I read of a study recently which pretty much concluded the obvious: Thick children are thick and no matter what you do with them, they will still be thick.
Put kids in an environment that allows them to flourish and go at the maximum rate they can learn at. That means differentiating them, and that absolutely is not a bad thing.
What we need is for education to stop being about schools hitting targets and "improving" and instead have them about maximising every child's abilities, whatever the outcome might be.
We're fine sending our children to a different hospital if they have a condition that is better treated elsewhere but not to a different school if they have an educational need better suited by a different school. Madness!
correct, those of lower ability can get of their depth and become disillusioned and the higher ability ones do not get pushed and are dragged down by disruptive kids that are struggling
If you think assessing a child's academic ability at eleven is a reliable guide to determining whether or not they are "thick", then you're an idiot.
I'm not sure you understand what "absolutely" means. You're claiming there are no qualifiers to your statement. Differentiating children IS a bad thing when it means that you're closing off the possibility for children to change how they are treated. A grammar school is a decision to radically affect a child's future and opportunities based on a rudimentary judgement of them at the age of eleven. How that is "a bad thing" should be fairly clear.
This much I agree with, but again the issue in your following paragraph is that you start placing children on a track at far too early an age:
Placing children on a particular track (focus on maths, focus on language, focus on art) should be done at a much later stage and on the basis of what they themselves choose to focus on. That is what university is for. Secondary school is about a broad base of general education. Well that and conditioning people to accept a nine to five work day and obedience. It's not the time for deciding that a child will be put into some particular track. Flexibility has to be preserved with the educational system is to be productive and efficient. Railroading children, who are the ultimate in round pegs, is neither efficient as a society nor doing right by the children. There's a principle in software development which is that premature optimization is a bad thing. The same principle applies well to the school system and the sorts of things you're talking about.
Surely to solve the issue of 'selection by house price' it would make more sense to raise the standards of all schools, rather than (re)introduce an alternative method of selection.
Academic excellence (or not) is usually clear to see by the end of KS2. Given that all the latest evidence shows that intelligence is almost entirely genetic, we should be able to clearly differentiate at relatively early stages.
The judgement is not rudimentary.
If you had understood my post properly you would have seen that children shouldn't be treated differently other than tailoring the education to things they have an aptitude in. Their natural aptitudes are unlikely to change through time, although some things nobody has an aptitude for and they must choose to do it and the system must allow for that.
I don't think we'll ever agree but, for example, I do think a system where the naturally gifted mathematicians are segregated and educated in a way that maximises their learning WILL produce world-leading mathematicians. That doesn't mean not producing a baseline level of knowledge in everything else, it just means they are placed with the maths teachers who are best at teaching gifted children and taught at a pace that suits them. They might totally suck at English and are therefore placed in a class with a teacher good at teaching those who are poor at English and at a pace which suits them.
Can't you see how a system like that would maximise the abilities of the child in each area, without removing their individuality?
Waiting until University to specialise is too late. University is too late to be deciding IMO, and the push to get more and more people into Uni is the reason why our Universities are offering more and more "joke" degrees. We wouldn't need people who are degree-level educated in Golf Course Management if our secondary schools could identify people who were fantastic at gardening/landscaping and got them into more appropriate vocational learning early on.
There are proponents of the ideology that too good an education for the working class man is not beneficial to a country's productivity.... I suspect few here will embrace that though![]()
Ah, the brain disease that is "the endless money tree" approach that Labour and their supporters seem to suffer from?
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron is to stand down as an MP, triggering a by-election in his Oxfordshire seat of Witney.
Mr Cameron, who resigned as prime minister after June's EU referendum, said he did not want to be a "distraction" for new PM Theresa May. The 49-year-old said his replacement had "got off to a cracking start".
Mr Cameron, who has represented Witney since 2001, became Conservative leader in 2005 and PM in 2010.
Speaking in his constituency, he said it had been a "great honour" to be an MP for the area, but said it would be difficult for him to remain on the backbenches without becoming "a big distraction and a big diversion" from the work of the new government.
He denied his announcement was related to the government's moves towards allowing new grammar schools, a policy he rejected as PM.
He said the timing - which came after a period of reflection over the summer - was coincidental, adding that there were "many good things" in the proposed education reforms.
Popular ex-PM David Cameron is resigning from Parliament
I find it odd how the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Dianne Abbott are vociferously against them but they are both products of grammar school.
Why's that odd? Someone can be the beneficiary of an unfair system and still recognise it as unfair.
And yet they still send their children to them. Blatant hypocrisy.