Thursday 17 March 2016

Out By Miles

"A daily mile" in schools? Heaven forfend that anyone might spend that time reading a book or writing an essay.

Are classes now in session all day of all year, so that no one who wants or needs to run a mile has any other time in which to do so?

How many politicians were any good at sport at school? Would you want the people who were to end up in politics, anyway?

Yet the obsessive and undignified deference to this kind of thing remains.

Periodically, there are what, in the minds of those delivering them, are serious calls for the exams to be moved around some tournament or other.

There are even complaints that the EU referendum coincides with something of that species, as if anyone ought to care.

Laughed out? Reported only as comedy stories? Not a bit of it.

The raising of the school leaving age to 18 will soon enough result in compulsory PE all the way up to that age, which will be enough to ruin some people's mental health.

But they are the people who read books. No one gives a stuff about them.

3 comments:

  1. I remember when you could walk 10 or 12 miles in the summer and think nothing of it, you used to run everywhere too. School was bad to you in lots of ways, the PE side especially. I would have left school even if meant truanting rather than do PE in the sixth form and so would you, we would have no A-levels.

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    1. Perhaps that is the idea? If they are the only people sitting the exams, then they are bound to be the people who do best at them. A bit clever for them, but they have their side of peasant cunning.

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  2. If school was bad to you, you have been remarkably loyal to it, how many years a governor starting barely after you had left? When the Labour party removed you from that you carried on going to productions and things, now you even turn up at all the old guard's funerals. Lucky for you your local academy is run by the diocese and you now write for the diocesan newspaper. You never really left and you'll be back soon enough because it is no longer anything to do with local elected representatives.

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