Quote Originally Posted by king2005 View Post
Its most likely the parents faults. If your not going to help your kid with school or force them, then it YOUR OWN fault your kid is failing.
That could well be true, however I think a lot of it also depends on the classroom atmosphere. It's pretty hard for one student actually wanting to get on with work whilst everyone else is trying to make the teacher's life as difficult as possible. It's certainly true of the state system here that the bright kids get lost amongst the crowd.

Quote Originally Posted by blue
Maybe we should steer our education system away from getting every kid into college. Not every student is going to go to higher education so why waste money trying to get every snotty kid into college?
You took the words right out of my mouth as far as the university system over here goes. We're a little country with a lot of people, and we simply don't have the places available to meet the government's quotas of having so many ethnic minority/dyslexic/autistic/deprived background students before academic potential and course suitability is even assessed.

I can't say I agree with the topic of the post, as I think teachers in failing schools deal with some horrendous situations that they really shouldn't have to deal with. Knives, physical violence, and just the other day I was reading about a teacher who was put through a trial on rape allegations (she was in fact stalked by three of her students, who then, with the whiff of compensation, decided to blame her when she gave them the cold shoulder.) However, I also don't think it's much worse than the millions of pounds poured into these schools to give them fancy new 'academy' names, and facilities that are usually graffiti'ed or burned down in due course. I don't know how to save the state system, but I don't believe in either of these methods.