单项选择题

Text 3 Daffodils bloom and chocolate eggs melt as the long Easter weekend draws near. Alongside such pleasures is another, equally seasonal: the annual outpouring from the teaching unions’ conferences, whose massed pedagogues can always be relied on to provide a few news stories to delight the headline writers. Guaranteed are lamentations about parents and pupils, both inferior to those of yesteryear in various, not always consistent, ways. Fairly standard attempts to blame the raw materials rather than inadequate workmen, but these moans are given a ready hearing because they confirm the fears of many readers (and not a few editors) that the nation’s moral fibre is in shreds. Also lapped up are the crazy conference motions, such as the proposal in 2007 for a curriculum based on fancy "skills" rather than fusty "knowledge". Union activists in most walks of life are well to the left of those they represent, and teaching-union loyalists are no exception. But such stories resonate because they fit the widespread stereotype of teachers as sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading lefties. It is one that has little evidence to back it up. The Guardian is indeed the profession’s favourite newspaper, but not by miles. And teachers, tendency to vote Labour is of recent origin, and may not last. In the run-up to the 1979 election that brought Margaret Thatcher to victory, most teachers told pollsters they intended to vote Conservative. When in 1987 they defected, disillusioned by low spending on schools, they turned first to the Liberal-Social Democratic Party Alliance, the third party, before coming round to the charms of Tony Blair. In 1997, fifty-nine percent intended to vote Labour, nearly four times more than fancied the Tories. But fewer have voted Labour in each subsequent election. In 2008, the Times Education Supplement found overwhelming disapproval among teachers of Labour’s school policies and a shift in voting intentions. Teaching is in some ways a natural job for the conservatively inclined. Like the police, teachers see too much of human nature to remain starry-eyed. And even the dogged idealists privately admit that traditional right-wing policies, such as physical punishment and academic selection, would make their jobs easier. But teachers’ politics are also shaped by those who train them and by the nature of the work. Both are changing. While teachers were voting Tory in 1979, education academics were intoxicated with child-centred education and discovery learning, and were turning out new teachers in that mould. The academics are still pretty left-leaning, but nearly a quarter of new teachers now train in schools rather than universities, up from a handful ten years ago. All are coming to grips with a very different profession: one shaped by a national curriculum with tests and targets.

It can be concluded from the last paragraph that（）

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