Concerns
Concerns
As well as requiring disclosure barring service (DBS) police checks, home and abroad, in a process of criminalizing the English language teaching profession, by suggesting teachers are a danger to their charges per se, contracts are being drawn up for ‘summer camp’, allowing property searches to ensure companies keep their industrial secrets.
Apart from limiting opportunities to those willing to accept such searches it’s handicapping the provision of English language teaching by restricting the use of professionals to those who are ‘in the know’, as they say, which is pandering to paedophiliacs, in the sense that the criteria for working with children is that of the paedophile. What the paedophile says is that it prefers camp guards, while the teacher has to be ‘diplomatic’, which is a euphemism for ‘castrated’.
It isn’t about the teachers’ sexual preferences, or orientation, it’s about what the English want from their ‘prevent awareness’ campaigning, which is at best asexual, and at worst neutralized, teachers, and that’s insulting, as ‘camp’ guards, lifeguards for the ‘pool, and all those concerned with ‘safeguarding’ activities, are expected to be similarly unaware.
Being neutered interferes with the additional objective of dealing with bullying for sexual favours, or outright terrorist demands, as the perforce naïve teacher isn’t in a position intellectually to surmise any issue, which places the burden heavily upon the student to notify. Expecting the teacher to be a diplomat in this way has a deleterious effect on the educational process, as the libidic energy reserved by the employee for channelling into the preparing and administering of lessons is redistributed in unnatural self-monitoring, and dispassionate disinterestedness, whereas monitoring of students, with at least an appearance of passionate interest in their progress, activities, and welfare, is what’s required.
The extending what summer camp providers seem to think of as their ‘police powers’ to the arena of intelligence gathering is familiar to teachers who’ve worked overseas where similar restrictions place the teacher in a category of those who’re disabled technologically, sometimes through outright theft of technical equipment and materiel, even while passing through airport controls, constituting ‘restraint of trade’ by making the individual unemployable, because deprived of the tools necessary to complete their contractual obligations.
Shouldn’t English language providers be instructed that such ‘dumbing down’ of the teaching profession is illegal? English grammar isn’t an industrial or military secret. Pretending that ELT providers are national, and international, security organizations, is ruining the lives of professional educators. If left unregulated such companies are abrogating the authority of the state to function as non-educational centres that nevertheless require the veneer of employing ELT professionals as camouflage, which again is insulting.
Especially given the inordinate care taken to ensure the teacher has passed all of the educational requirements, as well as being admitted a citizen of good standing, and having the requisite prevent awareness and safeguarding qualifications, not excluding a first aid certificate, and that of a lifeguard’s, to mask the fact that the summer camp wants educators only as a sop to a jolly.
In social scientist George Orwell’s ‘scifi’ novel, 1984 (1949), the antisocial slogans of the central government organ, Ministry of Truth, are ‘Freedom is Slavery’, ‘Peace is War’, and ‘Ignorance is Strength’.1 Prevent awareness and safeguarding presuppose terror, that is, slavery, war, and ignorance, which isn’t the perspective of the educator. The ‘IngSoc’ (English socialism) of Orwell’s dictator, ‘Big Brother’, is allied with the continent of Oceania, as ‘Airstrip One’ is at war with the continents of Eurasia and Eastasia by turns. We, the teachers, are not. Threatening qualified staff with surveillance of their communications devices is intimidation, and as safeguarding and prevent awareness certificate holders are well aware, it’s illegal ‘harassment’.
During camp concentrating, teachers are expected to act as ancillary ‘security guards’, after completing anti-terrorist training on the government website, which effectively introduces staff to students as ‘agents of terror’, whereas the Chinese from Eastasia, for example, and/or Uzbekistanis from Eurasia, aren’t.
Protectionism that excludes educators from education is ‘jobs for the boys’ with the ‘old school tie’, for example, needing a reference, where the referee understands they’re being offered an employment opportunity, and a few words of character assassination can secure the post. As such places are available because of the intellectual capabilities of the qualified, it’s insulting that the criminal can institutionally refer themselves. It’s a system approximating to brain slaving, where the posts offered are dependent on the efforts of the educated for their existence, while the criteria for acceptability remains ‘other’.
In an advantageous position are biceptual ‘activity leaders’, who didn’t sacrifice the culture of body sculpting to stand before the smart bored and educate. Modernity, having made security phone-e’s possible, risks placing its kids at the mercy of bullies’ muscles, which places the onus on the educator to obtain at least a second degree in physical education (PE), as if it isn’t insulting to suggest that an MA in applied linguistics is an insufficient contribution to a role as grammar teacher at summer camp.
1 Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four, Secker & Warburg, London, 1949, Pt III, Ch. 3.