Grammar Schools

[_angel_]

I do wonder if untethered has been inside a comprehensive school?

This idea that a kids destiny is affectively chosen at eleven over a few tests fills me with horror.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

I do wonder if untethered has been inside a comprehensive school?

Untethered's main education seems to be in the discipline of "thinking it is clever to say provocative things for effect". We must hope that it is just a passing phase and that the growing-up process begins soon.

 

[untethered]

I do wonder if untethered has been inside a comprehensive school?

Not only have I been in one, I spent a whole week in one on an "exchange" visit that my school had organised.

It was certainly educational, though barely so in an academic sense.

 

[_angel_]

Not only have I been in one, I spent a whole week in one on an "exchange" visit that my school had organised.

It was certainly educational, though barely so in an academic sense.

One whole week!

 

[untethered]

Untethered's dream seems to be to turn Britain into some fortress isolated from the world, where foreigners are essentially unwelcome - only good old British values welcome here. We won't really interact with the world - instead we'll grow own fruit and veg and become self sufficient, making our consumer electronic goods on a couple of lathes at the old British Leyland plant. I look forward to our steam powered, wood-clad betamax revival, driving our aged Rover runabouts to the local pork pie hostelry. What a prospect!

Britain used to be the workshop of the world. Now it's the contract cleaning agency of the world, and most of the cleaners are foreign (legal or otherwise).

Britain used to be a place where people made things. They had real, practical skills. We were able to resist foreign tyranny because we weren't totally dependent on other countries to supply us.

Back where I used to live there was this wonderful electronics shop. You could get just about anything in there. If you wanted to go in for a single resistor, you could get it. The staff were extremely knowledgeable and would happily look at your circuit diagram and suggest alternative components or design approaches.

What's there now? A Blockbuster video packed to the roof with American imports and staffed by minimum-wagers whose skill set seems to extend no further than blipping barcodes. And Blockbuster isn't even a British company.

As for our wood-clad future, wood is a sustainable and biodegradable material, which is more than can be said for plastic. I've got a couple of lovely Roberts Radios from the 1970s/1980s (made in England with the Royal Warrant). They have wonderful wooden cases, they sound superb and they're still going strong after decades of faithful service. Sadly the company is now owned by the Irish and knocks out plastic trinkets in the far east, but the tradition of craftsmanship lives on in the memory if nothing else.

It's time to reclaim these great British businesses and industries and turn the flood of foreign imports back at the border. We can manage quite well on our own, thank you, as long as the schools go back to focus on real education for a strong and diverse economy.

 

[untethered]

One whole week!

I suspect that anything longer than that would have brought diminishing returns. It was more than enough to get the size of the place and its inmates.

 

[_angel_]

Britain used to be the workshop of the world. Now it's the contract cleaning agency of the world, and most of the cleaners are foreign (legal or otherwise).

Britain used to be a place where people made things. They had real, practical skills. We were able to resist foreign tyranny because we weren't totally dependent on other countries to supply us.

Back where I used to live there was this wonderful electronics shop. You could get just about anything in there. If you wanted to go in for a single resistor, you could get it. The staff were extremely knowledgeable and would happily look at your circuit diagram and suggest alternative components or design approaches.

What's there now? A Blockbuster video packed to the roof with American imports and staffed by minimum-wagers whose skill set seems to extend no further than blipping barcodes. And Blockbuster isn't even a British company.

As for our wood-clad future, wood is a sustainable and biodegradable material, which is more than can be said for plastic. I've got a couple of lovely Roberts Radios from the 1970s/1980s (made in England with the Royal Warrant). They have wonderful wooden cases, they sound superb and they're still going strong after decades of faithful service. Sadly the company is now owned by the Irish and knocks out plastic trinkets in the far east, but the tradition of craftsmanship lives on in the memory if nothing else.

It's time to reclaim these great British businesses and industries and turn the flood of foreign imports back at the border. We can manage quite well on our own, thank you, as long as the schools go back to focus on real education for a strong and diverse economy.

This isn't really anything to do with schools but cheap imports and the rise of throwaway electronics though??

 

[Maurice Picarda]

This isn't really anything to do with schools but cheap imports and the rise of throwaway electronics though??

Yes, I was in the middle of drafting a long response about how globalisation has saved Britain from its c20th decline, and how we should get on our knees and give thanks to the serendipitous time zone that makes Britain the optimum place for global industries to site their knowledge workforce. Then I too realised that it had fuck all to do with grammar schools.

 

[_angel_]

I suspect that anything longer than that would have brought diminishing returns. It was more than enough to get the size of the place and its inmates.

Treating one type of school as less worthy than another results in the sort of situation you describe. That still happens sadly even within the comprehensive systems. Some schools bag the money and the extra staff and the poorer ones get worse as a result.


Only by funding all schools to their needs, not as some kind of reward/ punishment system will that alter.

 

[tarannau]

Points and laughs at Untethered.

This is a wind up right.

British Leyland, Amstrad, Sinclair , Ferguson, Radio Rentals- let's bring em back. And let's hold up Roberts Radio - always conservative and rarely innovative - as a successful example of world class electronics manufacturer, not a slightly twee low volume manufacturer of high priced goods mostly available to the well off.

