There has recently been a small media storm over a question in the Eton scholarship exam, in which 13-year-old boys were asked to imagine they were prime minister and to write a speech justifying the shooting of protesters. The best response I’ve seen to this was by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, in […]
Category Archives: education
During a less than complimentary Twitter exchange yesterday about the qualifications needed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (with the present incumbent providing the context) I made a serious point about the lack of economics teaching in schools, and rather surprisingly got a negative response; it would just mean pupils learning (I paraphrase) more of […]
It has been widely reported this week that one Leslie Carter, a former school chaplain, has pleaded guilty to a number of offences of indecency with boys dating back to 1957. He will be sentenced on 19 October and the judge at Harrow Crown Court warned him to expect a custodial sentence. It’s a case […]
Royal Wedding day, and a lot of mixed emotions for this lefty republican – fury and boredom at the hype in the weeks leading up to it; ironic reflection at the way those two old English revolutionaries, John Milton and William Blake, had their words appropriated by the Royal pageantry (while the designer of Ms […]
I was hugely amused to see this sign in a window in central Brighton today: Liberal Democrats probably not winning here
Yesterday, I blogged about Andrew Neil’s film Posh and Posher, which described the hold private schools have on our political culture. Today, by way of an ironic counterpoint, the Independent describes how the Coalition is trying to hound the Chair of the Charities Commission, Dame Suzi Leather, out of her job for enforcing the rules […]
Notes from a Broken Society 