General Chat

'to say all private schools produce twerps'

I don't think that has ever been said!

We have all just voiced our own opinions, as you have with the CA Stephen Harper

I consider the biggest twerp in our federal governemnt to be the PM, Stephen harper ..................


and he went to a public high school ................... ie, a state school



so twerps don't always come from private schools ........................


to say all private schools produce twerps is a terrible bias to have :-)

John Cleese's alma mata

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_College

Ronnie Barker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Oxford_High_School_for_Boys

and Ronnie Corbett

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_High_School,_Edinburgh

No comment.

Thank god for YouTube it is a long while since anything on BBC3 or the comedy slot on R4 made me laugh.

....and surely come under the umbrella of twerp? :-D

Who we consider to be 'twerps' is purely a matter of opinion or is their scientific evidence to substantiate a definition

In my opinion Boris is an imbecile, halfwit, schlemiel, nincompoop etc..........

:-D

Boris is good fun, highly intelligent and a trillion light years away from being any kind of twerp. Don't let the crazy hair do and hail-fellow-well-met buffoonery fool you. It is all part of an act a false skin he is all terminator underneath..

He scares the hell out of brave Dave. He is def. not what Mrs T once called " the wets" but rather SuperDry.

:-D :-D :-D Chris.
Reminds me of the 'I look up to him' sketch :-D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2k1iRD2f-c

'Major' public school, 'Minor' public school, state school

This 'updated' one is excellent too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSahEDRjvw

I remember Ian Hislop being interviewed and he said he attended a MINOR Public School....Got right up my ex husbands nose as it was his old school and Ian was in his year. Not that they were ever friends, Ian had more sense I expect:-D

Chris

Actually, getting back to the West Sussex/Winchester College mentoring.
Winchester College tried to get involved with the Duke of Edinburgh's Scheme - which isn't run by the Academy, but by volunteers, but, nevertheless they believed their input was necessary.
So, their children, and tutor went out with the 'locals' for a practice walk.
The local children aren't allowed to take mobile phones - they're meant to use maps and a compass. The Winchester College children were encouraged to use their mobiles as 'it was easier'!! :-|

So, more Winchester College children would pass their DofE than 'local' children, but they couldn't read a map!!
Is that really better education?

The volunteers decided Winchester College are no longer allowed to 'assist' with their DofE students - they'd rather the children passed on their own merits.

Rollo, MP's are on the TV a lot.
If you are going to give a few examples - let me give you one.

Boris Johnson - a twerp who's got where he is through friends/family/connections, or a serious, intelligent, decisive, hard-hitting MP?

By TV public school twerps do you mean Jeremy Paxman ?
Surely not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvern_College

Or maybe you are alluding to Stephen Hawking who is very good at working the media as well as being easily our top notch man of science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Albans_School_%28Hertfordshire%29

Then again you may be thinking about James Dyson the vacuum cleaner impresario not averse to maths and amazing things you can do with a screwdriver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_School

Chips on shoulders are a heavy weight to bear.

Gins :-D :-D :-D

As I said at the beginning - my brothers went to private school, and I wouldn't call them twerps (not very often, anyway) :-D
They certainly didn't use the 'old boys network'. One is a bonsai pot maker, who wants to retire - but people keep asking for his pots.
The other is retired, but spent some time as a print worker for a newspaper, then worked at Esso - in a manual job, and is now a driver for the local community bus. :-D

'I never said the privately educated were all twerps'

Maggie, I'm sure you are right, it just appears that most who are, are on TV!

My opinion ;-)

Teaching on Saturdays, with the top few percent, who volunteer to go to the lessons isn't teaching in the a class on a normal day to day basis.
They mooted teaching 'normal' classes, but so far haven't.

I never said the privately educated were all twerps, I said most.
A lot have absolutely no idea how the rest of us live, and quite frankly don't appear to care, or even want to know.
MP's are a prime example of this.

Illiteracy is no new thing, either but is costing the country a lot of money, and damaging the lives of many.