Bring back the gramophone! And wooden clad tv the size of a house, disguised as a clumsy sideboard for some reason.

We tried a buy British campaign for may years didn't we? Even the Brits couldn't be persuaded to buy their own inferior and overpriced products.

 

[Mr Retro]

Points and laughs at Untethered.

disguised as a clumsy sideboard for some reason.

 

[scifisam]

What is actually prevailing in most commentary on education these days is a concerntration on the top few, whether they are getting everything they want, whether other people are holding them back. There is also some mention of the very bottom, usually in relation to exclusions: but it's actuallyostly about the high-flyers. Probably this is because most people wh owrite or broadcast about it were high-flyers themselves and very few have any experience of not being, or, God forbid, of actually teaching anybody except the very top.

This means that the vast majority of people get left out of the picture - and if you say "there's too much concentration on the top few" then boy, do those top few (or rather, their parents) start screaming about it.

Now, having been a high-flyer myself, but one who went through a copmprehensive, I don't thing for one moment that comps hold back high-flyers. Why would they? What's the point? They're the keenest to learn and the easiest to teach. But what comprehensives do, which other schools will not, is provide a decent education for the vast majority, which in some instances will enable people to discover their talents later on.

Comprehensives aren't about jealousy, or trying to hold back the top set, or anything of that sort, and the idea that it is, gets on my nerves. It cripples educational deabte.

There's some focus on Gifted and Talented pupils, yep, but there's also an awful lot of focus on underachievers, BME pupils, pupils with SEN, different learning styles, etc. It really is not true that most commentary on education concentrates on the top few.

Of course comprehensives don't want to hold G&T students back, but occasionally they do. This is because, as you say, they're keen to learn and easy to teach, so don't demand as much of the teacher's time as those who are are borderline or those who have behavioural problems.

Lots of G&T pupils are left to coast, because they can get an A anyway, so they're not the school's top priority.

That's a problem, and it's one reason that there is some commentary about how to teach G&T students.

Note: I'm not screaming at you, I am disagreeing with you on a factual basis. Check through the last issues of the TES, for example, and the issues being discussed will not be dominated by G%T students.

It's amazing what people believe about how teaching takes place in comprehensives. There's a lot of people believing what they want to, which I suppose you can't do anything about, but there's a great deal of irony in debates about education being informed largely by ignorance.

I've noticed this too. But a post about there being a lot of streaming in schools doesn't display ignorance, except perhaps in confusing streaming with setting. There is a lot of setting in schools when it comes to maths and English (and occasionally other subjects). If you know about current comprehensive education, then you know that to be true.


Personally, while I wouldn't be in favour of bringing back grammar schools, I would be in favour of having a few schools for the extremely high achievers. Despite the existence of a policy for inclusion WRT kids with all sort of special needs, some special needs schools still exist for those kids whose needs are severe or specific enough that they won't benefit from being in a mainstream environment. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the super-bright - that's a special need too, after all.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Most comprehensives seem to be more concerned with politically-correct social engineering than providing young people with the skills they need to get on in the real world.

Really?
What kind of social-engineering projects do comprehensive schools undertake? What sort of results do they get? Who authorises these projects that are enacted (or so you claim) on pupils?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Britain used to be the workshop of the world. Now it's the contract cleaning agency of the world, and most of the cleaners are foreign (legal or otherwise).

When?
For about 50 years post-the Industrial Revolution, that's when, and from then on we were busy (rightly) shitting ourselves about America's manufacturing power

Britain used to be a place where people made things. They had real, practical skills. We were able to resist foreign tyranny because we weren't totally dependent on other countries to supply us.

It's not about whether you make things, it's about whether you make saleable things to a decent quality once you don't have the captive market of your "empire" to sell your goods to.

Back where I used to live there was this wonderful electronics shop. You could get just about anything in there. If you wanted to go in for a single resistor, you could get it. The staff were extremely knowledgeable and would happily look at your circuit diagram and suggest alternative components or design approaches.

What's there now? A Blockbuster video packed to the roof with American imports and staffed by minimum-wagers whose skill set seems to extend no further than blipping barcodes. And Blockbuster isn't even a British company.

Go into most branches of Maplin and the staff are equally knowledgeable. There's also the added bonus that Maplin are generally cheaper than independent stores because of their massive economies of scale.

As for our wood-clad future, wood is a sustainable and biodegradable material, which is more than can be said for plastic.

Tut tut.
That should read "...more than be said for some plastics", shouldn't it?

I've got a couple of lovely Roberts Radios from the 1970s/1980s (made in England with the Royal Warrant). They have wonderful wooden cases, they sound superb and they're still going strong after decades of faithful service. Sadly the company is now owned by the Irish and knocks out plastic trinkets in the far east, but the tradition of craftsmanship lives on in the memory if nothing else.

It's time to reclaim these great British businesses and industries and turn the flood of foreign imports back at the border. We can manage quite well on our own, thank you, as long as the schools go back to focus on real education for a strong and diverse economy.

I wish you luck in your attempt to convince the capitalists that their future doesn't lie in consumption culture, but in "Golden-Age" fantasies, import restrictions (and wouldn't that be fun for the balance of payments?) and daydreams about the education system being positioned to do anything other than produce whatever type of fodder capital wants.