No, Dave, they *don't* get weeded out at all.

The good teachers are leaving...in DROVES! Sick and tired of tick boxes, rules, regulations, checks, paperwork and being *controlled*!

Did you know that it was New Labour's divine thought to create a system where EVERY class was learning the same thing, on the same day, throughout the country?

No?

Well, check with the Home Education societies and find out what the f*** is *really* going on. Read story after story of kids driven to the edge of despair because of constant pressure.

What angers me most of all is that teachers themselves carry SUCH power! It's a power they REFUSE to use though. They could stop the SATS test overnight, by simply refusing to do them. They could do the same with GCSEs and A levels too, with all of the crap that this Orwellian Government and the B*stard Ones before that, have been churing out for decades!

A new way of thinking............

What is school actually for?   Think about it, deeply. What is it actually there FOR?

We are all born with a natural desire to learn, to explore, to work things out. It is instinctive, utterly instinctive.

Where it goes so wrong is when children are herded up into concrete buildings, made to sit down nearly all day long, in one place, and *study* things in which they have no interest whatsoever. They want to be outside, learning about life, having fun, enjoying their childhoods, but no, we still do what the Victorians did and make them sit and damn well learn what *they* have decided they damn well should.

IF a school does its job correctly, there would never be *any* need for any child to do homework, or to take exams. ALL that would be needed would be a Certificate of Education which states the strengths and positive outlook of every child.

Exams STOP kids from learning. For nearly 4/5 years of their lives, they simply learn enough facts to get them through a useless bloody exam. And what does that exam prove? That the child knows about their subject in depth? Of course it doesn't. It merely proves that on that particular day, they got up, felt well enough to think straight and were lucky enough to get some questions which they *did* know the answers to. Others may have got up feeling like shite that day, and known far more about the subject than others, but were unlucky in the questions they were asked, or scared shitless about the whole darn exam in the first place....but..for that, they are labelled and stamped FAILURE and made to feel an inch high and totally worthless, because they've let the school down!

Sod the school letting the child down! All the school wants is results...and our children have become the HUMAN RESOURCES that provide those results, so that headmasters and teachers can keep their jobs and crow about how great their school is.

Sorry to sound a little negative here, but I've seen so much shite, read so much shite about the education system, been right slap bang in the middle of it, had a child who almost gave up on life because of it, and who even to this day still judges herself on what her 'teachers' told her...

It's ingrained into the soul! That feeling that you're useless, stupid, slow minded, thick...Geez!!!!!!! And it's ingrained by prats who have no feelings, no thoughts or concerns about the damage they do to sensitive children, to creative children who don't fit 'the average child' box.

Teachers are stressed to the limits, so any kid who gives them grief gets it, bigtime....No thought is given to that child, to WHY that child is behaving that way...Everyone just wants and needs a quiet life, apart from the kids, who have to do what they're told.

They spend the majority of their day in hot, hostile, uncomfortable surroundings, often having to still even ask permission to remove their jerseys (in Sidmouth that crap still exists), or go to the toilet. They're made to wear uniforms they hate, which are so often hot and uncomfortable instead of light and airy. In Sidmouth, if your tie's not straight, you get balled out. WHY? Who the f*** gives a f*** about a tie anyway? Why the **** do kids still have to wear the bloody things???

So many people cannot let go of 'school'. They cannot ever think of life without school. They cannot imagine that life itself is the only school that we were ever meant to have in the first place, long before we built the enormous, sterile factory farms where our children now spend the vast majority of their childhoods, often having breakfast and tea there too, because their parents have been stolen away to work, work, work, to afford their houses and the long list of Corporate Must Have's to enable them to live their 'life' and prove to their kids how much they love them!

And people wonder why kids are going into schools with guns and losing the plot????????

Tell me, as an adult..would you take on a job where you had to take work home every single day? Would you take on a job where you got paid nothing for that extra work? Where you were examined all the time, made to sit examinations, judged, packaged and labelled 'success' or 'failure' at the end of your 13 year 'trial period', given detentions, not allowed to talk back, not allowed to ask questions when you needed to, bullied, threatened......etc..etc.etc..

Nowadays you can't take your kids on holiday outside school holiday times. The fact that most parents can't afford the holiday times, as the bastards charge twice as much, doesn't matter...You are made to feel that your child will 'suffer' if you do that, and never catch up again, thus ruining their lives forevermore....

What a load of tosh!

But what worries me is that people actually believe it!

Yes, we have created a population SO damned stupid that they believe everything they're told! They shudder and shake over school these days, feeling they'll be reported on for this or that...that they're being 'watched'...and you know what..they bloody well are.

NEVER has this sort of thing happened before, but it's happening now, right under our noses...and our children drink themselves senseless from a younger and younger age, whilst idiotic parents stand around going "Awwww..bless. It was just the same in my day!"

Well it wasn't.

The NHS wasn't in crisis over drunks in city centres. The police weren't in crisis about it either..and as the years creep by and the damage done by drink starts to raise its ugly head, and it will do so, we're going to be in even deeper crisis.

Children should LOVE to learn. It should be one of the most inspirational things in their lives. A world of information, a beautiful world to discover, to unravel, to marvel over...but they never get to see it, heads bent over desks, over books, studying for the next examination on that Conveyer Belt of Life....whilst those who create the examination packages and ideas get richer and richer and richer.

And then, they try to get a job and find those examinations mean diddly squat, because they want NVQs or Degrees, but only degrees from the *right* universities, because employers have sussed out that most degrees mean nothing, and so many of the people who have them can't put a coherent thought together any more..and so the testing and the examining continue..until you can't even get a job selling sausage rolls without various bits of paper to *prove* you're able to do it...

Meanwhile, the next generation is getting ready for their 'schooling' and the next lot of switching off and dumbing down begins...

It begins in secondary school mostly, not primary, although those are getting more and more serious and tested...

The day we decide to set our children free from all this stress and crap, to realise there is another way, is the day we, in the Western World, will have finally grown up.

(Apologies for any mistakes in this, but I've not got the time to check it through right now)

In short, give a child a LOVE of learning, of reading, of wonder, then set them free...and watch them do so much of it all themselves.