Tag: Education
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Colour Me Bad
Greg Clarke, the FA Chairman, has fallen on his sword for, among a selection of meek faux pas, describing black people as ‘coloured’. From that point, everything was going to get stuffed into the fact-mincer. ‘Coloured’ is a problematic term because while it is deemed by many to be offensive, ‘of colour’ is not. ‘Of…
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Mealy-Mouthed
Congratulations to Marcus Rashford on his MBE for his work to alleviate child hunger in a first world country. In these times, we might very well celebrate altruistic star leverage of personal influence. Most of them are out sharking social media and spouting fatuous twaddle in order to scoop up a sackful of Twitter or…
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The Golden Turd
I remember a time when the favourite educational pastime was slagging off Media Studies. That has hardly aged well. Most people seem to be neither able to accurately identify fake news nor to understand the relationships between discourse and power. And no, reciting Homer at tiresome dinner parties for the entertainment of twittering hoes, who…
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Lying Low
The UK Education Secretary Gavin Williamson foreshadowed the latest Government debacle with a warning on the danger that school students might be over-promoted into jobs that are beyond their competence. I can only admire his steadfast ability to deadpan that message. That’s weapons-grade irony, right there. This is a man who probably hides a spare…
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First-Degree Burns
‘I am pleased to announce that I have graduated from High Street University with a first-class honours degree in [insert any lamentable toss here]…… Such announcements are popping up all over the shop on social media. LinkedIn degree-result fanfaronade appears to be today’s must-have accessory for the me-me-me gang. ‘I’m so grateful to my lecturers…
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Slang Ban, Thank You Ma’am!
As if a truckload of horsehit about a 50p piece being bereft of an Oxford comma wasn’t enough, a linguistics expert from some august institution has broached the subject of whether schools should ban the use of street slang such as peng and bruv. Apparently, teachers are correcting students’ use of street argot in classes…
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Saved by the Bell
There’s something about our schooldays – and how we relate to them – that I’ll never truly understand. Particularly comprehensive schools, the like of which I frequented in the 1980s. When you were guests at these august institutions, the whole process felt torturous, and you couldn’t wait to leave. The desperation was palpable. Grey but…
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