General Chat

Michael Gove and his cheer leaders the Mail and Telegraph report that easy (?) subjects such as law and drama are to be scrapped.

The Telegraph also has this:
"School bus crashes into house in Texas
A school bus carrying 25 children has crashed into a home at a Texas military base after its breaks apparently failed. "

So don't worry about yr progeny's chances on the broadsheet GCSE in English or not.
:-(

Not only do I not trust Michael Gove to boil an egg without burning it, I do not trust him with our education system.

I gave up a long time ago on trying to understand what has happened to the education system in this country.

At the end of the day I formed the view that from the mid 1960's, successive governments of all persuasions have, in their goal to make a university education the be all and end all for every child, have played about with this part of the curriculum and played about with that part of the curriculum, for all age groups, to the detriment of ensuring every child received a good sound basic education.

To my mind, what matters to governments these days, is not that that every child receives a good sound basic education, what matters to governments is league tables and the number of individuals who gain a place at university.

I am thankful that I was educated between 1948 & 1960 and received a sound basic education in a state primary school and a state secondary school, an education that has served me well over my life.

I think that a sound basic education should include spelling especially in Tory supporting broadsheets. How difficult is it to hit the spell/grammar check button? How moronic does a journalist have to be not to understand the warnings?

The problem with the greater part of state education is that the targets are set so low. Brighter children get bored and are often branded as difficult and troublemakers.

It should not be the case that graduates in information technology from some universities have problems with pretty basic maths. They should also be able to draft a report in correct English but are mostly unable to do so. .

Unfortunately it is all too true. And so it goes on all the way back up the line to the primary schools.

If more people were numerate then the recent mortgage based financial crash would never have happened. Poorly informed owners of small and medium businesses would not have taken out loans supported by interest rate swaps. Black & Scholes would have been cast into acedemic anonymity instead of receiving the Nobel prize.

As it is the Greeks got all the blame as usual ( pun intended ).

Indelible ink & poor spelling are a dangerous combination in any language.

Sure and especially in German.

The Ninety-Five Theses 1517 ( Martin Luther )
The Communist Manifesto 1848 (Karl Marx)
Mein Kampf 1925 ( Alois Schicklgruber )

They all had good sub editors ;-)

I was educated in Scotland, their were three grades of state school, primary, secondary, and high school.

In primary school we were taught reading, writing, spelling, and basic arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages, and simple logarithms, nothing more and nothing less.

At age around 11 we sat a test, that test decided whether you went to secondary school or high school, however if you only managed to go to secondary school, the opportunity to go to high school presented itself again at age 15, this depended on how many Ordinary Grades and Higher Grades you got after sitting your Scottish Certificate of Education (SCE) exams.

Maybe I was fortunate in the schools I went to, as I do not recall any of my peers being dunces, all went on to find a good job and build a decent life for themselves & their families, and that includes myself :-)

How odd to consider dropping law.

The more you understand law, the less vulnerable you are.

It always amazes me how many small business men have little or no understanding of the law of contract even when they may be dealing with contracts worth many thousands of pounds.

I did a course in Scots Law at polytechnic as part of a diploma in business administration, one of the most interesting subjects I took and proved to be one of the most useful when I progressed into management, I agree that it would be stupid to drop it from the curriculum :-S