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1120   23 December 2005  

Editorial opportunism

My web-editing has become opportunistic.  By that, I mean that I must seize every passing spare moment to bring you up-to-date.  It is Friday morning, 23 December, and a newsagent's misdelivery has brought us The Independent, instead of The Guardian.  I am bowled over by the quality of their three major "political" features this morning.  I was stimulated and "provoked" by every one of them.

Steve Richards writes a masterly analysis of the destruction which is being wreaked upon the Labour Party by Blair.  He does not quite have Andrew Rawnsley's flair and brilliance of language, but the judgments are more perceptive.

A professional history teacher from America, Felipe Fernandes-Armesto, writes a brilliant critique of school history, and in particular the UK National Curriculum in the subject.  As both Elizabeth and I are graduate historians, this article is already provoking debate within the household.

And Matthew Norman writes the best critique of Blair's Authoritarian Britain that I have seen for many a year.  Our collective loss of sensitivity to human rights, reinforced by a purblind Cabinet, is deeply distressing.

The delivery of a perceptive Indy has changed my day...

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1121  22 February 2005  

"Respect" means lowering the
School Leaving Age

Why are the social structures of teenage maturation weakening?  Because we do not show our children real respect. All innovation is experimental, and our society took a wrong turning some fifty years ago when we increased our reliance upon compulsion in the expansion of school education.  In Victorian times, using compulsion to age 10 caused no ripples: indeed, you could leave earlier, if you proved you could read and write.  Compulsion up to age 12 seemed OK too, as those landmarks came and went. 

But when it went to 15 (1944, I think, can anyone remind me?) and then 16 (I seem to remember RoSLA in the 1960s) we went too far.  And the Americans, in using compulsion to age 18, have gone far too far, with Police now patrolling schools and school playgrounds.

I say that school indiscipline is fuelled by the wrongful use of force against our children and their parents.  I suggest that disruptive behaviour comes principally from children who resent being at school in the first place, and being forced to attend.  Coercion breeds reprisal.  We have learnt that in our political lives, why not in school management?

I suggest that every child should be allowed to leave school at the end of the school-year in which his/her 14th birthday falls.  Teachers and parents should have to persuade children to stay on, not rely on the  criminal law to do it for them.  Discipline would be transformed, throughout all schools, and much Police and "truanting-officer time saved. Those staying on after that age should be paid attendance allowances, along the lines of those pioneered for Sixth Formers.  But that should be without means-testing: "middle class" children need independence from their parents, as much as everyone.  They should not be tied to their parents' professional purse-strings.

Secondary education should become voluntary.  Is that such a revolutionary idea?  We should respect our children, and stop using coercion against them, in a futile attempt to influence their behaviour.

What do you think?  Drop me a line

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