Election and TES news

Hello from London once more!

After last weekend’s TES, and the many things that happened since my last blogpost, I wanted to write much sooner (as always), but alas, life happens :-) Once of my favourite things to take place over the last weekend was a theatre visit to the National Theatre and the great play Women beware Women. The NT has a fantastic scheme at the moment that they are selling £30 tickets in the best area of the theatre for £10 to students and if you are clever enough to bring a copy of your passport and the signature of someone who knows you, you can even sign up to their under 25 scheme and get the first performance for free (with further ones only £5!). This is amazing! I have really only discovered the theatre recently after watching Le Misanthrope with Keira Knightley, and then The History Boys two weeks later and with the NT giving away such cheap tickets, its sure that I am going to go down to London more often now to indulge. I especially liked the end of Women beware Women because it climaxed in a 5 minute scene where all of the central characters came together in the montage of a party where everybody was seduced by sin and many of them actually die. It’s incredibly dramatic and with a turning stage and pitch perfect music, really sent shivers down my spine!

If anybody is reading from outside the UK: Our general elections happened last week and basically resulted in a big mess where the winning party (the conservatives for the first time in 13 years) did not get enough votes to ‘dominate’ the parliament and provide us with a prime minister. The other party (Labour), which had been in power since the dawn of time, did only get a few less votes and now where is talk about them teaming up with the third party, the liberal democrats. All three parties have quite different views on how to run the UK and it is most entertaining to watch them try to sort themselves out. Most likely there is going to be another election, but for now, every day there are more news which tip the scale in different directions. Today, the old labour prime minister resigned (possibly to sacrifice himself in order to enable better conversations with the liberal democrats) and today the new prime minister, the leader of the conservatives, basically set an ultimate for the lib-dems.

One thing that really annoys me is that although the conservatives promised more state funded free schools, or new academies as they call them (see earlier blogpost), in a conversation with the TES Mr Gove, the possible next secretary of education, basically said that they would need to adapt to the exact same tests ‘with rigorous accountability’. Now, he might not have understood that the whole concept of free schools is to be except from state tests (with the possible exception of maths, one foreign and the native language in the Scandinavian model). Although I agree that the ‘teaching to the test’ would be slightly more creative in his 'new academy idea, it remains that the state dictates what children will need to know at a certain point in their lives and it disregards it whether they are ready for it or not and/or how quickly they will acquire the knowledge.

I also read an article about homeschooling in Germany and how it can result in the parents going to prison because it is illegal. At the beginning of this year a German family was even granted asylum in the US in order to be able to educate their children at home. As much as I am a supporter of homeschooling and greater freedom of education, I have to say that the article was quite radical even for me. Yes, of course it is wrong to punish people severely for wanting to educate their children at home, however to say that ‘parents are dissatisfied with conditions in regional state schools where classrooms are overcrowded and bullying and drug problems are not uncommon’ is, in my opinion and experience, quite an overstatement. Although I have to say that I went to a very good (state) school, I never heard about problems to this extend from other schools. I bet that they do exist, but not more than in the UK (teenage pregnancy rate, anybody?) and other countries in Europe.

Two and a half weeks until the end of my placement… Very mixed feelings.