OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE.

The education system is a mess. We have second generation social problems in Britain right now. In other words, many of this generation of young parents were woefully let down by weak family and social values and also by a dreadful education system which is still in place today.

Crippled families are hardly likely to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat to help prevent the sickness from continuing on into the next generation and so forth.
So where can we look for help to prevent further decline in standards or continued stagnation at best?

First choice should be schools. In an ideal world our schools should be able to pick up where parents leave off and help our children to become happy and worthwhile adults but many schools simply don’t.

For a start they are constrained by the National curriculum which is more about ratings than education.
It would be better if head teachers were given a bit more freedom to decide how their schools operated and to teach what they felt was relevant to their children rather than have to roll out the same old rubbish year after year.

My son’s school isn’t doing him much good at all. Far too much time is given to things of little value.

RE bothers me. The National curriculum states that education in Britain should be broadly Christian based. Incredible really being as they now claim that we are a multicultural society.
Personally I think that religion should be taught only from an educational perspective and never fed to children as though it were either true or right. I don’t believe that it is ethical to indoctrinate young people who have, by law to be there in your care whilst you are working under the guise of an educator.

French also gives me cause for concern. What the hell is that about? Once again, we have people from all over the place living here in Britain and still we insist on pushing children through French, it makes no sense to me.

What I would like to see my child coming home from school with are some skills that will help him navigate through life.

How many schools have a garden or better yet, a farm? How much emphasis is placed on caring for the environment or inspiring children to get out and experience nature?

That was a rhetorical question I know. There are two things there which I believe are fundamentally important for young people to learn about and they are hardly touched on at all by many secondary schools.

A subject that affects all of us is ecology; it’s a very small word and it’s a shame that it isn’t bigger, so that we couldn’t fail to notice it.

Does it make sense to you, that it is the law of the land, that our children must learn about the Eucharist but there is nothing to say that they must learn about the carbon and its effect on our environment?

My son has almost come to the end of his first year at secondary school. He has been out on a field trip twice in that year. The first visit was to the Catholic Church across the road and the second was to the Anglican Church down in the town. Now you know why they say that some children think that chicken breasts are grown in polythene bags at the back of Tesco.