Well I don't agree with everyone piling in on Chris, but I do think there needs to be a little more awareness on his part about difference.

Most education systems were originally set up to favour one segment of society and to further the agenda of the ruling segment of society. In most western societies that would be the rich white man. The left wingers have tried to change this so that education can benefit everyone and provide opportunities for all.

There was a heyday in the past if you were a white male. However, being a white male is not the "norm" or the standard we should all be judged by.

So perhaps people should stop and think before making claims about how much better such and such was/is and analyse if it is better for everyone, or just better for you.

Chris if of his generation and his background. A time when it was assumed that the British white way was the best way for everyone. This was a foundation of the way the British Empire was created.

It wasn't a great model however if you were Irish, Scottish, Welsh, poor working class or of colour. I have been doing a lot of academic reading lately on how this view of the "rightness" of the British way of doing things caused so much suffering and horror amongst the Aboriginals in Canada. I've also been able to contrast this with a lot of similar suffering caused to those back at home who were forced under the English regime to adopt the English world view which Chris often espouses without realising it.

So perhaps Chris and Sirius could step back and recognise that their historic backgrounds are causing this antagonism between them. I suspect that there are many in Ireland who do not think that things were better under English occupation. It might be nice if Chris would step back and realise that his attitude, which he takes for granted as being the correct English way, caused immense suffering across the globe and can be considered antagonistic by those of us that recognise it.

The "English way" is not seen as universally benevolent and a little tact in this area might go a long way. I know that I would get less offended if there were some recognition of this.

You have nearly perfectly described the master / servant relationship. A core issue in the thinking on many issues in US politics, where "tradition" is held as sacrosanct. Why screams of racism fly in the US.

Oh, in case there is any mistake, I'm not saying Chris is racist, just that the thought process of privilege is similar.

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Well I don't agree with everyone piling in on Chris, but I do think there needs to be a little more awareness on his part about difference.

Most education systems were originally set up to favour one segment of society and to further the agenda of the ruling segment of society. In most western societies that would be the rich white man. The left wingers have tried to change this so that education can benefit everyone and provide opportunities for all.

There was a heyday in the past if you were a white male. However, being a white male is not the "norm" or the standard we should all be judged by.

So perhaps people should stop and think before making claims about how much better such and such was/is and analyse if it is better for everyone, or just better for you.

Chris if of his generation and his background. A time when it was assumed that the British white way was the best way for everyone. This was a foundation of the way the British Empire was created.

It wasn't a great model however if you were Irish, Scottish, Welsh, poor working class or of colour. I have been doing a lot of academic reading lately on how this view of the "rightness" of the British way of doing things caused so much suffering and horror amongst the Aboriginals in Canada. I've also been able to contrast this with a lot of similar suffering caused to those back at home who were forced under the English regime to adopt the English world view which Chris often espouses without realising it.

So perhaps Chris and Sirius could step back and recognise that their historic backgrounds are causing this antagonism between them. I suspect that there are many in Ireland who do not think that things were better under English occupation. It might be nice if Chris would step back and realise that his attitude, which he takes for granted as being the correct English way, caused immense suffering across the globe and can be considered antagonistic by those of us that recognise it.

The "English way" is not seen as universally benevolent and a little tact in this area might go a long way. I know that I would get less offended if there were some recognition of this.

You have nearly perfectly described the master / servant relationship. A core issue in the thinking on many issues in US politics, where "tradition" is held as sacrosanct. Why screams of racism fly in the US.

Oh, in case there is any mistake, I'm not saying Chris is racist, just that the thought process of privilege is similar.

Racism is one of the ways privilege is expressed. The idea that somehow your culture and world view is superior to others is at the root of a lot of racist and bigoted behaviour. If your culture is the dominant one that gets to set the rules, then quite often that assumption is never challenged.

Chris is a member of the dominant culture in the UK and as such it is hard for him to put himself in the position of those of us who don't benefit from those privileges. This means that an education system that is set up to primarily cater to the needs of the white males will of course seem perfectly adequate if you are a white male. The rest of us will have a totally different experience.

The choice a person can then make is to site the problem either in the people who have a negative experience, or in the system that provides those experiences.

One of those choices supports the status quo, the other is less comfortable.

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Reality Internet Personality

So perhaps Chris and Sirius could step back and recognise that their historic backgrounds are causing this antagonism between them.

