Blair's Vision For Schools...

I remember the day corporal punishment got banned...

I was a sixth former... and a prefect... I remember the lunchtime I was on duty... all the first years kept running past us shouting at us and taunting us to hit them as they knew we weren't allowed to touch them... little bastards, eh?...

Back to the uniform issue... I'm certain that this isn't being proposed out of consideration for children in poverty... more so that new Labour are harking back to a supposed golden age of education... grammar schools and secondary moderns... from this point of view, uniform becomes about social control and conformity...

And here we start to uncover some of the contradictions in New Labour's thinking...

They continually talk about excellence... wanting to create a culture of excellence... this is not possible in a culture of conformity... I'll give you an example... one of the worst things to do to a student is to make them stand up in an assembly and give them a reward... sets them up as a target from their peers... this is because the pressure to conform is huge... and they get it from two directions... from their peers and from their teachers...

I'm doing research on what is currently known as "Gifted and Talented"... this is related to the approx top 5% students... one of the most worrying isssues is that these students will often consciously play down their abilities in order to relieve the peer pressure upon them to be less clever or less talented... those who don't often become isolated from their peers... now, some take this as a call to reinstate grammar schools but I do not see that as any solution... are you telling me that bullying doesn't go on in those schools?... of course it does... just the reason for the bullying changes... we have to relieve the peer pressure by moving the focus away from conforming to the will of the masses... we need to celebrate excellence where we see it... and we need to help all students discover that they have skills and talents and abilities and celebrate them too... whether it is in Drama... or Maths... or Sport... or whatever...

I would rather see an abolition of uniform and create a real and modern culture of learning in our schools... we need to look forward rather than backwards...

Fly...

ps... always on the arse mate!!!
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Oh I agree entirely. Still convinced that some form of uniform is a good idea, but probably not for the same reasons as Labour. As you say though, this is part of the problem. The romanticising of a perceived 'golden age', when milk and honey flowed through the streets... yadda yadda yadda.

I found that the 'academic excellence' of grammar schools is just a pretty shop window that masks the elitism and snobbery that underlies much of their structure. For instance, I never did particularly well academically, despite being (so I'm told) very intelligent, and consistently scoring very highly in objective tests. But I could never summon up much interest in memorising facts to regurgitate in exams (which never seemed to encourage much free thinking). I was also held back by my confrontational attitude. My school reports were littered with comments such as "would do well if he could learn to have some respect for authority". Of course, I now look back on such reports with a glowing sense of pride

But this is, of course, part of the problem. Schools don't exist primarily to educate. They exist in order to churn out well-disciplined little cogs in the corporate machine. Grammar schools go one step further, and also exist to validate an elitist concept of our values as a society. I think this is a part of our struggle as a nation to find a post-imperialist identity.