Ofsted and the one-trick pony

What are schools for ?

A product of a boys' grammar school in the sixties I was about 14 years old when it dawned that the school and its teachers had no interest whatsoever in me as a young person, and saw me merely as another exam statistic, and a chance to enhance its Oxbridge tally.

My education was highly effective in transmitting undue deference to authority, however crackpot and undeserving, and also in teaching a whole bunch of irrelevancies which were twenty years out of date even then.

As far as my school was concerned, literature stopped at some date as close to Shakespeare's death as teachers could pretend, while Shakespeare himself was close to sainthood.

Science made little recognition of Rutherford splitting the atom, and had all the excitement of a museum storeroom.

Geography (ah ! geography !) was an endless list of places and products (Shotton: Steel. Nottingham: lace.) and the real interest came from watching chalk dust drift Brownian dances in the tired sunlight of lost afternoons.

The masters (yes, masters) taught with a stern humourlessness and reinforced discipline with casual brutality. That is not too strong a word and is carefully chosen.

It was clear to me then that my school was serving some purpose other than my development or interest, which Is why I became so frequently absent both from it and within it. Perfecting anonymous and effortless invisibility was a key lesson from those days, and it has served me well through my entire life.

Then I must have hated learning. Not at all. I hated being taught, which is different. Particularly being taught by the authoritarian pygmies who mistook fear for respect and derived their power from status rather than stature.

That school would have pleased the Saints Michael (Gove and Wilshaw). Wilshaw, playing the role of over-assertive Baptist to Gove's Messiah is famous for his view that if staff morale is low, then you must be doing something right. There is something so profoundly dysfunctional about this remark that it could form the basis of a psychology module.

But what are schools for ? Merely preparation for work ? Preparation for life ? Personal development of the students ? Creating a passion for discovery ? Matching the educational achievements (though let's hope not the child suicide rates) of the far East ?

If we have a frankly coercive school system where parents are fined for children's absence, and where attendance is compulsory throughout childhood, then we owe more to the kids than the 'achievement' of a nugatory bunch of certificates (or not) and the illusion of a good job.

We do not have the right to waste years of life in compulsory education without giving something of real substance in return, without providing a real service to children and their parents.

Instead of tinkering at the margins of education, and wasting unthinkable piles of cash on discredited and doctrinaire inspection, maybe we should start again, and think about what we could really provide of use and value with a decade and more of captive time, preparing children for a future we can barely envisage.