Richard Dawkins on Radio 5
I’m listening to him on Radio 5 at the moment. He talks a lot of sense.
He has just said that we want free-thinking schools, where scirnce is to the fore. I went to one of those. It was called Minchenden. Such don’t exist in the public sector too much these days. So Minchenden was a grammar school, but that was just incidental. We had good teachers, who gave us the basics and made us think both in and out of the box.
The Anonymous Widower 
Ofsted dont like and dont encourage free thinking. I know of an excellent head who was vilified by them because he didnt conform to the norm, the children were encouraged to think for themselves, and encouraged to learn self discipline rather than imposed discipline. When these children went up to high school, they were streets ahead of other children in such things as remember to take the books they needed for the day, making decisions about things. And theye didnt need an “Every child matters” national policy, every child really did matter. One incident I remember, there had been two deaths within the school, one was a member of non-teaching staff, one was a parent of a child, within a couple of days of each other. The very wise head knew that children would be questioning in their minds why did it happen, what happens now. He was a Christian, but knew that giving the Christian answer wasnt the right approach. Instead, for the next couple of weeks in assembly he looked at lots of different ideas – he did one related to the Christian faith, but alongside many other beliefs, including such things as Native American. he said that his aim was that each child was able to take what they needed to in order find their own answer.
Comment by Liz P | August 1, 2010 |