Educating Rita[lin]

There is a distinction between teaching the student and teaching the subject; the latter is what used to be called education. The present system is about training the student to achieve ‘outcomes’ for certification of compliance, and monitoring the ‘progress’ of teachers and schools; causing the revulsion by cussed youths that would otherwise engage and aspire to knowledge. It maybe the explanation of why girls are doing better than boys these days, owing to this change of emphasis, that aids the box ticking bureaucracies, whilst fobbing off the conceit of faddish herds, with empty inflated grades.

Girls tend to be more amenable, more willing to integrate, comply and collaborate, so as to be flattered by acceptance. Boys on the other hand, seek challenges and independence; they thrive on cussedness, and are flattered by hard won victories.

The present emphasis on inclusivity, “no child left behind”, has inevitably led to the reduction of standards, since skill and talent have a normal distribution in the population, therefore inclusivity and high standards work against each other. Standards have dropped both by reducing the erudition required in examination, and by dumbing down the syllabuses. The girls thrive on lowered standards and reduced contention, because the easier the tests the greater the compliance; however the boys correspondingly fail to rise to the diminished challenges, as the reduced difficulty robs them of any sense of kudos from winning their spurs; “An empty hand is no lure for a hawk”.

In frustration, the teachers resort to ‘training’ the boys; which simply results in their cussed rejection of the whole schooling regime; this in turn leads to the pejorative term ‘laddishness’, a wholesale condemnation of the Y chromosome. It now becomes a war of both sex and generation; the headmistress selected for this conflict is ‘Rita’, Ritalin, the chemical cosh for cussed kids.

Ritalin works by allowing the dopamine levels to accumulate at the synapse during neurone activity. Dopamine functions at the synapses during the anticipation of pleasure, such as the sex drive, and is believed to be integral with the process of learning. Correspondingly, adverse stimuli such as bad food or unpleasant situations will result in a decrease of dopamine.

In our formative years we learn more than just academic lessons, we learn social distinctions alongside emotions. Our reactions to right and wrong, or good and bad, are what make us the functional individuals we are within a social group. Part of the learning process involves the resolution of social and cognitive dissonances; Ritalin may well alter this natural process to the point of perversion. The presence or absence of dopamine at the synapses is nature’s way of making a demarcation between the learning of pleasant as opposed to unpleasant stimulation. Or put another way, a kid sparked up on Ritalin may learn a bad lesson just as well as a good one. And does the Ritalin wear off when little Johnny is hanging around bad company, or suffering the unnatural propaganda from ‘social engineers’?

Furthermore, with an ever increasing number of feminist teachers, who have a low regard for males in general, what possible disincentive is there to prescribe the drug wholesale? Considering the potential boon afforded to quota-filling teachers presented with a classroom full of ‘compliant’ students, my guess is that boys will be targeted for this abuse, especially as the media is busy frightening the public with stories of ‘feral kids’.

Imagine if Winston Churchill was a present day child... “I made very little progress in my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor.” Would he be a candidate for ADHD, and after a course of Ritalin, would he then still be the man of the hour?

You can guess the outrage from feminists if husbands suggested the use of Ritalin on their obstreperous wives; or better still, if Ritalin is effective at focusing the mind for the learner, why not make the teachers take it so as to improve their lessons? It’s perfectly safe, after all, it’s been tested on children!

The idea of synthetically altering a child’s state of mind during his formative years, based upon the dubious politics of feminist teachers and the amoral school bureaucracy, smacks of brain washing; and is tantamount to the betrayal of the child’s future, to cover up the incompetence, and in some respects, the misandry of the teaching profession as a whole.

Below are the graphs for Teacher Gender ratios (Data set ST30308), and the corresponding A-level results by Gender for students with 2 or more A-level passes (Data set ST30317), for the years 1985 to 1998, according to the Department for Education and Employment for England and Wales. The data suggests the hypothesis that boys do not prosper in a feminist realm.