A simple spelling mistake has led to a 10-year-old Muslim boy being interviewed by British police over suspected links to terrorism.
The boy, who lives in Accrington in Lancashire, wrote in his primary school English class that he lived in a “terrorist house”. He meant to write “terraced house”.
You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that someone, somewhere would have realised that it was a spelling mistake?
His teachers did not realise it was a spelling error and instead reported the boy to the police, in accordance with the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, which states that teachers are obliged to alert the authorities to any suspected terrorist behaviour.
I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry. All I can say is that if this is the state of teaching in our schools, no wonder our education system is so appalling. It does tend to explain the dire standards of literacy I encounter in adult students. It also means that the terrorists – the real ones – have won.
The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which came into force in July 2015 as part of the government’s anti-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, places local authorities, prisons, NHS trusts and schools under a new statutory duty to prevent extremist radicalisation taking place within their walls.
Critics of the act argue it forces teachers to over-react, rather than using their common sense, for fear of breaking the law.
You don’t say?
Once again, it is demonstrated that we have more to fear from the state than we do from terrorists, who merely have to sit back and laugh as we do their work for them.
Or maybe a Freudian slip?
This country is rapidly becoming a third world shithole populated by brain dead morons. I despair for my grandchildren..
I agree – Occcam’s razor, in the written context, says that linguistic confusion is far more likely. I’ve spent enough years at the chalkface to search instinctively for homophones when an incongruous word appears.
It isn’t clear whether the work was handwritten; given the ubiquity of the Little Tin God that is IT, it may well have been typed, in which case, spell-check could have played a part. It’s highly likely that a child who had never seen ‘terraced’ written down would spell it ‘terrist’.
To me, the obvious first response would have been to ask the child to read the sentence out loud and then explain it – but then, I haven’t been on all those fancy training courses and I trust my own judgement before a set of arbitrary rules handed down from on high; I’m guessing this now puts me in a minority.
Macheath, check today’s ‘Mail’ – they have an image of the thing, it is indeed handwritten (poorly)!
Allow me to don my tinfoil hat here – the teachers have strenuously resisted the govt demands to tackle extremism. I hope someone’s considered the possibility that this is deliberate and designed to discredit the govt’s approach?