A Defence of Grammars

"Against the conventional wisdom, we find little evidence that gaining entry into a grammar school has a positive impact“, the Telegraph, 23 May 2018.

      This leads us to an important conclusion: gaining entry into a grammar school in the UK may actually not be as important as many assume. But one thing this article has managed to avoid saying in its negative assessment of Grammar Schools is the utter failure of the system brought in to replace them, the "Comprehensive System". The comprehensive system has failed and it is, quite frankly, a national disgrace.

     It seems to me that if children are failing it is because the Government have experimented by introducing other kinds of education ie Academies; Comprehensives; Secondary Modern; Religion based schools and not concentrated enough on bringing the quality of education in these State schools up to the same level. It is the State schools that are failing children, because of degraded methods of teaching, not all, but most of them, not the Grammar or High schools.

     At the bottom this is not the fault of comprehensive schools or the comprehensive system itself. It is a direct consequence of academic capitalism and marketisation, which has brought about the replacing of developing deep learning through teaching all pupils in a cognitively challenging way by behaviourist cramming.

     There are few experienced teachers that deny this.

Dealing with Swearing and Bad Language in Class

Swearing and inappropriate language in schools, even in primary classes, is on the rise. 
     As a child, I don't remember hearing a swear word until I entered school. When I was in the Army COs swore like 'bloody troopers', and their wives had very obvious substitutes for swearing. But this time the decadence would be of a more explicitly sexual variety!
       Smolensk these days and the lives of the children I teach are full of foul language. It's in the halls, classrooms, you name it. It's part of their normal vocabulary. I was discussing with colleagues the possible reasons for this. When television shows programmes containing words we would not accept in our classrooms, how can we argue? 
      Essentially, the purpose of school is to teach children how to be functioning human beings at least, both in the workplace and in their personal lives. Therefore not allowing children to swear in class is essential practice. 

      It did not take long for pupils to realize that part of the mutual respect between themselves and me is the lack of swearing. If profanity is blatant and direct, I ask for an apology. Nine times out of ten, the student has already caught himself and has self-corrected and apologized. 

     I hope and dream of times where children use appropriate language but am I fighting a losing battle? 
     As the old social groupings of nuclear families, extended families and church communities are replaced by imagined Internet communities and the state, which is Puttin' money before people, we have a generation that includes many who are isolated and lonely, drifting without any moral anchor or structure to their lives, faced with an endemic on swearing.

Degradation

The days of chivalry and respect seem to be long gone these days. Over the past 15 years or so many people who live in Smolensk have become more rude and disrespectful. I believe there are many contributing factors that have led to this rudeness. Selfishness and greed for money have led to many other byproducts such as disrespect to people and the lack of accountability to anyone. Kids treat their parents and teachers with disrespect and also treat each other badly. 

I am a school teacher and have been for about 4 years now. For just the time I have taught at school I have seen a complete turnaround from when I came. The disrespect and attitude that some of people have is crazy.

We don’t question the conventional wisdom that childhood is in crisis; we want to say that poverty and terribly low moral standards that engulfed substantial majority of families and darkened their lives have become a new issue for the state system of education. It is not simply about raising the price of education; many more fundamental problems arise – schools know much more about the state of Russia Olympic Team than they do about the state of their children. It shows that there is a lot of hypocrisy and double standard practices within the national education system.

Even further, this seems to be the age of tolerance and acceptance because we are all forced to accept someone's wrong-doings. Society is in fear about being accountable and being able to tell someone else that they are doing something wrong. The Moscow Patriarchate headed by ecumenical patriarch Cyrill has allowed this to creep in the very fabric of Russian way of life, where we get the ‘feel good’ gospel and sin is overlooked and become accepted by every civilian institution.

There are many things to blame on this but it all comes back to selfishness. All good manners can be summed up in one sentence: Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you. In other words, treat others as you want to be treated.