At least this school doesn’t pretend it’s not a prison:
Furious parents and local councillors today blasted a school after it unveiled plans to build a ‘prison-style’ block for 12 of its most notorious troublemakers.
Tudor Grange Academy in Worcester, West Midlands – which has the second highest expulsion rate in England – has applied to convert a disused office block into an ‘alternative education’ facility.
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Tags: ‘alternative education’ facility, Behavior Management, Behaviour Management, Classroom Behavior, Classroom Management, Consequences for troublemaking students, disused office block into an ‘alternative education’ facility, Education, Excluding troublemaking students, Jail, Prison, school to build a ‘prison-style’ block, second highest expulsion rate in England, Student behavior, Tudor Grange Academy in Worcester prison block, Tudor Grange Academy in Worcester second highest expulsion rate in England
Topical Teaching 
September 11, 2012 at 4:59 pm |
This madness is the end result of making teachers responsible for that over which they have no control. Once upon a time, I remember having control over what I taught my students. The state provided a curriculum. It was not mandatory. It was not exhaustive. It provided a course of lessons from which teachers were encouraged to select. There was a bit of guidance about what was appropriate for each grade and about the need to lead (“educare” in Latin) children from what they know into that which they do not know in gradual, manageable steps. I was free to use the curriculum according to the developmental level of my students.
Nobody seems to care about this any more. We need more rigour in our syllabus. OK, algebra in kindergarten. That should do it. I exaggerate only to illustrate the kind of thinking prevalent in education today.
By grade 8 there is a large cohort of students rapidly becoming disengaged from the educational process. In the stampede for rigour, these unfortunate children have been left behind. Couple this with the stress of simply being a teenager these days and one needs little imagination to suspect the source of an epidemic of self harm and even suicide.
We need to take the pressure cooker approach out of education. We need to stop trying to teach more and more earlier and faster. A significant proportion of our students are suffocating – and for what?
As far as a school “prison” block is concerned, such ideas are strongly indicative of then fact that we have lost the plot educationally. I have said it before and it’s worth repeating, school should proceed at the pace of a garden or a farm, not at the pace of a factory.
I’m almost on the scrapheap. I still enjoy the occasional casual day in various schools from Prep to Grade 12. The response from students, when you take the time to show you are interested in them as real persons, instead of a repository, to be stuffed with as much untold useless knowledge as quickly as possible, that response indicates that the spark to learn and to be creative has not yet been extinguished. Believe me this extinction is rapidly approaching. We have about 5 years at the current rate of degeneration. It’s not about how much you spend on education (though adequate funding is vital). It’s not about a national curriculum. It’s not about mass testing and league tables. It’s not about performance pay for show ponies. It is about how much we care for our kids and whether we want to take the trouble to properly train teachers in the craft of their vocation. The political rhetoric is not good. It indicates that teachers are not valued and are to blame for a political situation not of their making.