I've seen this clip many times, now, and Peter Hitchens' lucidity and sincerity never ceases to resonate. He is the one sane man in a madhouse of liberals, trying desperately to get them to understand that our problems are self-made and the system we have created is destroying something not only precious but irreplaceable.
Naturally, nobody understood him, and so he is not so much a posh Nostradamus but instead an English Cassandra, doing everything to raise the alarm but forever cursed to cast his pearls before swine.
One can feel the desperation in his presentation. When they accuse him of, in fact, hating Britain it becomes clear that they have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. Tragic, frankly.
"I can honestly describe Arday’s teaching as terrible."
Jason Arday taught me. Here’s what I learned.
The song lyrics were the first red flag. The way he’d ramble about Tinie Tempah or Eminem, or how black artists like Beyoncé were sexualized by white men, without offering any evidence to substantiate his claims. Or else there were the film clips, from Fish Tank and Kidulthood, which he’d tell us to discuss without offering guidance on how to do so. And this was if he was even in the classroom at all. He often arrived late and left early, once teaching for a single hour when four were scheduled.
So when I saw Jason Arday’s name in the news, my first thought was: “finally!” As a student on the Education module Arday taught at the University of Roehampton, back in autumn 2018, a module replete with music but shockingly light on education, I can’t help but have thoughts on the story that’s unfolded over the last couple of weeks. For me, though, the real surprise is that it didn’t all come out sooner.
Before Arday arrived at Roehampton, university leaders enthusiastically told us of his amazing backstory: how he only learned to speak at 11 and write at 18, and how excited they were to have him teaching us. Naturally, we were all very interested to see the man himself, even if the module he’d be teaching had been written by a previous lecturer.
I can honestly describe Arday’s teaching as terrible. He rarely used the PowerPoint slides. Instead, he usually sat casually on a desk, giving his generalized views on racism without ever referring to any academic theories — let alone those relevant to the “Youth Participation and Identities” module he was supposed to be teaching.
@owenjonesjourno Lynn & Meisenberg (2010), Intelligence — National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations. This is one of the major attempts to construct a worldwide dataset. It combines psychometric IQ results with international educational assessments and reports est for 108 countrie