Balls
Ed Balls' ideas for yet another rehash of secondary education are depressing. He thinks it should concentrate on the 3 Rs. Sorry, I thought that was the function of primary education? He's still keen on the classics. That's a relief, drumming some Latin into young brains may improve grammar. Oh no - he doesn't mean Classics, he means traditional English literature. He wants to include "personal finance" as a subject, by which he means telling students how to open a bank account. Hello? That takes maximum 30 minutes to explain...He also wants to include cookery, Urdu and Mandarin as mainstream options. I expect those languages will be replacing French and German soon, to the delight of the EU. If they're staying on at school until 18 pupils may be able to learn a few Mandarin characters. Just how much more employable that will make them remains to be seen.
posted by Whispering Walls at 8:53 am
4 Comments:
The reason the French system is so good is that there have been no changes apart from a few minor ones for years and years. The system is though but at least there is no dumbing down.
"Sumimasen, ari wa Shinkansen desu ka?"
Look, don't blame me; Japanese was the language of the future when I did my A-Levels.....
I agree with eurodog. As a modern languages teacher, I can remember all this "Let's teach ethnic community languages" being mooted before and at one point I could see some sense in it. Now, however, it would be very difficult to justify which ones and it could cause riots. Sadly, modern foreign languages attract little support in British schools. All governments go on about the necessity of learning them but will not fund the resources needed. I spent most of my teaching life trying to make French, German, Spanish, Italian non-elitist subjects but fear they will meet the fate of Latin and Greek in state schools.
Winchester - you are starting to sound alarmingly like that 'old fart' Libby Purves whose paean to middle aged mediocrity in the Times in the past few days reminded me of the banality of M&S pre-Stuart Rose.
I thought you were meant to be a hip, happening Winchester babe - so start 'raging against the dying of the light' a bit more..
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