dr_feelgood wrote:Now school's are Academies thay tend to see themselves as businesses competing for customers (pupils). In Wigan, where there are more places than kids, some became academies to avoid closure by the council (my brother was made redundant when they closed the school at which he taught) and this has lead them to wasting money that should be spent on the kids on advertising to attract pupils. You see it on advertising boards around the town, on buses and even the electronic advertising hoardings at the DW stadium.

I spoke to my local Labour councillor about this waste of money and was told that as the Academies aren't run by the councils there is nothing they can do, even though they too see it as a waste of money, and that the spending would have had to have been authorised by the Board of Governors at the schools involved. In my opinion the Governors and / or head should be shown the door for wasting money that should be spent on the kids.

Mintball wrote:Fascinating yesterday, though, to see that headteachers are very angry. These are not 'the usual suspects'.

And Channel 4 news last night was reporting that rumours coming out of the DofE say that Gove himself is personally rewriting the national curriculum.

Sal Paradise wrote:Teachers will be angry - if it was up to them there would be no league tables no judgements on their ability?

You have to seriously question why have the exams been dumbed down so far - could be that they have to be to match the quality of teaching most of our kids receive - its a disgrace.

Sal Paradise wrote:Teachers will be angry - if it was up to them there would be no league tables no judgements on their ability?

You have to seriously question why have the exams been dumbed down so far - could be that they have to be to match the quality of teaching most of our kids receive - its a disgrace.

Mintball wrote:Ignoring the fact that you said "a bit of ..."

It's a major work of fantasy fiction and a jolly good romp. The creation of the languages was an extraordinary feat. Which doesn't stop it being, IMO, overrated.

It shares with the likes of John Betjeman a rather reactionary attitude toward industrial and urban Britain. The Shire is England's countryside; Mordor is the industrial England – in essence, then, the midlands and north.

He cribbed from other sources – not in itself a problem, but hilariously, JRR himself claimed that the only resemblance to Wagner's Ring cycle was that both included a ring and rings are round, although various literary scholars have pointed out that this is a tad disingenuous – not least in the fact that both were influenced by a range of source materials, including Volsunga and the Nibelungenlied, but also in that Wagner had imbued his ring with certain powers, which was not something that was in the original myths and legends.

But my point would be, in essence, that LOTR fails as 'great literature' because it is little more than what it is (and it's arguably over long and indulgent). That's not a snobbish comment on genre fiction, though: I'd rate Terry Pratchett far, far more highly than JRR – simply because the bulk of the Discworld novels go beyond straightforward fantasy tales and have something to actually tell us about the human condition. You don't have to read them like that, but the satire is most certainly there. They're also deceptively simply written, and yet can have you laughing on one page and crying on the next.

Mintball wrote:
Of course there will be youngsters who are 'limited' educationally (for want of a better word). There has never been a time when it wasn't the case and never will be (unless we genetically engineer it otherwise). And there are factors that will mitigate against a child getting the best out of their education, just as other factors will work the other way.