This was the title of a St. George's House seminar\u00a0then Tuesday which\u00a0I went to by kind invitation of the NUS. \u00a0 A great setting, of course, and we met in a room (the Vicar's Hall) where it seems it was \"not impossible\" that Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare might have both been at the same time. \u00a0Well, if so, I hope they had been\u00a0better prepared for their meeting than we were.<\/p>\n
The answer to the first question is, of course \"No\", but then unfairness seems to be built into the human condition, unless that is, you can have control of your genes, parents, domicile, luck, etc. \u00a0Is it\u00a0just?<\/em> would have been a better question, but that wasn't on offer. \u00a0As it was, much time was wasted by the\u00a0bien-peasant<\/em> teachers present railing against the existence of independent schools \u2013 as if anything could be done about that, save, making all schools independent of government orthodoxies and political prejudice, of course.<\/p>\n Fit for purpose<\/em> is a different matter, and is much the more important issue. \u00a0Indeed that was why I went, thinking that we might get the chance to explore how children \/ schools \/ the curriculum could be helped to face up to existential issues such as climate change, the challenge offered by the sustainable development goals, and the fact that the rest of the world exists. \u00a0No chance; too many people were fixated by the problems of teacher supply about which \"something needs to be done\" (again!), and by teacher training more generally, or by disagreements over how good \/ bad Finnish schools have now become. \u00a0It would be easy to blame the rather self-indulgent co-ordinator for all this, as\u00a0he just followed where most people wanted to go (apart from reading some very dodgy verse \u2013 which he thought was edgy) in the lunch break.<\/p>\n Here are the highlights:<\/p>\n That wasn't much to show for a day, but happily was\u00a0...<\/p>\n Not an entirely wasted day, then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was the title of a St. George's House seminar\u00a0then Tuesday which\u00a0I went to by kind invitation of the NUS. \u00a0 A great setting, of course, and we met in a room (the Vicar's Hall) where it seems it was...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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