Fluent Radical

According to The Telegraph, a school’s isolation unit has been likened to Guantanamo Bay.

The room is painted totally black. The walls, the partitions, the window blinds – everything was black.

The partitions down one side created four cells where school kids are expected to sit at a desk all day.

I would rather take my son out of school than see him spend time in that dungeon.

Gosh. I recall on one occasion I was required to stand alone in the lobby of the school for one hour as a punishment for something or other. At the time it just annoyed me, but now I realize that it was in fact a shockingly medieval form of punishment.  Boredom plus public humiliation. Perhaps I should sue the school under human rights laws.

Get real. Boredom + public humiliation are just about the only punishments that you can legitimately apply in UK schools. Next they’ll be asking that teachers refrain from using sarcasm to humiliate kids in their classes.

News from Oxford University, the great appeasers:

Oxford colleges are to lose their 800-year-old right to select undergraduates in response to Government pressure to admit more students from state schools and lower social classes.

I tried and failed to get into Cambridge twice. Guess what? It never even crossed my mind that it had anything to do with me being from a state school. Fact: not until right now, 5 years later, have I considered the possibility. And rejected it.

Also is news:

Candidates will be able to state a college preference once they have been offered a place but in principle all successful applicants will be centrally ranked on the basis of their performance, then distributed randomly.

Idea: what OU needs … is a sorting hat!

Actually this leads to an interesting idea (it’s like that lateral thinking technique). If you’ve got a school with ‘houses’, as I understand some extremely posh schools did/do (anyone know?), then you should give all entrants an in-depth psych test. Then house 1 can be the studious and hard working, house 2 can be the sporty types, house 3 can be the irritating prodigy geeks, and house 4 can be the party animals. Wouldn’t that make school life go much more smoothly?

Ravikiran Rao writes on the quality of blogs, and arguments against regulation. Read to the end to see how he turns it around.