Outside In

‘I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.’ Pope Benedict XVI…

I’ve often thought there is a tendency in teaching to try to offer intellectual justification for educational trends that lead primarily to diminishing the role of the teacher. Partly, I suspect, this is because of a philosophical and cultural fetish for anything that contravenes settled notions of authority and hierarchy;…

Teaching. It’s a tough job. Genuinely. Which means that, sometimes, people get into teaching and find it is not for them. The demands placed upon them, they decide, are too unreasonable. The task, they decide, too thankless. The alternatives, they imagine, too tempting. And so they leave the profession. This…

A tip for aspiring snake-oil salesmen: to help peddle your wares in the state school sector, always start any pitch with the words ‘Ofsted are looking for…’ It’s a winner. After all, which school would dare object to anything that might improve their standing with the Masters of the Universe?…

As a brief follow-on from the previous post, a few words on Michael Gove’s decision not to include RE on the list of humanities subjects that students wishing to gain the EBacc accreditation will have to  study. Now, the issue of RE is a vexed one, and as I have blogged before, and as…