PooterGeek

17 Comments

1. Jo
   Posted 28Jul05 at 07:57 | Permalink

   Nah, I just think it’s one (small) union who have strayed from the herd because they asked the right questions about education but came up with the completely wrong answer.

   Sorry, must do better.

2. dearieme
   Posted 28Jul05 at 09:56 | Permalink

   As Professor Smith explained so carefully, we got rich by exploiting the advantages of specialisation. The doctrine of “comprehensive” schooling denies us the advantages of specialisation. This is a horribly expensive folly; it might be affordable in the USA, a country that is very good at making money in spite of its High Schools, but not here. Naturally, people like the French will have nothing to do with such nonsense.

3. john b
   Posted 28Jul05 at 11:08 | Permalink

   There’s little or no room for significant specialisation at secondary school level - everyone ought to know basic maths, English language and literature, science and history, otherwise we end up with a society of oafs and barbarians. The French are well aware of this - hence you don’t specialise until you leave secondary school and go to the lycée. This is pretty much the same as the British system…

4. Andrew Duffin
   Posted 28Jul05 at 12:12 | Permalink

   I believe the Association of Professional Teachers is the renamed body whose membership is largely drawn from the staffs of independent schools. (Sorry, can’t remember what it used to be called).

   So you are probably reading too much into this. It’s more likely to be a case of Mandy Rice-Davies syndrome.

5. Linda Grant
   Posted 28Jul05 at 13:29 | Permalink

   Odd how no-one ever calls for the restoration of secondary moderns, which are of course silently implicit in the calling for the restoration of grammar schools.

6. PooterGeek
   Posted 28Jul05 at 14:18 | Permalink

   I don’t call for the return of secondary moderns either, but the ones that exist in Northern Ireland still outperform matched comprehensives on the mainland now.

   “Anti-elitist” education policy is about telling young people they’re just as good as anyone else while making sure that they do worse. Of course, those who perpetuate a system that disadvantages the poor protect their own children from it: openly, by going private, or, more discreetly, by paying a premium to get them into the catchment areas of good schools and by hiring home tutors:

   [A] British firm, Fleet Tutors, has created the first nationally branded provider of home tutors.

   “Private tuition has come out of the closet,” says its owner, Mylène Curtis. “Until a year and a half ago it was a covert activity: parents whispered to each that they had a tutor.” That’s changed, she says, chiefly thanks to the realisation that private tuition is so widespread: the industry’s best-known client is Tony Blair, whose teenage children all had private lessons to supplement their state-school education.

7. dearieme
   Posted 28Jul05 at 14:27 | Permalink

   john b, “There’s little or no room for significant specialisation at secondary school level “. Don’t be silly, the specialisation that matters is between those who are good at subject x, those who are mediocre, those who are useless. Teaching tham all at the same pace is just foolish. Linda: I’ll call for the restoration of the Secondary Moderns. A cousin attended one and swears by it: she went on to a professional career that she enjoys and which pays handsomely. It rescued her from a lousy primary schooling and, in her view, practically specialised in that.

8. PooterGeek
   Posted 28Jul05 at 14:33 | Permalink

   And you can always help your little one to clamber over the competition by getting God.

9. john b
   Posted 28Jul05 at 16:02 | Permalink

   Dearieme: that’s an argument for streaming, not for school selection. Indeed, France does the former but not the latter.

10. dearieme
    Posted 28Jul05 at 18:48 | Permalink

    As the original proponents of the Comprehensive Schools realised, once you’ve sold the pass and allowed streaming, there’s no logic in refusing to allow separate schools.

11. chris
    Posted 29Jul05 at 08:54 | Permalink

    Pardon me, dearie, but that’s nonsense. Young peoples abilities develop unevenly, and they can switch streams. If you get a kid who, like me, is dead good at elementary algebra, but can’t get their head around calculus, you can move them from stream 1 to stream 3 in maths without disrupting and upsetting them further by making them leave all their friends and go to a different site across town.

    If you have Grammars and Mods, the only choice is either leaving them where they are, sitting in maths classes they don’t understand, or making them leave and go to the other school, where their continuing excellence in, say, English, will not be sufficiently encouraged.

12. Tom
    Posted 29Jul05 at 09:50 | Permalink

    Doesn’t follow - I went to a comp with streaming, and like most of my colleagues was in different streams for different subjects.

13. dearieme
    Posted 29Jul05 at 10:17 | Permalink

    Tom, but you have to explain why, if you allow streaming within schools, it makes sense to forbid streaming between schools. The original proponents of Comprehensives may have been foolish but they weren’t illogical. They saw the point.

14. Tom
    Posted 29Jul05 at 11:55 | Permalink

    Well, the bus travel between classes would take up most of the school day.

15. George Szirtes
    Posted 29Jul05 at 12:40 | Permalink

    The trick is to dump a lot of the baggage associated with the old system, and a good thing too.

    My brother who was a very gifted musician (and is a professional musician now) but no academic, had a miserable time at sec. mod. and friends from primary school who failed the 11+ were immediately lost to resentment. The sec. mod. kids were, in fact, treated like losers.

    The system in what you call Eastern Europe, and what Eastern Europeans call Central Europe, wasn’t altogether bad. Rather than an 11+, selection/choice came at 14, and you opted for schools specialising in, say, health, or catering, or technical careers, or the , the grammar school equivalent, that was distinctly academic and aimed at universities. The system still obtains. We have friends, one of whose children attended gimnazium, the other a catering-based school. Not class divisive (same family) and kids quite happy as far as I can tell. Of course that is a big city solution, and not practicable in small towns. Isn’t this like the current government’s city academies scheme at half-cock?

    One answer might be comprehensives adaptable enough to allow for outside classes, apprenticeships, and specialised teaching for the very bright. This could be provided by shared units and connections.

    But blimey! what do I know? I have taught in a variety of schools from poor state ones, to ex-grammars, to the independent progressive fringe. Life was certainly easier in the latter two kinds. Now I don’t teach in schools at all, thank heaven.

    I myself went to a co-ed grammar in London that became a comprehensive in my last two years. Maybe, with the benefit of very misted hindsight, I would probably suggest streamed, single-sex comprehensives, with the above desirable appurtenances.

    See, I am rambling. I blame my education.

16. George Szirtes
    Posted 29Jul05 at 12:41 | Permalink

    ps. Got my italics running wild. Damn! Or should that be Damn!?

17. Linda Grant
    Posted 29Jul05 at 12:44 | Permalink

    wot George said.