Tuesday, May 15, 2007
It wasn't like that in my day.....
How glad I am not to be a teacher any more:
The wreckage of the Education System
Spiked 10 May 2007. Emile May
Never mind by the time they leave school these kids will all be able to become model Police-people, finding the job perfectly understandable, what with all the form filling and computer-using they get so used to their teachers doing instead of teaching them.
Having started in my previous post to make Gordon Brown a Lenin (rather than the Stalin most claim), it is only a short step to suggesting the peasants (= teachers) revolt to take over their schools, running them to teacher rather than provide easy-read, groovy bar- and pie-chart statistics for ministers at their desks. It shouldn't be too difficult to do it all on the same day, so that all British State school teachers take over all schools on a given day, say for administrative convenience the beginning of term.
Headmasters, of course, to be locked up or shot without due process, Committees of Public Safety (er, Education) running the everyday business of ensuring pupils are taught something or other rather than used as fodder for social experiments.
Ahhhhh,(sighs nostalgically, not) I remember the text books I read, or half read on my post-graduate teacher training course, in particular one by a certain Olive Banks (Sociology), where she defines education in various ways including something to do with (loosely paraphrased) providing for the occupational/economic hierarchy. And a great philosophy of Education tome, The Logic of Education.
Teaching was always, axiomatically, about economics in that the product of the education system (mainly) went to work or higher education then work. You would need to study the history of the education system in this country over the last 150 years to grasp where things went wrong in the state sector, which clever little political theorists realised could be used to further the countries economic interests over those of the individuals going through the system - while millions of privately educated pupils were beneficiaries of a good solid and life enhancing education, and are to large part still are.
The evidence for this can be found in many areas including the retention of sport as an integral part of independent school life, whereas the sports ffields of the state schools have been largely sold off for housing development, a sort of digging for Britain de notre jour, except the spuds grown in the second war were marginally more useful and probably educational.
