Today's news is full of stories about Michael Gove, the Education Secreatry, warning tachers not to take part in the planned public sector strikes next Thursday. He apparently thinks that striking will cause the public to lose respect for them.
What world does Herr Gove inhabit ? When I was a child, teachers actually cared about their students; they saw their occupation as a vocation and worked for decades in the same place, happy in the knowledge that they were imparting genuine education to their charges.
Today, far too many teachers are motivated not by vocation but either by money or by the old adage 'those that can, do, those that can't teach'. They are also hideously handicapped by an imposed curriculum that gives far more credence to nonsensical rubbish such as 'citizenship' and 'PSE' than it does to proper subjects. They teach 'Equality and diversity' rather than Physics and Chemistry but, of course, the latter is far easier as it's really just a matter of sociological claptrap; Physics and Chemistry require the teacher to have some genuine education of their own.
If I was Gove, I'd be jumping for joy that the teachers were going to strike, and just a bit sorry that they hadn't chosen a more helpful time of the year. As itr is, a little friend of mine has already told me that next week she's on 'work experience' (at 15) and the following 2 weeks she's trying out the next year's timetable. Why it should be necessary to 'try out' a timetable for 2 weeks is beyond me - we never did when I was at school and I don't recall ever landing up in second year French when I should have been in third year English. This seems to me like teachers creating reasons for not actually doing their jobs. Whatever, my young friend will suffer not a jot by the intended strike and may well benefit, as she'll quite probably end up in the company of adults who'll teach her far more than any school ma'am is capable of.
Gove is an idiot. He always has been, hide bound as he is by political doctrine and motivation. He has no real ideas about education, any more than have dozens of other Education Secreataries over the years; the only one I have any respect for is Estelle Morris, but only because she recognized her shortcomings and resigned, something previously unheard of amongst the political fraternity. The rest have been a joke, successively trying to please all points of view and utterly destroying our schools and university system in the process. We now have the least well educated people in the developed world thanks to decades of government meddling, cant and target setting, all supported, I might add, by the teaching unions.
Cameron talks of a 'broken society'; he supports all manner of left wing policies aimed at 'helping' families' and young people. Doesn't this moron understand that 'he does best who helps himself' ? What is needed is an education system that recognizes the different abilities of children and allows them to develop in their own way, with proper support, not a system that insists on everyone achieving certain numbers of and grades in specific exams, and then trotting off to 'Uni' to do useless degrees in colleges that used to be the local Technical Colleges awarding HND's and the like.
Let the teachers go on strike, they will only hurt themselves. Then sack the lot and start again.
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