Just read an article about Chris Woodhead, former head of Ofsted, and his forthcoming book.
Sorry to hear that he is suffering from motor neurone disease, one of my schoolfriends' mother had it and it was incredibly sad.
However, reading the interview with him in the Guardian, brought back horrible memories of what he and Labour have done to education in this country.
I remember Carry-On-Teacher stories about the time he frolicked with teenage girls in his underpants. How in the spring of 1976 he supposedly confessed to having an affair with one of his sixth formers in Portishead. It's ten years back that he actually said that teacher-pupil relationships could be "experiential and educative".
On top of that, are his antediluvian and regressive opinions on education in general. He asks "Why do we think that we can make [children] brighter than God made [them]?", utter tosh!
Surely that is the whole point of education, to get the best out of each child, to excite, to amaze, to inspire a sense of wonder and curiosity, to teach individuals how to think and how to question what they see and hear.
He also says that "the genes are likely to be better if your parents are teachers, academics, lawyers", this sort of eugenicist nonsense would be laughable if it were not out of the mouth of someone who has been so influential on Labour and Tory educational policy.
Poignantly he says that, "Life isn't fair. We're never going to make it fair".
No, you're wrong Mr Woodhead, our duty is to make the world a much fairer place, rather than entrenchning and worsening that inequality by making money out of private education and endorsing the educational apartheid of grammar schools.
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