schools
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Parental strike against school testing – hint, intimation, or flash in the pan?
Straw in the wind? Harbinger? Hint or intimation? Dunno. Snowball in hell? Impossible odds? Flash in the pan? Dunno. Still, worth noting that at the time of writing 24,412 parents (or people claiming to be parents) have signed an online petition supporting a strike – yes, worth reading that again: a STRIKE – that will… Continue reading
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‘Slummy mummies’ – the overreach of schools
For the past couple of days the newspapers have been buzzing with a story summed up in this Daily Telegraph headline: ‘Head teacher tells parents to stop wearing pyjamas on school run’ The Daily Mail, rather more pointedly, talked about an ‘unrepentant slummy mummy’, referring to a mother who responded to the Headteacher’s letter by… Continue reading
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Come on, it’s not so bad – the APPG report on play
It’s true, the recent report on play by the All-Parliamentary Group on a Fit and Healthy Childhood would have benefited from some judicious editing and organising in terms of structure and length. True, too, that there are points where it veers off in directions that some might feel are not entirely consistent with other points… Continue reading
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A word in your ear: Sharing dismay
It’s been ringing in my ear recently. Like a tune stuck in one’s head, endlessly repeating itself. ‘Disciplinary society’, those are the words, that’s the discordant, repeating, tune. And the flipside of discipline, is punishment; or, in the more mealy-mouth words of official-speak, the flipside of discipline is ‘sanction’. In practical terms this is a… Continue reading
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‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today’
To cut to the chase: I hold that a society or culture entrapped by a perpetual need to achieve, to endlessly generate quantifiable outputs, to obsessively ‘progress’ – slippery term that – is a society most likely to exhaust and dispirit its members. For rather too long, that’s pretty much the position that has been… Continue reading
About Me
My name is Bernard Spiegal, I write mainly about Palestine/Israel and related issues; sometimes other stuff too
Bernard Spiegal 