Dr Patrick Hazelwood, headteacher at St John's Comprehensive School in Marlborough, Wiltshire, has already scrapped subject teaching in his school. Now he's scrapping homework because "to make schooling more relevant to life in the 21st century pupils are to be given responsibility for managing their own learning". They must also be encouraged to "love learning for its own sake," so the information-led, subject-driven National Curriculum will be replaced with one based on "competence for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and information". Subject teaching has been replaced by "cross-curricular projects", whatever they may be. Teachers marking work is out too. Dr H says it is "repetitious, just a load of ticks and causes conflict at home. I want to give pupils responsibility for and ownership of their own learning." High-flown phrases, but what exactly do they mean? According to Dr H the National Curriculum drove teachers into the ground and created a "society of damaged learners." The time has come, he says, "to let sunshine flood through the classroom window," which sounds like moonshine to me. St John's pupils are to be guinea pigs in a futuristic project designed by the Royal Society of Arts, which rejects the idea that a teacher's job is to transmit knowledge. Dr H is their willing ally. I hope he and the RSA are right. If not a whole generation is going to have difficulty in retrieving lost years and achieving their potential. If St John's is in a middle-class area the damage will be minimised by an outpouring of parental support and a dollop of private tuition. If its pupils come from a depressed area, God help them. A survey by the Higher Education Funding Council concludes that youngsters from the wealthiest 20pc of homes are six times more likely to go to university than those from the poorest 20pc. The benefit of the explosion of higher education has gone largely to the middle classes. Ambitious parents with careers of their own and perhaps experience of university life breed an expectation that their children will follow suit. Parents with no experience of university and job insecurity will opt for an early wage, and who could blame them? If you are poor the prospect of a huge debt at the end of three or four years of study is not appealing. Better a weekly wage now, they think, unheeding of the fact that manual jobs continue to be exported to low-cost countries in the Third World and the jobs that are left will, in all probability, require a qualification. So it's all very well to experiment with teaching methods or take away grants or fees. Time will tell whether or not such experiments improve the education of our children. If they don't, politicians and educators will write it down to experience and move on. For the generation of children damaged in the process there will be no such relief. * Denise Robertson cannot enter into any personal correspondence. *********** Sobering thought One sentence jumped out at me as I read reports of British servicemen allegedly abusing Iraqi prisoners. Someone was talking about photographs one of the soldiers was said to have taken, photographs which allegedly showed him laughing at the sexual degradation of terrified prisoners. "He took them to show to his friends back home," the witness said. Friends? Who, I wondered, would actually want to look at pictures of another human being debased? Would they laugh, the way you sometimes laugh at holiday snaps? Would they ooh and aah in appreciation and say "Nice view!" Would these friends number young women as well as men and if so, how would they handle it? "Say, I like this one best," or summon up their courage and walk away. I do hope it would be the latter, but it takes unbelievable courage to take the moral high ground in that kind of situation. Easier by far to look and pass them on, even when your stomach is churning. But the rule which applies to child pornography surely holds good here. We are seeing men sentenced to hefty terms of imprisonment simply for looking at child porn on the internet, the reason behind it that if there was no one who looked there would be no point in taking the pictures and a child would escape abuse. So it is with these photographs. Anyone who sniggers in a pub or at a party and says "Serve the ******** right," is actually standing there, in the cell, participating in the cruelty. And that's a sobering thought. *********** Spring in step I hate winter - cold fingers, no garden flowers, worst of all long, dark nights that seem to begin after lunch and last until elevenses. The longest night is mercifully buried in the rush to Christmas, but as soon as Boxing Day is over I look at lighting-up times, taking Manchester as my mean. When I checked last month lighting up began at 3.57pm and ended at 8.25am. For a few days the morning didn't budge but the afternoon shed a minute here and there. As I write this the times are 4.25pm and 8.06am. Almost an extra hour of daylight already. Spring is coming! *********** Great directing from Clint When Clint Eastwood first appeared in spaghetti westerns I marked him down as beautiful but dumb. How wrong I was. His latest film, in which he directs and stars, is being hailed as a "masterpiece," "wonderful knock-out entertainment," and "magnificently moving." It has won two Golden Globe awards and looks set to gain others. Called Million Dollar Baby it covers women's boxing, surely not the greatest box-office draw, but in Eastwood's hands the film is said to be a triumph. It confirms him as not just a great actor but a great director too, proving that I underestimated him all those years ago. I must look at Jude Law and Co more carefully. *********** My contempt for Adriana, 66 The story of Adriana Iliescu, the 66-year-old Romanian professor who, at 57 started a nine-year course of hormone therapy and then submitted to IVF in order to produce a baby, fills me with a mixture of anger and exasperation. She is selfish but she is also foolish. Her baby was born of a donated egg and donor sperm so she has not reproduced. She has simply acted as an incubator and her genes will die with her. Genetically, her baby is a stranger. Even if Adriana lives to a ripe old age her baby will be orphaned too young and there is no father to redress the loss. I admit that when we say a 67-year-old mother is too old but pat a 67-year-old father on the back we're being sexist and that's wrong. The crucial difference is that there's bound to be a younger mother for the baby if an older father dies. Adriana's little mite, the only foetus of three to survive, would have no one. I don't think a fit woman of 67 is incapable of rearing a baby. Lots of grans do just that and do it well. But the real bummer in all this, as far as I'm concerned, is that Adriana lives in a country where orphans abound. They live lives of indescribable institutional misery, some hardly ever lifted from their grimy cots. With such a lack of parenting their develop-ment is bound to be impeded. How much more fulfilling to have opened her heart and her home to a clutch of these children and loved and reared them for the years left to her. I'd have admired her then. Now I feel only contempt. | 
