On 10/10/2010 20:58, Bruce wrote:
wrote:
On 10/10/2010 19:41, Bruce wrote:
wrote:

We'll be getting the "well, you know what I mean" response when it is
pointed out that, by virtue of their illiteracy, someone has written
utter scribble. When I used to lecture on English contract law I was
forever telling the gormless scrotes - all of whom had "achieved" A*
GCSE English, of course - that what they'd written meant something
completely different to what they thought it meant. This, in contractual
terms could have meant an utter disaster. Yet, throughout their
schooling years punctuation and grammar had been totally ignored,
perhaps because the students had been taught by illiterates.

Still, given that now, it seems, the educational norm is to be
illiterate - and innumerate, which is part of the same problem - I
suppose we'll have to accept the NUT has achieved a measure of social
equality in dumbing everybody down.


My thoughts, exactly.

I don't know which is worse - people who do not care how wrong they
are, or people who do not know. In either case, the teaching
"profession"* has an awful lot to answer for.


[* Never was the word 'profession' so inappropriately applied.]


Strange that you should say that, as I hesitated over whether or not to
use the word "profession", relating to teaching, in an earlier posting.


As if we needed to be reminded of the very low quality of the average
"trained" teacher, a recent proposal that only people with a 2:2
honours degree (or higher grade) would be accepted for teacher
training was shouted down on the basis that hardly anyone with a
maths- or science-related qualification would then apply.

None of my secondary maths or science teachers had a degree that was
lower than a 2:1. About half had Firsts. And that was in the days
when achieving a 2:1 required a far higher standard than now, and a
First was very rare indeed.

Today, a First is very common indeed, 2:1 is the norm and 2:2 degrees
are handed out like confetti. Yet it is a widely-held belief that
there would be a shortage of maths and science graduates applying for
teacher training, presumably because so very few applying today have
reached the 2:2 standard.

This is a result of 13 years of Labour's dumbing down, contrary to
Tony Blair's oft-repeated mantra that "Education, Education,
Education" was his No.1 priority.



Unfortunately it pre-dates those lost 13 years. My secondary education
was from the mid-1950s, when "reading ritin' and riffmatic" were crucial
to one's progress. It DID matter in those far off days.

Ah well, it's the price of progress. As long as we dumb down the
brightest of our children in the interests of equality, we'll have
nothing to worry about, will we?

LCD rules, OK!

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Moving things in still pictures