"Academics say that traditional teachers' titles such as 'Sir' and 'Miss' should be axed"

Today's Daily Telegraph bears this baleful news:

"Academics say that traditional teachers' titles such as 'Sir' and 'Miss' should be axed, with pupils being expected to use first names to drag schools into the 21st century."

I remember how shocked I was to learn in 1996 that the boys at my grammar school, Westcliff High School for Boys, Essex, no longer call each other by their surnames. Even as sixth formers drinking illegally we did so. 

Anyway, here is the enemy of civilisation, hierarchy and tradition in clear sight. This is what we are fighting against. 

Why call schoolmasters by their Christian, sorry first, names? The reason is to do with sexual equality. 'Sir' apparently sounds well but not 'Miss' (which is rather working-class but this is not the point) or Madam or Ma'am. The article quotes,

Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US, said the traditional title for male teachers “always conveys respect” while Miss does not. 

“It’s very hard to create linguistic equality between people who, in many people’s minds, aren’t equal,” she said. “At school, we have children who are still really only learning language. They pick up on it very readily and then the next generation gets exposed to the prejudices of the previous generation.”

Once this kind of thing would have been laughed at by most people, certainly by most readers of the Daily Telegraph, but many of the opinions of what, in the late 1970s, was known as the Loony Left are now part of the ruling consensus. While the free marketeers concentrated on moving economics rightwards society and culture continued to be moved (it was mostly not spontaneous) in the opposite direction. We all know this but what do we do about it? Fight back, obviously - with laughter and argument. Instead of calling teachers by their christian names insist they wear gowns, as in Will Hay films - something they would love and which would cheer us all up. 

Once schools were supposed to teach the catechism, love of country, knowledge of national history, Latin and Greek, the manly and womanly virtues. Of course they did not do a good job of it and schools were awful places, but now schools, British state schools at least, proselytise a secular religion of equality and 'human rights'. To its adherents, who are include most teachers and opinion-formers, this philosophy is manifestly good, but objectively it is propaganda.

[I am an enormous Will Hay fan by the way - this can be the subject of another post. For now here is 'Good Morning, Boys'.]