Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Gove hammered by radio caller
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lydia R on
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Gosh yes. It *is* brilliant.
It illustrates so clearly what is wrong with the education system when muddle-headed idiots like that are out there agitating for their amorphous ideas about a school agenda. The fact that this caller had no awareness whatsoever of how he was exposing his soggy thinking on national radio was a depressing reminder of a prevailing tolerance for un-analytical thought even amongst articulate people.
Gove did very well, considering that he was punching custard.
btw. I am an English and Art teacher. I got my qualifications in university from teachers and from books -- not from feeling my way through to find out who I was before I found out who Picasso was. Had I been able to, I would have reminded this caller -- who obviously had no interest in history as a child and so feels he can re-write it as an adult -- that all the great artists were forced to learn mathematics as children while mathematicians like Newton no doubt had their childhood creativity completely blighted by having to learn a lot of Latin grammar.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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As I dropped my six year old off in class this morning I noticed that they had a slide up titled "Who is Allah?". Arrrggghhhh!!! If they could get the tense right it would be a start.
We are all peasants, but some of us have cars and cellphones.
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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John
Allah is God. God is still around (apparently) so they have the tense right. :)
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Lydia,
I think you have got the caller completely wrong. He was not slagging off the teaching profession. Far from it. He was asking Gove to leave schools to do their job and was criticising the addition of History & Geography as a must take subject.
According to this BBC article, Head teachers say the inclusion of the new "English baccalaureate" in this year's league tables is unfair.
Joan McVittie, head at Haringey's Woodside High said on a BBC TV News interview yesterday;
It (Woodside High) has improved markedly, but will get a very low ranking on the new measure.
"This is a major issue for us. We will be lucky to get three or four per cent [of pupils credited with achieving the English Bacc]," she said.
"We have already started to make changes because they have moved the goalposts. We want to continue to be seen as an improving school. But it will be hard on our children.''
Schools need support from programmes designed to give extra time & support to a multitude of needs for certain pupils. That includes specialist staff such as those based at the PDC. Having governments interfere year in, year out by cutting funding, stopping programmmes suddenly at will doesn't help.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Ugh! Sounds like he hasn't progressed far from 1st year bar conversations.
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After I put in my two-penn'orth this morning I happened to be talking to someone who had been working on the set of Question Time this week, when Gove was on the panel. Apparently someone from the audience told a very sad tale of horrors and abuse at his school (I didn't watch QT this week but as I understand it that piece was cut from the finished programme). The QT worker told me, though, that after the show Gove got the man back and took him to a private room where they spent almost an hour in conversation.
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Permalink Reply by Alison P on
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Interesting. I did watch some of it and there was a man who commented at one point about the problems faced by children in care, and Gove asked if they could talk at the end - don't know if that was the same issue.
As for the radio interview, personally don't think Gove was remotely hammered, and I ain't no fan...
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms is what the education debate should be thinking about. Otherwise it's just papering over the cracks. No one dares. ( disclaimer: I was a teacher for 18 years under 2 very different political regimes each who claimed to care about education)
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It is a brilliant little talk, even the cut-down version.
I do believe that political parties of any stripe in this country generally are run by people who want to improve the world and I think that although Conservative Gove and his immediate Labour predecessor might have different ideas about how to go about it, they both want the same thing -- that is, the best education for the most people that the State can provide. The problem is, how do you give each child an education suited to his/her particular temperament within a system which has to cater for hundreds of thousands? I don't think it is possible and I do think that some of us will end up suffering because we don't fit. Any generation has this, with different sorts of people not fitting in that particular era.
Such personal discomfort may actually serve a function. Misfits have their place too, after all. One of my sons is very profoundly dyslexic and although this has not been beneficial for him, his lack of structured perception has given him an astonishing lateral capacity which has translated into all sorts of insights which his work colleagues would never otherwise have had.
As for children's ability to think imaginatively deteriorating as they grow, I'm not so sure it is the schools which are at fault. My parents worked a lot harder to batter my individuality into submission than any of my teachers.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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I'm staying out of the staffroom this lunchtime. Doesn't anyone talk about last night's Eastenders any more?
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I don't think that he is saying that all we need is personalised education. He is asking us to question a model that was developed to suit a society that came into existence approx 200 years ago and whether this model is suitable for today.
We continue to think education is an issue of governance ( free schools), types of school (grammar, comprehensive, academy), testing (Sats, Olevels, GCSE, A levels or BAC) or funding (state or private) but leave the basic model set by the Enlighenment and the Victorians in place. So, the debate should be whether there are alternative models of mass education that are better suited to a society that recognises that intelligence is neither fixed nor necessarily measurable in standard ways and which can help people be part of an entirely different society from the one that spawned the industrial revolution.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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Liz, genuine question to someone I know is a teacher - do you believe that children will choose to teach themselves literacy and numeracy naturally without guidance from a teacher ? And if so, would that be the most effective way of acquiring those skills ?
Why do we have league tables anyway ? Aren't there regular inspections to identify failing schools / poor teachers anymore ? It seems to me that league tables serve only to exacerbate the gap between good and bad schools as parents cherry pick the " best schools ". In the 60s we didn't have league tables, schools were pretty much of a uniform standard and children automatically attended the nearest school, not one half way across the borough. You didn't have this frantic scramble to get your child into a school because the nearest one is full.
What happened ?
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