Yeah, I like those new conservative leaders in the British politics. Take that former leader of the Tories - William Hague now too cheering for Merkel. Thatcher had a winner written all over her, and now it's just losers finding their niche to make careers, gain privilege and get rich. I guess if you get enough of those loonie authoritarian loser types assorted together in one pile, by sheer numerical advantage they become winners and drag everyone else down with them.
No I disagree, just like there are a range of abilities amongst children, there are a range of abilities amongst teachers. The best teachers should be placed with the best children to produce the best output of the next generation of professionals. I don't care about some children "feeling dumped" upon. I care about the best for Britain. You can do your best for the children that aren't so bright but dragging down the clever children in the name of socialist policies is not acceptable to me.
That part I agree with completely (I am certainly no fan of the 'mixed ability teaching' idea - that just fails everyone), but you don't have to drag down the academically gifted in order to do good things for the less academically gifted. The best teachers can be used to teach the best kids and give the best help to those who need it a little more - they can teach more than one class, and they can help other teachers to develop too. You can do both, and you can do both within the same school without building the same kind of social divide as grammar schools inevitably create. Kids of different academic ability can socialise and do non-academic things together, seeing each other as equal human beings but just with different kinds of talents rather than as 'good people 'and 'rubbish people' or as 'normal people' and 'arrogant snobs' or whatever. The problem with some systems is that the best teachers don't end up helping the best kids, but the kids from the wealthiest backgrounds, because they are usually the ones who very often end up doing best in the very early stages of school for various reasons (before the school system has had the chance to redress the balance and allow kids who start with disadvantages to show what potential they actually have). That is something that ought to be avoided.
Well said Jack. Many forget that she changed Britain from 'the sick man of Europe' back to a country to be respected and admired, rather than pitied - or worse, ridiculed. And as to the small-minded 'milk' sneer - she cancelled it because it was being wasted on a grand scale, and it was being wasted because kids don't like warm milk. Who does!!
Without doubt she did some good things. She also did some pretty awful things, but more than that the way she want about doing some of those 'good things' was wrong - she left large parts of the UK utterly devastated, with no jobs, no hope, and chances and no help. She left whole communities with nothing, and whole regions in real poverty. She in large part created the problem of 'welfare dependency' because of the dogmatic and vindictive way she shut down industry (sometimes even profitable parts of it) in order to destroy the unions, leaving generations of people who had always worked hard for a living with absolutely no opportunity to continue to do that. Yes, the unions were too powerful (and too political), and yes industry was a mess, and yes the economy was in a mess, and yes that needed to be addressed. She addressed it, but in a way that created as many future problems as it solved, and in a way that was almost inhumanly cold, calculated and unsympathetic, and ultimately short-sighted.
That has reminded me that my sister and b-i-l were able to buy their little end of terrace (of 7 situated on the outskirts of an estate) council house; before they all purchased it was typically nondescript, but with pride of ownership on the part of all of the buyers they've been made individual, are well maintained, and in the summer months the little front gardens are a joy to behold. Subsequently the borough council was criticised for not using the accrued revenue to build new community housing.
