Thread: Middle-class attitudes in teaching - a bad thing?

An article in the Sunday Times was comparing charter schools in the US with UK schools. I'm not a teacher, but I find the quote below from a UK teacher quite frightening; if middle-class values means learn things so that you can get a job and pay your own way what's not to want?

Is this a bit of sensationalism or have any arrsers come across this attitude?

Afterwards their teacher described their inarticulacy as “a serious issue. It’s quite often the reason they get really frustrated�, yet she thought it “patronising� to try to correct them. “I don’t want to push my middle-class values on them,� she said.

Well according to the experts on Today this a.m. (or was that A.M, today? I digress...) middle class attitudes from parents equal success in school and workplace.

It seems as if we have identified the cause of through-life success, which seems to have confirmed what we already knew. However encapsulating that into our education system is being derailed by some pretty academic debates like:

Having money is evil.

Good manners will perpetuate feudalism.

Have as many children as you like, the state can afford it.

There was a lot of surprise expressed by politicians that the gap in society is getting wider. Why are they surprised? all the mechanisms for getting poor children further up the chain have been sacrificed in order to try and restrict wealth accrual at the top. Face it that will never happen. Instead you want to facilitate the success of the able - meritocracy. This has long been the defeat of the oligarchy, look at the growth of the middle classes in the C19th FFS. Ironically Neue Arbeit's make-up is portrayed as meritocrats but in fact they are just scions of the new oligarchy...which is cack!

The clearest defined route out of the ghetto/poverty in the Uk over the last three hundred years has been via the Grammar School. Replacing selective education with comprehensive education but lowering the expected standard to avoid upsetting people was a completely idiotic policy. We are where we are I know but FFS the idea that social equality has been assisted by the past 50 years of social engineering is bollosx. Yes I wish we could turn back time but that isn't quite what I want really - I would like the acknowledgement that we were wrong when we changed to be publically avowed and that the recognition be given to the values and success of the past "open to all of ability" system.

I know there will some who claim that isn't "fair". Well life isn't fair, Darwin was right and Colbert is just a nancy French economist who we can blame the EU on.

No.

Originally Posted by Cuddles

The clearest defined route out of the ghetto/poverty in the Uk over the last three hundred years has been via the Grammar School.

The problem there is that society now isn't as it was 300 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years ago. In those days, there was a need for a very small number of academically-educated people to run things and the rest of the population just needed to be able to hit thing with other things for 14 hours a day.

The sorts of jobs that require low levels of academic skill don't exist now in the quantities we need, so we need far more people with an academic education than ever before or the laws of averages say they'll stay unemployed for their entire lives.

Grammar schools were successful largely because they were based on recruiting, selecting and training an academic elite; no bad thing in itself but by its very nature it's not a model that can be applied generally to today's situation - not if you expect any general success. Not everybody is an elite, simple as.

Personally, I think comprehensive education is a good idea badly executed. Somebody who's had exposure to manual and intellectual labours in their teens is in a far better portion to decide which they like and are good at than somebody who's been streamed at 11.

I've been having a close look at South Korean secondary education for work purposes lately, and the success rates amongst graduates of their new-ish comprehensives in western universities is rather higher than from the old system, except in maths and science subjects where the trends are roughly comparable.

In short, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. What you can do is find out what the sow's ear is actually good for and put it to doing that as well as it can.

Good post but as you said we don't have the jobs for people to "hit the the with the other thing" any more, or if we do it is being done by low paid immigrants - so what is the option for our future chavs?

SAC - fairly put indeed. Fundamentally educationalists have been of the "if you don't know where you are going, any road will do" school for far too long. Unlike our competitors in world markets who think about the purpose of their country/society.

Too much wishy-washy liberalism involved in UK education - and that's just the caretakers!

Originally Posted by DarkNinja

Good post but as you said we don't have the jobs for people to "hit the the with the other thing" any more, or if we do it is being done by low paid immigrants - so what is the option for our future chavs?

Some bloke who runs a trainer making factory today said the exact opposite - he claimed that 1 in 9 are working in manufacturing.

Originally Posted by DarkNinja

Good post but as you said we don't have the jobs for people to "hit the the with the other thing" any more, or if we do it is being done by low paid immigrants - so what is the option for our future chavs?

Landmine clearance?

Sterilisation?

