Interfering pen-pushers should keep their hands off our children
With reference to obsolete education, especially with foreign degrees ('Principal's US degree 'insufficient'', Education Post, November 24), sadness seems to hang like a shroud over our schools when administrators declare that they are the ones with 'real' knowledge of what our children (and adolescents, and adults) need.
They - and they alone - can decide who should teach whatever they 'curriculise' to be taught. And who is incompetent.
I'm sure I am. I completed my Certificate in Educational Psychology in 1973. According to office wisdom that makes it - 'as it was more than two decades ago' - obsolete.
It's true, there have been changes - but always for the better? In our study time we looked outward, to the new drive for social education with Marcuse, Habermas, Adorno, but also the practical application of this in Ivan Illich's 'de-schooling' in Cuernavaca, to Pablo Freire's 'children's survival learning through involvement' in the favelas of Brazil, to Alexander O'Neill's 'Summerhill' and its freedom in closeness and contact. But that is all 'obsolete' now.
And the contact, the closeness, the care and feeling? 'Out! Out, brief candle. Give a child that falls and hurts a knee a cuddle - and beware! And children? In Massachusetts, and spreading further, all games like tag or catch are banned: 'We want games in which children do not touch each other.' What is that? Mad?