As a foreigner with only a spotty knowledge of the UK educational system, I am struggling to understand some of this, and I'm quite prepared for pitying comments telling me I ought to go look at some album cover of four guys walking across a road.
What is "the comprehensive system" that you say you root for? Is it the same thing as the system with the title "the grammar school system" which you say is inaccurate and would better be called "the secondary modern system"? Or is it something different?
If it's the same thing, why are you rooting for it, if it condemns 70% of the children to the cellar in Omelas? Perhaps that is explained by your desire for "setting not streaming," but while I think I know what "streaming" is, what is "setting"? And isn't the Omelas comparison a bit extreme? Are the secondary moderns really that bad? Have none of their ex-students ever achieved Attenborough/Bakewell/Parker levels of success despite their disadvantages, ever? (Mind, I'm not arguing that, if they did, it proves that the secondary moderns are as good as the grammar schools. I'm from a country which has people pointing to our president as proof that blacks are no longer discriminated against, so I know how fatuous that sort of argument is. I'm just looking for some calibration of the degree of disadvantage here.)
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Date: 2012-01-05 10:31 pm (UTC)What is "the comprehensive system" that you say you root for? Is it the same thing as the system with the title "the grammar school system" which you say is inaccurate and would better be called "the secondary modern system"? Or is it something different?
If it's the same thing, why are you rooting for it, if it condemns 70% of the children to the cellar in Omelas? Perhaps that is explained by your desire for "setting not streaming," but while I think I know what "streaming" is, what is "setting"? And isn't the Omelas comparison a bit extreme? Are the secondary moderns really that bad? Have none of their ex-students ever achieved Attenborough/Bakewell/Parker levels of success despite their disadvantages, ever? (Mind, I'm not arguing that, if they did, it proves that the secondary moderns are as good as the grammar schools. I'm from a country which has people pointing to our president as proof that blacks are no longer discriminated against, so I know how fatuous that sort of argument is. I'm just looking for some calibration of the degree of disadvantage here.)