Time to learn from mistakes of past

PEOPLE of a certain age - yes, like me - who can go back to the days when mathematics was sums, will remember learning the times tables from two to 12.

In Miss Moss’s class there was a daily dread which, not unlike our daily bread, was sustaining if not always enjoyable. Each morning Miss Moss (very pretty, as I recall) would point a ruler randomly at pupils sitting quivering at their desk and shout out “two”; “four”; or the dreaded “seven”; “nine” or “twelve” and the unfortunate target of the ruler would rise with some trepidation to his or her feet and attempt to rattle through the nominated table.

Miss Moss adopted the same learning system with spelling tests, dates from history, names of the disciples and even Henry VIII’s wives.

Somewhere along the charge to a new-thinking, change-for-change-sake modernity embracing the latest trends and fashions, the tried-and-tested teaching methods that had equipped children for 11-plus exams, for secondary education and, indeed, for life and employment, were abandoned.

Was it all worthwhile? Was abandoning those spot checks really beneficial?

Well, it has allowed us to fall behind the world’s most advanced education systems and has prompted an assertion that all the left-wing, doctrinaire classroom tinkering has damaged countless children’s lives and left them unfit to meet the demands of the workplace.

And it is not without a degree of shame that the Confederation of British Industry tells us that four in 10 companies are now forced to offer remedial lessons in maths and English to new recruits.

The left-leaning, Guardian reading, strike-calling members of the teaching unions could have learned a lot from Miss Moss and her colleagues, most notably that just because something is new and on-trend, it doesn’t mean it will have better results than the tried and tested.



A LOT of hot air is being generated over the subject of same-sex marriages in church. The Roman Catholic Church will not allow ceremonies to take place and the Muslim community is equally adamant in its opposition.

The Church of England has decreed that it will always hold to canon law that says marriage is between a man and a woman and speaks of a fracture in the link between church and the state, leading to the removal of the Queen as head of the church.

It may just be me, but I thought civil partnerships, set up in 2005 and available only to would-be partners in the gay community and not to heterosexual couples, had put this argument to bed.

But chubby Dave ruffled the duvet when he made his: “I support same-sex marriages because I am a Conservative” speech that has driven thousands of his supporters to rip up their Tory membership cards in disgust.

According to current records, only six per cent of the population is gay. Is this emotive, PC issue and its threat to rip the Christian Church in the UK apart, really a Government priority?

We are above our heads in debt; unemployment is rising; hundreds of youngsters have no job prospects at all; the NHS is in turmoil; we have little more than rowing boats if we face a threat at sea and the haunting shadow of Murdoch (have you noticed how he favours Alfred Hitchcock?) hovers over us all still. Haven’t Cameron and his cronies got enough to keep them occupied?






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