayons and that might affect their perception of racial equality.
By the way, have you noticed that black people aren’t actually black – they are every shade of brown?
What these stupid experts have either ignored or completely missed is that when you put half a dozen children of any race, creed or colour together they are oblivious to the fact that the others are different in any meaningful way. They just get on and play together.
Children are not affected by the colour of witches cloaks or the paper on which they scribble. They are affected by naïve social engineering that attempts to convince them that racial differences need to be acknowledged.
Like Sammy Davis Jr, I don’t give a damn if people are black, white or polka dot.
The quality is in the character not the colour. These drips under pressure might take a leaf from Mr Davis’ book – printed on white paper incidentally.
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