I'll clear this up while I have the chance. As far as I am aware, there is no antagonism from me, at a guess, there is none from Chris either.

The main issue is that Chris, as you more than likely stated correctly, caught the tail end of the "British Way". Chris makes that worse by his seemingly superior attitude towards all others that are not British.

As for my Irish background, I don't have one, I was only born there & spent all my life here in the UK.

From what I can see on these boards, most people post on topics that they have an interest in & with most, have much experience of as well. Of course they are some topics that some have no knowledge or experience of so read & learn.

To see someone post without any thoughts or knowledge from themselves with all the knowledge & experience they have accumulated makes one wonder.

Britain as it stands today was made what it is due to all nationalities & not just the natives of the Home Nations, in fact some of my best teachers were foreigners.

It's about time Chris woke up to that fact & stop rubbishing other nations & posters because their views are different to his.

Personally, I find his comments for the past several months totally laughable. Calling this board a cesspit & making snide comments on the other boards, yet pops in whenever it suits him. Pass disparaging remarks if the poster is male, yet when female, we see this:

Well that has put me in my place then hasn't it. Now, I have two options here, either crawl away in disgrace as a non-person or fight back. I will think upon it for a couple of days and then decide.

2 issues here: - fight back? This is not a boxing ring. 48 hours to think & decide? From one of such a superior attitude speaks volumes.

I really don't think there is much to be gained from singling one person out here. There are plenty of people here that post things that I often find ridiculous and outrageously offensive. There is another group of posters that I sometimes agree with and sometimes disagree with. There are also some who I generally agree with.

What I do find frustrating are those who speak as if their personal experience is somehow more than merely their personal experience. Personal experience is of course valid and we learn about how things affect different people because they tell us their stories.

You then try to put those stories into a context.

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Reality Internet Personality

...But it was the way it was then, everybody was happy with it, and nobody queried it.

Oh Chris, you cannot possibly have meant that...

Eric's mother recently gave me a memory book of Eric's school years. The book was published in 1965. There is a page for every school year, from kindergarten through high school. Parents were to record the names of their child's friends, the activities their child enjoyed, their child's achievements and awards and their child's plans for the future as their child progressed through school.

There are boxes to check under the heading "When I grow up I want to be..."

For boys, suggested professions were
fireman
policeman
cowboy
astronaut
soldier
baseball player
other:_______

For girls, suggested professions were
mother
nurse
school teacher
airline hostess
model
secretary
other:_______


I, for one, am so grateful that the most of the readers of this thread would find this dichotomy as distasteful and disturbing as I do.

For patently obvious reasons, I am withdrawing from this thread.

As I do so, I note that the the usual wolf pack instinct of turning on a wounded member still thrives here today as much as it ever did. However, this injured prey has escaped to live happily elsewhere.

Hopefully it got the point that old ideas are old for a reason ....

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...But it was the way it was then, everybody was happy with it, and nobody queried it.

Oh Chris, you cannot possibly have meant that...

Eric's mother recently gave me a memory book of Eric's school years. The book was published in 1965. There is a page for every school year, from kindergarten through high school. Parents were to record the names of their child's friends, the activities their child enjoyed, their child's achievements and awards and their child's plans for the future as their child progressed through school.

There are boxes to check under the heading "When I grow up I want to be..."

For boys, suggested professions were
fireman
policeman
cowboy
astronaut
soldier
baseball player
other:_______

For girls, suggested professions were
mother
nurse
school teacher
airline hostess
model
secretary
other:_______


I, for one, am so grateful that the most of the readers of this thread would find this dichotomy as distasteful and disturbing as I do.

I believe I mentioned this on these boards in the past. I found it very distasteful that I had to learn what the curriculum at that time imposed.

Being of a slim nature all my life, I did not want to waste a complete afternoon every week on PE(PT) as every time, I was put in the school's rugby team. No way José!

After an "awkward" few weeks, I was asked by the headmaster what I wished to do. I had selected Technical Studies (the other were Business, Commercial & I can't recall what the girls studies were called) I wanted cookery & needlework & got laughed out of the room.

To cut a long story short, I received those lessons rather than PE. I became just as proficient with a needle & thread & sewing machine as I did with a Self Loading Rifle (& I'll lay odds that there will be some males on here sniggering at that fact).

