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Jun. 18th, 2009 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnny9fingersAs Ashes season is upon us I want to write about the notion of excellence. Our cricketers in general come from those schools which still maintain cricket facilities, or after-school youth clubs which serve in the place of what used to be a normal part of the secondary school curriculum: the summer game.
Now, just as it seems that any typeof elitism is regarded as bad form, excepting of course in sport; it also appears that the worship of the average doesn't deliver winners.
If you take a young person with talent for cricket, or football, and encourage them to develop those talents in a disciplined environment, they are more likely to fulfil that potential. Which is why the cricketing authoritites set up centres of excellence, and why the football authorities did likewise. Such enabled the UK to compete with those countries which had already-established academies; like Australia, and France.
Simple, really, when you think about it.
A good job we value our sporting competitiveness rather more than the intellectual development of our people: else we should have schools of academic excellence as a normal part of the state system, rather than the exceptions. And let's face it: why do we really need ordinary working-class young folk put into centres of true academic excellence? They'd only try to rise above their station. Instead, lets make sure that the requirements to get into university are brought within reach of the ordinary people, rather than fitting ordinary people to fill a place of genuine academic quality. Oops, we're doing that anyway. Good job we'll never meet any of the more sensible nations on the field of thinking....or if we are represented, it will be by students of our private schools, or the Scots, who still maintain an academic secondary system.
The folk that acquiesced to the dissolution of the Grammar Schools (mainly Labour Politicians to begin with, followed by the bulk of the left-of-centre population) have faced this moral dilemma by sending their children to the local Comprehensive Schools, and 'topping up' with after-school tuition, which, although paid for privately, doesn't somehow count as private education. I wonder at our capacity for self-delusion. The difference between ordinary students, and those that have had 'extra' tuition in, let us say, Maths, is noticeable to teaching staff, and makes a difference in final exam marks too, apparently.
Humbug.
Give 'em all a proper education, even if we have to pay for it in taxes. Also teach 'em how to bat and bowl when their brains can't cope with any more of the ablative absolute. (It always did for me.)
Now, just as it seems that any typeof elitism is regarded as bad form, excepting of course in sport; it also appears that the worship of the average doesn't deliver winners.
If you take a young person with talent for cricket, or football, and encourage them to develop those talents in a disciplined environment, they are more likely to fulfil that potential. Which is why the cricketing authoritites set up centres of excellence, and why the football authorities did likewise. Such enabled the UK to compete with those countries which had already-established academies; like Australia, and France.
Simple, really, when you think about it.
A good job we value our sporting competitiveness rather more than the intellectual development of our people: else we should have schools of academic excellence as a normal part of the state system, rather than the exceptions. And let's face it: why do we really need ordinary working-class young folk put into centres of true academic excellence? They'd only try to rise above their station. Instead, lets make sure that the requirements to get into university are brought within reach of the ordinary people, rather than fitting ordinary people to fill a place of genuine academic quality. Oops, we're doing that anyway. Good job we'll never meet any of the more sensible nations on the field of thinking....or if we are represented, it will be by students of our private schools, or the Scots, who still maintain an academic secondary system.
The folk that acquiesced to the dissolution of the Grammar Schools (mainly Labour Politicians to begin with, followed by the bulk of the left-of-centre population) have faced this moral dilemma by sending their children to the local Comprehensive Schools, and 'topping up' with after-school tuition, which, although paid for privately, doesn't somehow count as private education. I wonder at our capacity for self-delusion. The difference between ordinary students, and those that have had 'extra' tuition in, let us say, Maths, is noticeable to teaching staff, and makes a difference in final exam marks too, apparently.
Humbug.
Give 'em all a proper education, even if we have to pay for it in taxes. Also teach 'em how to bat and bowl when their brains can't cope with any more of the ablative absolute. (It always did for me.)
