Tuesday, September 23, 2003
I say! That's bloody well not fair!
This is great. I heard some people on the radio this morning complaining about it, saying that it was unfair for students from under-resourced state schools, with equal or lower A-level grades, to be preferred to other students with grades achieved at independent and private schools with masses of advantages. They argued it should be based on grades only, otherwise it was unfair.
They want it both ways - they want the privileges associated with an unequal society, but they don't want any of the inequalities used against them.
As far as I can see, it's entirely logical for universities to prefer students who achieved their grades despite the adversity of their surroundings, because it indicates that they are more able/committed than others who made it helped by all the advantages in life.
Imagine the implications. Private education would lose its attraction. Why spend a fortune sending kids to private schools if it disadvantages them compared with the hoi polloi?
What's more, if a school's league table position started to count against its students (because their school was thought to provide a privileged education), maybe that school would stop thinking about churning out the highest possible exam scores, and actually be able to devote time to educating their pupils in the important things in life.
Mind you, if you were to extrapolate this idea too far, schools would start to degrade their standards deliberately in order to improve their deprivation index, so there would either be huge waiting lists at Tower Hamlets Comprehensives from nice families in Islington, or the nicer schools would start introducing headlice and glue-sniffing courses to improve their Oxbridge credentials.
posted by Plig |
14:32 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Forget the sentimental notion that foreign policy is a struggle between virtue and vice, with virtue bound to win.
Forget the utopian notion that a brave new world without power politics will follow the unconditional surrender of wicked nations.
Forget the crusading notion that any nation, however virtuous and powerful, can have the mission to make the world in its own image.
Remember that diplomacy without power is feeble, and power without diplomacy is destructive and blind.
Remember that no nation's power is without limits, and hence that its policies must respect the power and interests of others.
Hans Morgenthau
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts
Bertrand Russell
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one
Albert Einstein
When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative
Martin Luther King Jr.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man
Bertrand Russell
I think it would be a good idea
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun
Pablo Picasso
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others
Groucho Marx
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it
Mahatma Gandhi
Always make new mistakes
Esther Dyson
|
|
| archives |
|
|
|
|
| blogs I like |
|
Mr. Happy
me-ish
Poor Man
Plastic Bag
Making Light
Electrolite
Body and Soul
Sideshow
Little Red Boat
Great Communicator
The Autoblography
Londonmark
Matthew Yglesias
Troubled Diva
Wherever you are
What you can get away with
Mad musings of me
Team Leadership
CB2020
MyLandmarkForum
Neale's Blog
<
#
Blogging Brits
?
>
|
|
|
The look of this blog owes much to Mena Trott, but everything posted to it is my copyright, unless I say otherwise.
If you want to use or quote any of it, please do the decent thing and let me know.
|
|
|
|
|
