The Telegraph reports that pupils are dropping out of language learning. As a result of changes in the law, they are no longer required to take languages at GCSE level. This is a terrible thing for this country, where we are already embarrassingly ill-equipped for the global marketplace, and even fail to grasp our own grammar sometimes.
Our clueless schools minister pleads: “We do not want to go back to the old days when we tried to force feed languages to 15-year-olds who had no aptitude or interest“. Oh, that’s just great. Does that mean we’ll drop science next because the students aren’t interested in it? How about we abandon teaching them history – it’s a dry and dusty subject after all, and surely not going to catch their attention. Come to think of it – why make them go to school at all?
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Schools are vaccination programs designed to prevent potentially dangerous outbreaks of understanding, interest, and enthusiasm.
At school I was successively inocculated against music, drama, art, sports, foreign languages, english lit., biology, geography and history. Due to some sort of unusual personal biochemistry, however, my immunizations against latin, english composition, physics, maths, and chemistry were only partially effective, and I refused to accept the injection of computing antibodies entirely fortunately, the effects of this obstinancy were overcome by a few years experience in the industry, and of the politics in the open source movement.
Sorry, feeling a bit cynical ATM, but really, how much of the stuff you’re really good at did you learn and enjoy at school?
Ironically – French and English