Dream School?

Last night, owing to circumstances beyond my control, I found myself watching Jamie's Dream School, the jaw-dropping 'reality show' in which the endlessly irritating but well-intentioned Oliver tries to 'rescue' teenagers who have been failed by the school system - not to mention, in most cases, their families and themselves. The aim, oddly, is to get them back into education, though it's hard to see why. Whatever its intentions, the series has done one thing spectacularly well - exposed the utter rottenness of a system that can take over the 'education' of children for ten years and, at great expense to the taxpayer, turn them out not only uneducated but also to all appearances uneducable and unemployable. What, you might well ask, have the teachers been doing with them? Presumably acting merely as custodians and classroom riot controllers, certainly not going so far as to teach them anything (least of all how to behave). To judge by the wet dishcloth of a headmaster who hovers over the Dream School experiment, little or nothing has been offered in the way of discipline or structure - the very things these unfortunate children need to lift them out of their circumstances and preoccupations, offering an oasis of order in otherwise chaotic lives, and opening up the prospect of - yes - social mobility, the Coalition's latest buzz phrase. This was how the Victorians turned even less promising human material into literate youngsters capable of learning and of holding down a job. This was indeed how the class-blind, background-blind grammar schools gave children from poor and troubled backgrounds a way out - a ladder. Now all that has gone, replaced by the 'child-centred', child-failing orthodoxies of the 'education' establishment. The behaviour, attitude and wilful ignorance on show in Dream School demonstrate the results all too graphically. In the light of which, this story should come as no surprise...