The compliments received last night for an excellent dinner party were a pleasure to receive.

The main problem with Internet forums & also quite obvious on these boards is the lack of comprehension!

"Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning. An individual's ability to comprehend text is influenced by their traits and skills, one of which is the ability to make inferences. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read."

Unfortunately, some people's traits & skills will not allow others a view, especially when it is totally alien to their own.

I stated earlier that it took over 100 years for the education system to change...

doesn't seem much has changed then...

I really don't think there is much to be gained from singling one person out here. There are plenty of people here that post things that I often find ridiculous and outrageously offensive. There is another group of posters that I sometimes agree with and sometimes disagree with. There are also some who I generally agree with.

What I do find frustrating are those who speak as if their personal experience is somehow more than merely their personal experience. Personal experience is of course valid and we learn about how things affect different people because they tell us their stories.

You then try to put those stories into a context.

I have to agree that personal experience has to be just that and we should not think it applies to others.

I am the same age as Chris, and some of his experiences did not apply to the area where my, very, limited experience of English schools took place. There the problem of trying to get school selection changed once applied was not possible because there were very limited places available at the Grammar schools. For the one year I suffered English schools I was put into a Secondary Modern, because as explained several times, all the Grammar school Places in State and Public* had been taken.
*Public schools in UK are fee paying or scholarship, the public means - the public can attend if they can afford the costs

I must also point out that my sister's school experience was much different than mine, because she is 6 years younger that me and by then all the new comprehensives had been built.
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And on your earlier claim that more girls qualified for grammar than boys, has to say more about school education at that time rather that differences of intelligence between the sexes. Many studies world wide show that there is no measurable difference in intelligence. There were more girls at grammar in that town where I lived, only because there were more girls places available.

The differences measured in the old IQ test, and quoted by many, are actually only small amounts, and the actual figures are more like 50 ± 1 or 2%. And any differences measured because of the way the brain is wired, is probably environmental because they are not seen in the brains of children below the age of 11.

And ES, you must know that as a woman that has studied maths and science beyond GCSE level, that you are the odd one out.

I really don't think there is much to be gained from singling one person out here. There are plenty of people here that post things that I often find ridiculous and outrageously offensive. There is another group of posters that I sometimes agree with and sometimes disagree with. There are also some who I generally agree with.

What I do find frustrating are those who speak as if their personal experience is somehow more than merely their personal experience. Personal experience is of course valid and we learn about how things affect different people because they tell us their stories.

You then try to put those stories into a context.

I have to agree that personal experience has to be just that and we should not think it applies to others.

I am the same age as Chris, and some of his experiences did not apply to the area where my, very, limited experience of English schools took place. There the problem of trying to get school selection changed once applied was not possible because there were very limited places available at the Grammar schools. For the one year I suffered English schools I was put into a Secondary Modern, because as explained several times, all the Grammar school Places in State and Public* had been taken.
*Public schools in UK are fee paying or scholarship, the public means - the public can attend if they can afford the costs

I must also point out that my sister's school experience was much different than mine, because she is 6 years younger that me and by then all the new comprehensives had been built.
_________________________________________

And on your earlier claim that more girls qualified for grammar than boys, has to say more about school education at that time rather that differences of intelligence between the sexes. Many studies world wide show that there is no measurable difference in intelligence. There were more girls at grammar in that town where I lived, only because there were more girls places available.

The differences measured in the old IQ test, and quoted by many, are actually only small amounts, and the actual figures are more like 50 ± 1 or 2%. And any differences measured because of the way the brain is wired, is probably environmental because they are not seen in the brains of children below the age of 11.

There are differences at that age, and it is a fact that the pass marks where higher for girls than for boys. You can look that up. You can read what ever you want into the reasons that was done, but whatever it was, it clearly wasn't in the girls best interests. Also in a lot of areas there were less places at grammar schools for girls than for boys because of same sex schooling. So your town was probably an anomaly.

*note: my claim is NOT that more girls passed the 11 plus than boys. It is that they had to achieve a higher mark to be allowed to pass. This is a shocking fact and it is no surprise that you have difficulty understanding it.

And ES, you must know that as a woman that has studied maths and science beyond GCSE level, that you are the odd one out.

