Edumacation, Cutting Edge style.
Jun. 19th, 2007 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teylaminhI apologise for the insanely long entry yesterday. Because I type them in Wordpad at work I generally don't realise how long they are...
We went to Wetherspoons last night because I wasn't in the mood to cook and we hadn't got anything out of the freezer anyway. Also I had a massive curry craving. Their chicken tikka masala is much nicer on non-Curry Night nights, it transpires... although they have suddenly started putting currents into their naan. :(
We watched Cutting Edge: The Dangerous School for Boys on Channel Four, which turned out not to be quite so interesting as I thought. The school itself was situated in a delapidated building somewhere in rural France, and turned out to be run by a Catholic bloke who wanted to give the boys in the school the same quality of schooling he remembered from his childhood. As a result he taught, alongside the usual subjects (where the boys worked towards British exams), things which upheld the Catholic doctrines. And also Morris dancing, apparently. He was very adamant the boys shouldn't learn about sex education, either, and was worried that when he applied to the French state for money and they had a hand in the running of the school, he would be forced to teach it... (At which point, I thought, "And, God-forbid, you might have to teach girls?")
Interesting, though. The parents of the boys all seemed a bit mad, and all were deeply religious. I think of all the Christian branches, Catholicism terrifies me the most...
That aside, I would've loved to have learnt how to do Gregorian chanting at school... Was also amused to discover that Paul's school taught typing as a subject and the girls got first choice over the boys. He's never allowed to laugh at me for studying Latin in first year ever again...
One particular scene, in which [don't read the small text if you're squeamish] the boys were learning how to kill a rabbit for dinner and failed to knock it unconscious on the first blow, resulting in the thing screaming and twitching when its throat was cut somehow provoked an argument between Paul and I about the difference between chickens and other farm animals. Not physically, obviously... I'm not going to get into it here because I'm probably very much in the minority and I can't be bothered to argue it again, but in any case, it didn't reach a conclusion.
It also started as an entirely different argument, because I said that I thought it was good for children to learn where their food comes from - perhaps not in the same brutal way as mentioned above, but at least so that they associate the shrink-wrapped, bare piece of meat on the shelf with a creature running around a field. I realise this is something which becomes apparent at some point during a child's development, but I honestly think more trips to farms are necessary. Kids need to learn that things COME from somewhere - milk does not magically appear inside a little plastic bottle, it comes from a living thing. Eggs are not produced on an electronic conveyor belt, they also come from living things.
At the very least, it might stop teenage idiots doing horrible, disgusting, evil things like throwing a live cat off a block of flats just to see what happens... and then repeating it, as if the first time wasn't bad enough, to see if it dies the second time. (Though I think those children are probably beyond help. Someone needs to throw them off a building.)
Anyway. That turned into a bit of a rant. I shall now sign this one off.
We went to Wetherspoons last night because I wasn't in the mood to cook and we hadn't got anything out of the freezer anyway. Also I had a massive curry craving. Their chicken tikka masala is much nicer on non-Curry Night nights, it transpires... although they have suddenly started putting currents into their naan. :(
We watched Cutting Edge: The Dangerous School for Boys on Channel Four, which turned out not to be quite so interesting as I thought. The school itself was situated in a delapidated building somewhere in rural France, and turned out to be run by a Catholic bloke who wanted to give the boys in the school the same quality of schooling he remembered from his childhood. As a result he taught, alongside the usual subjects (where the boys worked towards British exams), things which upheld the Catholic doctrines. And also Morris dancing, apparently. He was very adamant the boys shouldn't learn about sex education, either, and was worried that when he applied to the French state for money and they had a hand in the running of the school, he would be forced to teach it... (At which point, I thought, "And, God-forbid, you might have to teach girls?")
Interesting, though. The parents of the boys all seemed a bit mad, and all were deeply religious. I think of all the Christian branches, Catholicism terrifies me the most...
That aside, I would've loved to have learnt how to do Gregorian chanting at school... Was also amused to discover that Paul's school taught typing as a subject and the girls got first choice over the boys. He's never allowed to laugh at me for studying Latin in first year ever again...
One particular scene, in which [don't read the small text if you're squeamish] the boys were learning how to kill a rabbit for dinner and failed to knock it unconscious on the first blow, resulting in the thing screaming and twitching when its throat was cut somehow provoked an argument between Paul and I about the difference between chickens and other farm animals. Not physically, obviously... I'm not going to get into it here because I'm probably very much in the minority and I can't be bothered to argue it again, but in any case, it didn't reach a conclusion.
It also started as an entirely different argument, because I said that I thought it was good for children to learn where their food comes from - perhaps not in the same brutal way as mentioned above, but at least so that they associate the shrink-wrapped, bare piece of meat on the shelf with a creature running around a field. I realise this is something which becomes apparent at some point during a child's development, but I honestly think more trips to farms are necessary. Kids need to learn that things COME from somewhere - milk does not magically appear inside a little plastic bottle, it comes from a living thing. Eggs are not produced on an electronic conveyor belt, they also come from living things.
At the very least, it might stop teenage idiots doing horrible, disgusting, evil things like throwing a live cat off a block of flats just to see what happens... and then repeating it, as if the first time wasn't bad enough, to see if it dies the second time. (Though I think those children are probably beyond help. Someone needs to throw them off a building.)
Anyway. That turned into a bit of a rant. I shall now sign this one off.
