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2021-09-16

Many would suggest that state education never recovered after Crossland's abolition of the grammar schools. But he was a politician, so what did we expect?

But is there any fundamental reason why a Comprehensive shouldn't produce excellent results? Apart from that age old aphorism "Jack of all trades, master of none" of course.

There are clearly many attributes that a good school must possess, and specialisation may be only one among the many. So what attribute should we value most highly? 

I would suggest that "a good teacher" must rank very highly indeed - but what makes for a good teacher? One of the best teachers I ever had was teaching outside his subject-matter but used to keep one lesson ahead of the class! So subject-matter competence need not always rank very highly. 

Should a teacher be engaging and supportive? Engaging certainly, and supportive is a nice-to-have but is it essential? My teacher was very clear about his expectations of us - if we didn't get at least 7/10 for our homework (and 7/10 three times in a row wasn't good enough) we would have to do it again. So clarity of expectation was critical to concentrate the mind, and supportive marking of homework with a prompt turn-around was critical to keeping momentum.

Jon Rappaport, looking through the wrong end of the telescope, has some contrasting views on what the education system has been doing wrong from the USA perspective.

"How did you get to be the way you are, Mr. Jones?"

It's a dystopian vision that eerily echos the response of governments in western nations when faced with "the pandemic". Surely education hasn't been preparing our populations for this "pandemic" all along?

David Adelman (author: "School: No Place for Children") "looks at how schooling has gone corporate, fitting the UN global agenda to rid the world of true diversity. Schools are now ‘weaponised’ to coerce children and parents into blind conformity to methods that not only are not educational, but tantamount to child abuse. David considers how our schooling affects us later in life"

Catch this and many similarly unconventional presentations at the annual Glastonbury Symposium.

 

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