You are right that I wasn't exactly encouraged to do it...but I think people are aware how stubborn I can be.

Fortunately the times are changing and more girls are going into science and math than before, although the numbers are depressingly low. I have been trying to discover the reasons for this. Some of the research suggests that those girls smart enough to do science and math are also very good at English and the social sciences so they have more choice. Whereas the boys that are good at math and sciences are often not as good in the humanities, so have less choice about where they focus their intelligence.

Also from a young age girls are discouraged from the behaviours that make someone a good scientist such as curiosity and challenging the accepted status quo. These are seen as very negative behaviours for a girl and are quite forcefully squashed early on in life where they might be accepted or encouraged in a boy.

Again, hopefully this is changing, however if you go to a Toys R Us you will see that these gender stereotypes are still being reinforced and certain toys that would encourage scientific curiosity are not being promoted to girls.

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Reality Internet Personality

The main problem with Internet forums & also quite obvious on these boards is the lack of comprehension!

Serious Comprehension Here. I Understand Completely. I was In Typing Class with All Females back in High School. Ooooba! and Man 'O Live. Why? 'cause I wanted to type. Like My Dad. He could do 100 wpm on A Manual. WOOOBa!

Me Being An Ugly Stick, No Babes Bothered Me and I Could Actually Learn! HO HUM beating dat keyboard DRum.

' '

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May we All have a METAMORPHOSIS. REASON. GOoD JUDGEMENT and LOVE and ORDER!!!!!

Lovely wasn't it...

...to be the only boy amongst a class of girls.

I loved them "helping" me to learn to cook...

...ooh, those hands :-)

I went 3 years to a boys only highschool, 2 girls in our class of 23, toughened me up.

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

If pass marks were higher for girls then it is logical more girls would have passed. But if there were less places for girls, and grammar schools were generally segregated, then girls will have had to get higher marks to get in.
Less grammar schools places for girls would also have meant that there would have been an unbalance in the intelligence levels between the sexes in the secondary modern schools.

It is no wonder that the statistics show that generally girls were more intelligent than boys. At the grammar schools, with there being less girls a greater percentage would have got higher grades, and in the secondary moderns the girls would be more intelligent and therefore have greater numbers in the upper classes and again have been shown to get better results.
If that was the case the Statistics, as usual, are damned lies.

One the scale they normally used a score of 120 and above was needed to be put on the list. It was all very much an IQ test really. But not all education authorities used the same methods or subjects to make their selections.


There was also another problem in the grammar, secondary modern era from 194n to 197n there meant to be Technical schools, in between grammar and secondary, virtually none were built.

Your comment about Toys R Us might not actually fit the facts, some studies on very young children, just at crawling age, have found boys go for things that move or have moveable parts and girls will go for dolls. Colour is not a factor.
It also applies to young monkeys that have no environmental background to push them in one direction or the other.

Have they only just worked this out?

Lavish praise from teachers 'does not help pupils'

Have they only just worked this out?

Lavish praise from teachers 'does not help pupils'

Why tell failing students that they're doing brilliantly, where's their incentive to change.

Only a couple of weeks ago, i was told i wasn't allowed to mark students' work in red pen because that can seem too aggressive.
I told the Athena Swan representative to go a long walk off a short cliff at that one.

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Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

Have they only just worked this out?

Lavish praise from teachers 'does not help pupils'

What they actually said was that praise when used correctly can be a very effective tool.

I do understand what they mean about low expectations. I took over a class once of students who would take the whole lesson to complete what I considered 20 minutes work. They were surprised when I said they could do better as their last teacher had spent a lot of time trying to build their self esteem by telling them how great they were.

Needless to say that eventually they were able to do the work they were supposed to in the lesson and that actually did raise their self esteem.

I totally agree with praise...but it has to be praise where praise in due.

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Reality Internet Personality

I totally agree with praise...but it has to be praise where praise in due.

That's where all of society can play a role in education. The problem though is in all aspects of life, many cannot be bothered to say two words for a job well done!

I went 3 years to a boys only highschool, 2 girls in our class of 23, toughened me up.

When I was learning french in highschool I was the only boy in the class.
Rather liked it:)

“I Teach For Seven Straight Hours In Stilletos And Never Stop Smiling”—What Stock Photos Tell Us About Teaching

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Reality Internet Personality