You have my most heartfelt sympathy, Andrew. I can't bear such
euphemisms.
Chris
On 30 Dec 2007, at 05:28, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Oh believe me the depths of both extremes have been plumbed.
>
> Thirty years in an education system and I've seen every possible way
> of avoiding actually describing a student as either dim or malevolent
> (or, gawdelpus, both). Mealy-mouthed euphemisms such as
> 'intellectually challenged'; the entire concept of 'multiple
> intelligences' ('cos we all have to be smart at something, hey?) with
> no empirical basis whatsoever (merely soft plausibility);
> instructions to pass students who frankly couldn't pass water; the
> tendency to measure a school's performance by the number of students
> who complete high school 'successfully'; the refusal to admit that a
> pass in home economics is perhaps not quite as worthy as a pass in
> physics; the inability to accept that perhaps some staff are the
> product of this same system and are just clueless to the point that
> they don't know that they don't know.
> And of course the polarisation this produces with staff muttering
> about the decline in standards which never actually existed; the
> constant stream of new education policies and philosophies which try
> to provide for the entertainment of students in classroom seeing they
> can't be educated in a real sense; the slew of underfunded remedial
> programs to...
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|