Judith Rant

 I realise that I’ve been a bit remiss in not keeping up with my rant. My excuse is that there are so many things to feel strongly about. I’ve been thinking for some time about proportionality in war & it’s something I’ve wanted to write something about, especially as the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki approaches. I know that those terrible events are justified (if that’s possible) as being instrumental in bringing about a more timely end to WW2 but eyewitness accounts & the ongoing trauma suffered by the inhabitants of those cities are reasons for thought. I also include events like the bombing of Dresden. There are, of course, many examples from history both ancient and more recent. What concerns me at the moment, and this where the idea of proportionality comes in, is the situation in the Middle East. I think any right minded person will & indeed should condemn the actions against Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023 and agree that the Jewish ...

 When I decided to write about things that I consider important & believe should be discussed I wanted especially to go along the education line. So here’s my second concern - HOME SCHOOLING. This seems to have become a popular thing but I wonder how good it is for students as well as for standards in education. I have had some experience in this area in that late in my career (yes, I was a secondary English teacher) I taught at a school where the students had not been in a formal classroom setting until the first year of secondary school & while they were, almost without exception, competent readers, they had little idea about the conventions of writing. So I had to spend most of their first term teaching them about sentences & paragraphs among other things. Now I know some people will say that such things no longer matter; after all we now have texts & emails & zoom. But is this true? Will we end up as a society where we have no developed form of writing? The ...

 Of course education does not mean just sitting in a classroom. It encompasses all sorts of learning and travel and holidays are without doubt part of this wider experience BUT the question of children being taken out of school particularly at the beginning of term(s) in order to go skiing or to foreign destinations requires deeper thought. I realise that some people will immediately disagree - my children, my decision. There’s also the problem of higher costs during school holidays. But then travel agents, hotels, airlines etc have to make money while they can. The difficulty arises especially at the start of the school year. Children who are not at school during the first couple of weeks miss out on a number of things eg perhaps a choice of where they sit and with whom; introduction to new concepts. Sometimes or even often these things are difficult for teachers to deal with and children feel left out or just baffled/confused by ideas they don’t recognise. There’s been much discu...

 I’m a great believer in the power of education. I believe that education can do many things but perhaps the most important is its  ability to lift people up.