School's Out

Its amazing that despite all that training, the guidance from child psychologists, educationalists and sundry other experts and well intentioned interference from politicians, schools have a knack of patronising pupils.

I think that there is a whole culture of belittling the home, and making school and its exams the only valid measure of achievement. Josh is 15 - he can drive anything far better than most adults (fortunately he lives on a farm where he can do this legally), plough a field, ride a horse, train a hawk, dog or ferret, strip down an engine etc. The work he does on the day he spends at the agricultural college is graded A* (5 GCSE equivalent) - his school work is dismissed as a more-or-less adequate C/D because he is bored to tears by most of it.

The trouble is, education for most people is being extended far beyond reasonable limits. In days gone by, academically minded people stayed at school and received an academic education, whilst those not much interested in book learning left school in their early to mid teens and got on with learning about what they wanted to do in life.
Nowadays they pretend that everyone will benefit from a university education, so the whole secondary school system has been dumbed down to try and attract the non academics, which it fails to do, because there isn't the money to teach a wide range of vocational subjects successfully.
Why does Josh have to be still at school - why can't he be at college and on the farm legitimately?
However, schools are still trying to cater for the children whose homes are not quite like that Jake comes from - who don't go home to their pet hawk and ponies, but to somewhere like those homes seen in "Honey You're Killing the Kids" where there are no family activities, encouragement to pursue hobbies or nurturing of the child's own interests or skills - so really schools are in a lose lose situation.

I agree with everything you say. I'm not actually convinced about the dumbing down. Lots of what they do may be less academically demanding, but I think they work a great deal harder than we needed to - and, yes, I do know that you worked a lot harder than I did with better results, but that doesn't alter the fact that I could, and did, coast through without any visible effort except when you and Karen sat on me to get me through my French retake - the fact remains that with the amount of course work expected nowadays you couldn't even think about getting away with the lack of effort I very nearly succeeded in getting away with.

Josh has to stay at school for another term and a half because he is still 15 and has those pesky GCSEs to take after Easter. Although he is doing so well on his day release to the agricultural college, he still needs a certain level of maths and English to go there full time next year.