I Don't Understand ...

Two things. The Government and education professionals keep telling us that State education is getting better and better. The exam pass rates get higher every year - more than 95% now for A-levels.

And good liberals tell us that it's far better to break up an unsatisfactory relationship than to stay together 'for the sake of the children'. After all, what about your needs ? Anyway, it's better to split than for the children to see you quarrelling all the time. 'If the mum/dad/whoever is happy, the children will be happy.'

So this Guardian report is very strange.

"Secondary school teachers are spending so much of their working day dealing with worsening pupil behaviour that they are battling to "be allowed to teach", according to a damning report out today."

"Teachers have become social workers as a result of the breakdown of the nuclear family, which has left many parents unwilling or unable to support or help their children, it says."

How can the children be learning more and more, when the teachers are struggling to get any teaching done ? It just shows what fantastic teachers we've got, I suppose.

And how can the liberation of children from the stifling confines of the discredited nuclear family possibly lead to "parents themselves unable to cope with their children growing up in a new and challenging social context ?"

Theree must be something wrong with the survey.




UPDATE - Brian Micklethwaite links to this Telegraph report, which seems to imply that teachers would be able to cope with poor behaviour were it not for that dreadful curriculum and those dreadful SATs tests (in other words, the teaching bit).