Total Pageviews

Sunday 2 December 2012

Questions And Answers

On Friday I was down in Oxford for the regional final of the Kid's Lit Quiz. As it's a 3 hour drive from my part of the world, I decided to make a day of it and visited the fantastic new Barefoot Books studio for lunch first. I wasn't sure what the quiz was all about really but by the time I left at 6 for the long drive home, I'd had a glimpse of a reality that the persistent critics of schools refuse to see.

The event was brilliantly organised - 30-odd teams of 4 pupils from different schools competing to answer questions on all manner of children's and YA literature - and even as part of a team of authors we struggled to match the scores of most of the teams. The winners scored 90/100 on questions based around themes as wide-ranging as France and Aesop's Fables. The children were bright, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about reading and literature.

This morning I tuned into the Andrew Marr Show briefly until Osborne mentioned how his government was 'transforming' a school system that was letting children down. Well, on Friday I saw at first hand children who were highly motivated and far more knowledgeable about literature than I was at their age (or am now, if you care to check the final scores). The constant peddling of doom about schools and 'standards' for the last twenty-five years has left a huge hole in our national self-confidence. Our elected leaders have hijacked the purpose of education. No longer is it seen as the 'drawing out' and building upon of talents and enthusiasms but merely as a means to produce economically useful adults.

But Friday's experience galvanised my belief that if politicians stopped rubbishing teachers, schools and 'standards' (and by association, children's achievements) and placed some real trust in our schools and children, we'd do just fine without George's kind of 'transformation'.

No comments:

Post a Comment