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.
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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 ...
I’d like to point out a couple of points in the aftermath of today’s demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. First: do we need to rethink our use of the terms “antisemitism” & “antisemitic” ? A dictionary definition of the word “Semite” defines the term as not just Jews but also all Arabic people as well. What is really being dealt are differences in belief rather than differences in race. The other thing is that no one (as far as I can see) ever discusses the history of Palestine. How many people know anything about the Balfour Declaration 1917? It was an acknowledgment by the British government that there was a need for a homeland for the world’s Jews. So far, so good. Unfortunately no one asked the people who were already there in Palestine what they thought of this arrangement. Not a good way to start the movement towards a new nation or two. Bear in mind too that this is comparatively modern history. Think back to the Roman conquest of Judaea & the ...
Not so much a rant as a request to all who love the English language and who appreciate that its correct & accurate use can be a great power for good. Firstly can people stop using ‘incredibly’ in every oral situation which seems to need some emphasis. Ditto for ‘iconic’. In addition everyone who speaks publicly feels the need to mention ‘community’ - whatever that means. Another developing favourite is ‘social cohesion’ - the PM must have used the phrase a dozen or more times in his Royal Commission announcement yesterday. I’d also like to mention that ‘it’s’ only ever means ‘it is’. It’s not the possessive which is ‘its’ without the apostrophe. I know - those pesky little punctuation marks which cause people (& predictive text) so many problems. Have a good weekend and enjoy the cooler weather.
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