The kindest teacher I ever met was AFTER my children had left school and were being Home Educated. Mr. Strawbridge was our Educational Welfare Officer. By law we didn't actually have to let him into our home, nor even let him meet our children, but we welcomed him and he became our friend.

He made my children feel like a million dollars. I've written about him before, but he's worth mentioning again. He lavished praise on them, gave my daughter his entire collection of old National Geographic magazines, because he knew she'd love them (and she did, indeed still has them at the age of 26)

He told us terribly sad stories of other children who'd been kicked out of the education system....and because they'd been expelled, he was legally bound to give them 25 hours a week of free education. He did this job because he cared desperately about those who'd been so damaged by a system he knew was terribly wrong.

He had been a teacher, as had his wife. Their careers were cut short when she was in a terrible car accident, which left her paralysed from the waist down.

We went to tea with them both one day, as he wanted us to meet her. He'd spent over 20 years caring for her by that time..They told us of their grandchildren, who were still only very young, 6 and younger, but already their parents were paranoid about them doing homework, studying, moving home to get them into better schools etc...

They could see the stress being piled on their grandchildren and the stress of their children too, who were so deeply anxious, even then, that if their children didn't do perfectly at school, they'd never succeed in life...

Mr. Sawbridge told us how nearly all the good teachers had left now, like rats leaving a sinking ship, and that the entire system was imploding from within..He was very down about it, very angry too..and very upset over children like mine who'd suffered so deeply because of the Insanity now within the UK education system, where the presssure on teachers is passed down to the children, who are seen merely as stumbling blocks to so many teachers keeping their jobs these days...for if those teachers do NOT get The Results, then their jobs are severely at risk.

Lessons are almost 'controlled' on a daily basis by The National Curriculum...indeed, New Labour's aim, when in power, was for all schools to teach the same lessons on the same days, countrywide...I only knew about this because of the wonderful 'Education Otherwise' informing parents of everything that was happening in the education system. They kept, and still do keep, an incredibly close eye on what's going on.....

It is A System Out Of Control, where children are forced to study things they have no interest in, forced to do homework, on TOP of a whole day of being at school, forced to take examinations, forced to study endlessly for those examinations and then forced to view themselves, and each other, as a Human Success or a Human Failure PURELY on the grades given to them by those who mark examination papers.

The pain and damage done to so many unbelievably creative children is mind-blowing! They are so often those who are sitting on the streets selling The Big Issue, if they are lucky, or injecting heroin, if they are not....

They are often The Poets, The Songwriters, The Musicians, The Dancers, The Acrobats, The Artists, The Healers, The Storytellers...

Academically they may fail in The System, for they are NOT allowed to BE WHO THEY ARE. Some will find their way through and go on to become Academic in their own way, in their own time, later in life, where they are no longer judged, where their talent has already been able to develop....

But the pain of being called Stupid, Slow, Lazy, Troublemakers, stays with many their whole lives long...

And the very people who have made them FEEL this way are those that society deems to be TEACHERS!

The GOOD, NATURAL Teachers teach a child how to live, how to love, how to have faith in themselves, to see the GOOD in them, the TALENT in them, the BEAUTY of them!

The BAD UNNATURAL Teachers still teach, but *they* teach children to have NO confidence in themselves, to see themselves as stupid, thick, ignorant and a total failure. They also teach others to laugh at them, when they publicly humiliate them in class, thus fostering the belief that 'stupid people deserve ridicule'...

My children had WAY TOO MANY Bad Teachers. My daughter is still, to this day, aged 26, affected by her art teacher who told her that her work was 'crap'. The teacher loved Picasso, my daughter loved The Great Masters. She is a Natural Artist, but she rarely paints now...and even the wondrous paintings she HAS done remain hidden away from the eyes of others, even though, when some HAVE seen her work they gasp in disbelief. She will NEVER believe she can paint, even though it is her very Soul....

She is a deeply intelligent human being, a deeply sensitive one too, as is my gentle son. School is there to DE-SENSITISE children, so it seems to me, not to Nurture them...and that, in my book of life,is very sick and very, very worrying....

But hey, what do I know, eh...for 'Teacher Knows Best'!

Yeah, right...