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Question for parents
• I picked up a copy of the Tribune on the Tube. It made for very interesting reading.
I found the tributes to Rose Hacker particularly touching as I was raised to value the elders in society as they have the experience of life behind them. I wish more elderly people’s lives were celebrated in the same way.
I also read the letters about the discrimination displayed by church schools when picking new students (Now it’s time to move away from segregated schooling, February 15).
Both sets of information were paradoxical. The first celebrated one woman’s initiative to make the world a better place despite her disadvantages as a child. The letters blamed parents for the discrepancies being created in society by their choices.
Surely, if Rose Hacker’s life has shown us anything, it is that a person’s capacity for learning and contributing to society is not affected by age, education, environment or money. Rose Hacker’s drive resulted from her own desire to change things around her, not from a teacher’s guidance or from her friends’ ideals.
The more children rely on teachers and their parents to make a subject interesting, the least likely they are to apply themselves enthusiastically to a work environment or university-level education, where students are numbers, not names and personalities.
Organisations such as CfBT Education Trust are joining up with the Department for Children, Schools and Families to create special programmes for gifted children and initiatives for adult learning. Academies are popping up all over the country, sometimes overshadowing the reasonable secondary school down the road. Despite all these measures, the results every year do not show significant improvement.
I would like to ask the people who wrote in encouraging parents to send their children to the secular primary and secondary schools for some advice.
My dilemma is this: if I have children tomorrow, having the realisation that it is their choice to learn, achieve, take advantage of the facilities available to them, keep good company and buy into the ethos of the school, can I still blame the other parents for choosing the quieter religious school or the teachers for not trying hard enough to entertain my kids if they turn out to be juvenile delinquents or fail to obtain qualifications for employment?
AA
Carshalton, Surrey
(Name and address supplied)
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