11.06.08, Educational Chaos and caveats

Educational Chaos.
I expect like me everyone who reads this will fail to understand, first of all how they can have 600 schools that are in risk of closure, how they arrived at that situation, and what are they going to do with the children when they close them, also where are they going to find teachers of the right quality? Say each school has 500 children, that means that a third of a million children will be affected, .worse, if you take the population of each age group as being 0.7 million, and that there are seven age groups involved, say 5 million, of which two thirds are going to secondary school, or 3.3 million, then those affected represent roughly 10% – even as a rough calculation it is mind-boggling. Soph, who was a secondary school teacher, teaching to A level has said for a long time that the standards required to get into university and to graduate are too low, with the result that those who reach that level are not all confident and competent to finish the course, and that a high percentage of those that do are inadequate. When I was at university in the 50s in a class of 40, there were only two dropouts, one through serious illness. If her comments are accurate then some of the teachers are below par. Teaching requires dedication, a sensitivity to the reaction of the children, and the strength of character to obtain respect and that can control 30 unruly kids with a glance or a word, and doesn’t need to resort to a harsher punishment. It is not just yet another job!

Is this another government knee-jerk reaction, because inefficiency has allowed this condition to arise unnoticed? I’m sure it didn’t happen overnight, It is acting precipitately instead of with long and serious thought to the way in which standards can be improved without the children involved being disadvantaged.

Caveats.
I read somewhere that with the advent of the Internet instead of the passage of paper being reduced, as one would expect, it has increased immeasurably. Recently I have made a couple of purchases not on the Internet because almost all my purchases there have been a disaster, and I have lost money. These purchases were across the counter. In the old days, you walked into a shop, you trusted the man behind the counter, you expected the article that you purchased to last you a lifetime and it usually did, you paid, received a receipt and went home with the article. Today, the chances are that when you go into the shop they will only have a demonstration model, because warehousing costs money, and so you have to order, and then the paper-chase really starts, if you are fool enough to admit to having an e-mail address, not only do you get paper coming through the letterbox telling you about the delivery, the contract you’ve got, and an invoice, even though you walked out of the shop with a receipt that formed the guarantee, the whole thing is repeated on the Internet so, just to be on the safe side, you print that up so that you can read it at your leisure in case of some caveat that you object to. In some cases you even get telephone calls to see you if you’re happy with the product, generally at teatime. All I want to know is why the word of the man at the counter is not adequate, and if the product when it is delivered is not up to scratch, a phone call will get you a prepaid label and you can return it either to the shop or from whence it came. I strongly suspect, like the use-by dates on the packets of food, all this paper is to avoid being sued whether rightly or wrongfully.

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Categorized as General

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