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28 10 2008

A Guide To Scenes From The Battleground.

Posted by: oldandrew in Guides To The Blog, tags: ,

As usual I have updated this guide for the holidays.

This blog is about the state of secondary education. There is an introduction to it here:

There is a discipline crisis and a lowering of standards both academic and professional. The following posts sum up what is typical in schools these days:

    As well as the advice for teachers included in many of the other posts, I have written advice specifically for new teachers:

    These deal more directly with my own personal experiences, or the experience of people I know:

      I have also written a number of posts exploring and explaining how this situation came to be, discussing the arguments in education and suggesting what can be done.

        I have also outlined what I would expect from schools willing to do put things right:

        Finally, there are a few posts I wrote purely for a laugh (although some of them perhaps make a point at the same time):

          Also to be found on this blog is The Battleground Forum where you can start a discussion on a topic of your choice, or introduce yourself to the readers of this blog.

          Can I also remind you that you can vote to say what you think of this blog by following one of the following links to: BlogHop.com!

          ‘the best’ ‘pretty good’ ‘okay’ ‘pretty bad’ ‘the worst’

          Also if you want your name and face to appear in the “recent readers” column then you can go to Blog Catalog and register for an account there (and rate my blog while you are at it). Alternatively, there is now a “community” for this blog at MyBloglog. You will need a yahoo ID to log in but once you do you that this should enable you to appear in the other “recent readers” box in this blog’s sidebar.

          Finally, I can now be found on Facebook. Please “friend” me.

          This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Guides To The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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          8 Responses to “A Guide To Scenes From The Battleground.”

          1.   Granny Smythe Says:
            July 20th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

            I thought I’d read all of the posts and then I found The Kennedy Assassination. So funny, so true.

            Thank you for this blog, it must take a lot of time and effort but it really does keep my hopes up to know that there are some sane and decent people left in education.

          2.   oldandrew Says:
            July 20th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

            Thank you very much.

          3.   Snuffy Says:
            July 21st, 2008 at 9:58 am

            Granny is right. Great stuff. And HAPPY HOLIDAYS!! Isn’t it wonderful? Of course I’m about to go into school… but I’m so relieved I have time to get the work done!

          4.   A Guide To Scenes From The Battleground. | Schools online Says:
            October 28th, 2008 at 8:16 pm

            [...] I Call It Hell The Naughty Boy The Disruptive Girl How To Find Out If Your Teacher Is Gay Unsol Source Art and graphic design schools - [...]

          5.   Granny Smythe Says:
            October 29th, 2008 at 1:24 am

            After the libertarian campaign to send a copy of 1984 to every M.P. with a message ‘this is a warning, not a template’, how about a similar campaign to send a copy of Frank Chalk’s book to every M.P.?

          6.   oldandrew Says:
            October 29th, 2008 at 2:16 am

            At the risk of ignoring the main point of your comment, the misinterpretation of 1984 as some kind of parable about creeping authoritarianism is something that really winds me up.

            The book is inspired by Stalinism and Nazism, neither of which came about because mainstream parties gradually eroded civil liberties, but because of explicitly totalitarian parties, with their own armed groups, taking over the state due to the weakness (not the authoritarianism) of the established regimes. Both are cases where a bit more repression and a few less civil liberties could have nipped the problem in the bud.

            With regard to the point about politicians, MPs are not going to be able to change this. It would take an education secretary with the utmost determination many years to make a difference. No amount of lobbying by backbenchers will make a blind bit of difference.

          7.   Granny Smythe Says:
            October 29th, 2008 at 2:30 am

            1982 is my favourite book of all time. It doesn’t say how the circumstances came about but Hitler does say in his book (Mein kampt) that the way to control people is a slice at a time, if they saw the final goal they would be horrified. The Nazi’s didn’t do it all as soon as they achieved power, they did it bit by bit.

          8.   oldandrew Says:
            October 29th, 2008 at 3:00 am

            It depends what you mean by “do it all”, but the Nazis most certainly didn’t discretely erode civil liberties while pretending to maintain democracy. They were always explicitly anti-democratic and in favour of overthrowing the constitution. The myth that totalitarianism results from subtle changes in civil liberties over time by apparently democratic governing parties is precisely that: a myth.