Statistics from 2010:
20% of the adult population is functionally illiterate and a third cannot add up two three-figure numbers
The prison population is some 85,000. More than three-quarters of them cannot read, write or count to the standard expected of an 11-year-old.
It is difficult enough to get a job in the UK at the moment. It is even more so if you've just come out of prison.
The rate of reoffending drops from 90% to 10% if the person leaves prison and goes straight into the world of work.

Every reoffender whose act lands back inside costs the country £250,000.
And that is before we think of the human cost, the disruption to victims' lives, the dislocation of our society.

So, more money spent on state education, including smaller classes, would not only benefit society as a whole, it would save the country an awful lot of money.

One of my rellies went to Wykeham's School. It does not seem to have done him any harm - he is now a senior hospital consultant with a pretty comfy nest nr Hursley.

Is this the W Sussex twinning scheme you mean? It seems to be working ok.

http://www.winchestercollege.org/midhurst-rother-college

I doubt if any hard pressed state schools teach A levels in classes of 35. Although it is a long long while since I taught maths 20 is about top for A level, 30 for GCSE with an optimal max of 16/25. Highly talented kids need to spend at least some time in much smaller classes. By and large state schools utterly fail in this which is why so few of their kids make it to to Oxbridge/Russel unis.

Kids with educational problems also need extra resources and small classes at least some of the time. State schools mostly fail here too. Instead the whole class is dragged along bored out of its mind at the speed of the slowest who are unhappy and disruptive.

It is often said that the failure of the UK education system ( compared to say German or Scandinavia) is down to not growing the tallest poppies as tall as they might be. Though there is some truth in that the real failure is the abysmal level of maths and English of so many. Foreign language teaching is so bad/non-existent that even the Foreign Office / GCHQ et al are having to scrape around for people who can speak Russian, Arabic or even French and German.

A modern economy cannot afford to have a grunge class with as much as 25% of the population. It may suit Cameron & Osbourne's vision of Britain but it is not for real. The choice is to fix it or to go on selling off the country to the Chinese.

Thus it is disappointing to see Labour already committing itself to paying for better primary education (hooray) from uni funds (boo) and caving in to the demands of the teaching unions. Yes, people can teach very well indeed without PGCE. If James May decides to become a teacher he probably won't lack for offers.

One thing is for sure. So long as attitudes to education are based on such sterile and outdated ideas as "our people and the plebs" or conversely "public school boys are all twerps" we won't get anywhere.

carpe diem

Well said, Maggie.

I object to public and private schools registering as charities and getting tax relief.

http://oedeboyz.com/2014/08/29/a-very-unusual-charity-eton-college/

Of course the number of pupils in a class is significant!
If you've got 16 pupils, you notice them. If you've got 35, some will slip through the net.
An Academy in West Sussex is 'twinned' with Winchester College. One of their plans is for the teachers to swap - ie Academy teachers teach at Winchester, Winchester teachers teach at the Academy, so the Academy teachers can 'learn' from their supposed superiors.
It hasn't happened yet, but I can't wait!!

Up until recently, you didn't need a teaching degree/pgce to work in a private school, yet, apparently they were /are better teachers than those in the state sector.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." (William Butler Yeats.)

I wish I had paid more attention in class!

Our church primary school, which is in a working class area built on a mining heritage, has an excellent reputation and is vastly oversubscribed. Once again as in the past, there are over 100 applications for 45 places.


Of necessity there has to be a criteria of admission as things are not run on a 'free for all' nor a 'first come first served' basis.


The first criteria is if a child is in care, closely followed by church attendance, siblings already in school, baptism, distance from the school etc.


If parents wish their child to attend this school, then they must adhere to the criteria - it is entirely up to them - the choice is theirs. There are other schools with good reputations in the area.


I was told on Wednesday, of a family who were found to have been forging the signature of a church official in order to gain admittance.

I have no objection to which school a child is sent to, I do however object to the very limited options that the majority of parents have

Statements like 'a good school place' sit alongside 'we're all in it together'................some more than others I think!

Some families are without food and heat, a good school place is not an option, they have to take what the state offers which unfortunately is not always 'good'