A few other thoughts spring to mind.

I think as SmartasCarrots points out, the problem with the grammar schools was that it was very much an either/or situation and the alternative was dire. I don't think that ought to be tolerated in a publicly funded system. OTOH, I don't see why grammar schools shouldn't form part of a broad-based continuum of academic and vocational education targeted at individual abilities.

Of course, it won't ever happen.

Originally Posted by cpunk

I think as SmartasCarrots points out, the problem with the grammar schools was that it was very much an either/or situation and the alternative was dire. I don't think that ought to be tolerated in a publicly funded system. OTOH, I don't see why grammar schools shouldn't form part of a broad-based continuum of academic and vocational education targeted at individual abilities.

Of course, it won't ever happen.

May I say you put that beautifully, you should have been a politician. Just a point of information, is that a target or an aspiration? :(

The only thing better than middle class attitudes (and this is often forgotten) is respectable working class attitudes. Years ago Tony Parsons had a piece on TV on "Whatever happened to the working class?" "The working class used to be the most self-disciplined, courageous, ambitious and hard-working class.......Look at us now". Middle class values include a kind of presumption and sense of entitlement that ensures that some of their kids ended up in the crap, usefully adding to social mobility :D

It's the loss of respectable working class values - the people who joined the building society and the co-op, who read report cards and attended parents' evenings, who made their kids wear school uniforms, who would be mortified if they had the police around - it is the loss of these values which has done the damage.

As a literate prole I say, "Sod the self-satisfied middle class"

Originally Posted by Cuddles

Originally Posted by cpunk

I think as SmartasCarrots points out, the problem with the grammar schools was that it was very much an either/or situation and the alternative was dire. I don't think that ought to be tolerated in a publicly funded system. OTOH, I don't see why grammar schools shouldn't form part of a broad-based continuum of academic and vocational education targeted at individual abilities.

Of course, it won't ever happen.

May I say you put that beautifully, you should have been a politician. Just a point of information, is that a target or an aspiration? :(

Why - is he a thief? :D

Comprehensives were a c0ck up from Day 1 mainly because of the wishy-washy way they were handled in th 1960's. I know this because I was at an excellent Scottish High School where discipline was in place as late as 1969 even with the influx of non selected pupils. However the new breed of "liberal" thinking teachers who came in let the situation deteriorate badly and the place went to ratsh1t.

Strangely, being a jock school in Central Scotland and with a strong engineering background in the area all of the male pupils did technical drawing and either woodwork or metalwork until the age of 14 when they could then select which O levels to take.

If this is the type of broad spectrum educashun SAC is talking about he is spot on! BUT - it needs a disciplined environment for it to work properly.

In my small town with a mixed socio-economic make-up we have one secondary School, or Techincal College as they like to portray themselves, and it's the sole stablishment apart for some good, and expensive, independant schools. The issue to me is that they rely heavily on a Gifted and Talented program because as it's unselective on it's entrants and they've obviously made a conscious decision to teach (at times seperately) by ability. Again, I'm no teacher and have no idea how widespread this is amongst the UK education sysytem.

So my questions are; If you had a selective system such as the 11+ would it then negate the need to have these selective systems within one teaching establishment? Are these gifted programs common in non-selective schools and has anyone any facts/links that prove their worth.

I suspect two of my three children would qualilfy as they are well above average for their age in their Primary school.

As for teaching middle-class attitudes, bring it on, as I've lost all faith in the working class or what allegedly some decree it to be.

Grammer schools were good. secondary moderns were shite that was the problem kids that did'nt get into grammer got a 2nd class education.
the fact that rates for 11plus passes for girls were kept atifically low etc etc.
means its asystem for a bygone time.

The state education system is vital 95% of children pass through it mps and ministers maybe able to afford to go private most voters don't have that luxury.
"middle class values" whatever those are important although assuming a kid comes from the bacground where education is valued and supported etc is also important.
inarticulancy needs to be challenged and should be how you go about it slightly harder.
I want to teach science at secondary school and should be starting full time teacher training in 2011 got 120 points of OU study to do. no illusions that I'll be joining a profession that is a politcal football with some daft ideas floating about and a lot of bullshit invovled but hey ho

As we have fewer manufacturing jobs now what is the point in 'teaching' children to grow up as 'working class'. The wording says it all.