I agree that the current education system does not work for some young people and it is unfair to expect them to get a C grade in maths, english and science as par for the course. (Depending on the kid in question) I think it would be a great help to get the kids who struggle with academic learning onto DECENT apprenticeships (just ask Sir Allan!) where they can learn the skills of a trade, earn a living and where the ability to read, write and do maths is essential for the job (no mechanic wants to get ripped off or fail to pay their bills).

I’m not saying that the system is fucked because kids are lazy, but I would say that if a class full of kids like their teacher and want to have more oportunities in life, then it is down to the kids to wise up and accept the help that is being offered.

If “every one agreed that he was the best teacher we had … half the time half the class were interested in something else other than what was being taught”, maybe they should start taking reponsibility for their own future and not expect their faveourite teacher to take responsibility for their future/education.

Every relationship is two-way. :group_hug

I can only agree.

Our greed for £s as a measure of success has a lot to answer for.

“nurturer to the unexperianced in life? “

True enough – some teachers could do with reminding that they are the “responsible adult” in a classroom, but that does not mean that the kids can dismiss all responsibility for their behaviour.

respect mr. tek, you seem a right-on fella and an ideal teacher. mutual respect and mutual learning is what its about, not a system of “i have the knowledge and you need to work for access to that knowledge”

im not a fan of the formal education system though. i think its too rigid and one size does not fit all. i do a lot of work with informal education which works on entirely different principles and in my opinion is more focused on the needs and choices of the individual

it’s empowering and facilitating young people to make their own decisions regarding their education and social development, not setting a curriculum and dictating this.

the eventual achievment is also different – whereas in formal education a rigid pass or fail is acheived, the achievement of informal education is in the personal development and personal learning, therefore there is no fixed system, it is based on each individual

Cheers Boothy – but I WAS an ideal teacher. I reckon you have a lot to offer the profession too y’know 😉

“Unless we get told stuff we are merely animals” – WTF! In the words of Gordon Ramsey… “Grow some fucking cojones!”

It’s YOUR life so YOU better take responsibility for it.

I repectfully have to disagree with you there buddy – a school is a place of education. Education is a gift that is given away for free in this country (and believe me when I say that is a blessing that most third-world kids would give their right arm for). Unfortunately (possibly because of their own experiences in school) a lot of parents don’t value the education system and so don’t encourage their kids to get the most out of it. This leaves their kids feeling like they are forced into doing something which should be seen as a gift rather than a punishment. In addition to this, they can sometimes expect schools to act as a free childcare service and expect the teachers to take responsibility for their children’s welfare/future/manners/behaviour/income/career prospects/etc. This really annoys me because it means that teachers are expected to educate the yout’ on everything from tying their shoe laces to advice on sex or drugs education to manners and taking responsibility for themselves. It is not the school’s responsibility to bring up children, it is their responsibility to educate them, nothing more and nothing less. If responsibility is going to be handed over to the kids at any point, it is the parents who should be doing it, not their teachers. I agree that better education at a younger age would make a massive difference, but I think the responsibility for bringing up kids should stay with the parents. All schools should do is educate, not rear the kids that attend them.

Mrs Mac’s elementary lesson

The success of one clear-thinking headmistress demonstrates the dangers of hothouse education

Oliver James

WHEN EXAM results, rather than class or family contacts or old school ties, became the main method for selecting who gets the best jobs, our leading public schools had to change the way they taught.

Their answer was academic force-feeding — a response now also adopted by leading state schools. In 1972, for instance, fewer than half of Etonians achieved a B at A level. Today, the average Etonian leaves with three A grades.

But this academic force-feeding, this obsession with exam results, is counterproductive. Last week a study in Science journal demonstrated that primary school children educated using the progressive Montessori method do better, socially as well as academically, than ones subjected to the ubiquitous battery farming.

Even if one puts to one side the much chronicled harm that “hothousing” does to children’s mental health, a large body of scientific evidence proves that neither exam factories nor pushy parenting are the best motivators. Some 128 different studies show that encouraging people to prize-hunt — that is, to chase results and rewards — drastically reduces their interest in tasks and the way they do them. In one example, students were given three-dimensional cubes to play with; half were paid to do it, the other half were not.

The paid ones lost interest sooner and were more likely to stop and read magazines that had been left lying about. Money — for which you can read exams or being top of the class — changed the focus. The unpaid volunteers said they played with the cube because it was fun or because they chose to; for the paid students the interesting, enjoyable, challenging aspect of the activity got lost.
Anne McDermott, the headmistress of Kitebrook House, a preparatory school near Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, has not heard of this evidence, but for 50 years she has been putting it into practice.

“I seldom think specifically about exams,” she tells me, and yet for five decades nearly all her girls have been passing into the top girls’ public schools. Her belief that “children need to feel secure to learn, if they feel anxious they can’t function properly” and that “it is their playfulness, love of challenge and hunger for new information that must be nurtured if you want success” is borne out by hundreds of studies.

Unless they have particularly pushy parents, until they go to school, children are blissfully unaware of their performance relative to peers. If you ask them if they are good at reading they will say things like: “I am the bestest reader in the world.” However, in most of the developed world, at around the ages of 7 to 9 they become acutely aware of where they stand in the pecking order. Then their confidence plummets, they become cautious in their mental habits and they are increasingly liable to dislike going to school.

These deficits are not universal. In nations where learning is child- centred, such as the Scandinavian ones, children throughout their time at school look forward to it and suffer no decline in self-confidence. In Denmark, there is minimal examination and tremendous efforts are made to encourage the children to find subjects that interest them — the Mrs McDermott method.

Because of this system the Danish economy is nearly always in the world’s top ten performers. According to Professor Alison Wolf, of the London Institute of Education, there is no connection in developed nations between spending on education and economic productivity or growth. Entrepreneurs are critical and many of the most successful left school before A levels.

Our academic system does not create Richard Bransons (left school with six O levels) or Michelle Dewberrys (winner of The Apprentice, two GCSEs), it does its best to squash them.
The idea that you should use education to create good little consumer-producers — which seems to have been new Labour’s main goal — runs flat against what will be needed for future economic success. As Margaret Thatcher was at pains to point out, enthusiastic, individualistic originators add far more value to an economy than the merely skilled.

When children are crammed, they become disengaged from learning and develop a robotic “going through the motions” mentality. While some may still achieve good results, they feel little pleasure at doing so. But it’s not only schools that are getting it wrong.Parents who make their love conditional upon performance create children who are passive, angry and looking outwards for definition.

Such children have downloaded parental dictates, like computers. But human beings possess volition and require the motivation of intrinsic interest, not instructional software.

Children who have actively and willingly adopted parental wishes, making them their own, perform much better. This absorption happens only if the parents have shown that their child’s best is good enough and that they love him or her whatever the results: children are much more likely to follow parental wishes out of love than fear.

Schools and parents who make humiliating comparison with peers’ performance are liable to create empty enactors of the meaningless. Their children will merely download their Latin and maths, and like the hypnotised, emptily regurgitate what has been ordained by someone else.
Many children leave school feeling like a failure and that is especially true of the highest achievers from privileged homes — 38 per cent of 15-year-old girls from the top social class suffer from a mental illness (depression, anxiety, eating disorders), far more than girls from the bottom one.

The reason is simple. Neither their parents nor their schools realise what Mrs McDermott has known for 50 years: that the lasting foundations of high achievement are security, joyousness and creativity, not fear and robotics. Education should set children’s minds free, not incarcerate them.

Oliver James is the author of They F*** You Up — How to Survive Family Life