education
Jonathan Lewis
A Level Playing Field is the first play in my trilogy Education Education Education. The trilogy is my response to the black cloud of exams which has arrived in our household every spring for the last nine years – just as the sun was beginning to shine.It is my response to the maniacal devotion to testing and prescriptive teaching in our schools, in which exams are not just a diagnostic part of learning but the sine qua non of an education based on conformity and compliance.The first of the plays is an attempt to present the A-level experience from the students’ point of view. The second is Read more ...
David Nice
Youth may have vanished from the title, and its first flush is gone from the cheeks of most of the young persons. Now they’re in their prime, a magnificent sight – and the sound, too, is that of a world-class orchestra with a voice. Which we heard at its most distinctive, deep and muscular, from the strings in the opening signals of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So what went wrong with the music from Wagner’s Ring in their first 2015 Southbank concert’s second half?Ultimately the blame must rest with Gustavo Dudamel – when good, great, but horrid when he gets the wrong end of the stick, as I’ve Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary.Despite chronicling a year of a group of immigrant children in the French school system, School of Babel (La Cour de Babel) is not about the politics of France’s attitude to immigrants or Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Two moments of physical comedy from British sitcoms regularly fill the polls of viewers’ favourites: Basil Fawlty thrashing his broken-down car with a branch, and Del Boy falling sideways through a just-opened pub bar. So what are the chances that future polls will contain the episode of Bad Education in which Alfie Wickers takes viagra, mistaking it for a drug that will help him run faster, in order to beat the elderly Richard, an apparent rival for the heart of Miss Gulliver, in a race which he ends up completing on his stomach, in order to conceal the erection that the viagra creates, as a Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Having been put to the fiddle at the age of five, Nicola Benedetti appreciates the value of making music at an early age. She is fiercely committed to music education and developing new talent. So it was a joy to see her playing enthusiastically with 30 primary school children as a pre-concert curtain raiser to the start of Manchester Camerata’s new season.It was all part of the laudable “In Harmony” project, which aims “to use music as a tool to increase aspirations, enthuse, unite and inspire the community”. It was started in two less-than-privileged schools, Old Park Primary, Telford, and Read more ...
David Nice
José Mourinho is Setúbal’s most famous son. Non-Portuguese readers are not expected to know the two other celebrities most feted by this extraordinary port city on the estuary of the River Sado, with miles of sandy beaches opposite where a school of dolphins resides and the lush national park of the Arrábida mountain range just to the west. Luísa Todi, the Portuguese mezzo who graced the court of Catherine the Great, gives her name to the lovely garden avenue which is the city’s most relaxed hub; poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage’s statue looks over the central square in his honour (“hardly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The brightly coloured flyer promises all manner of activities. Improvised jam sessions, performance poetry, and philosophy discussions. Oh, and an Indian dance workshop. On an obscenely cold Sunday night I find myself braving not only the cold, but an unprecedented evening of “genre-defying artistic collaboration”, courtesy of English National Opera’s outreach arm – ENO Baylis. I ponder whether I’m really ready to have my inhibitions and preconceptions stripped from me in front of a bunch of earnest strangers. Welcome to Satyagraha Remix.The reason for all this unwonted activity? Philip Glass Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Classroom ProjectsIt starts with a plummy voice: “The poems, the words and the music on this record all come from children at primary schools, boys and girls of eight, nine, 10 and 11 years old.” Although the introduction to Classroom Projects sounds like a BBC continuity announcement from a lost era, what follows is more than entertainment. This collection of tracks from albums made by and for British schools is enlightening. Compiled here are music concrête, folk, chamber experiments and songs written about road safety. All of it is amazing.An important release, Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue Stockings poses again and again.For the women who provided the inspiration for this play – the students of Girton College, living on the cusp of the twentieth century – this is not a hypothetical question. To choose to study at Cambridge is, for them, to choose the life of an outcast over the possibility of marriage and a family. In 1896, when the action takes place, a campaign is underway to attempt to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Boldly not going anywhere near things like Grange Hill or Teachers, Big School is more like a throwback to the St Trinian's of the 1950s. Co-writer and star David Walliams plays a man known only as Mr Church, Deputy Head of Chemistry at Greybridge School (the nod to Billy Bunter's Greyfriars presumably being the whole point). He's repressed, uptight and sexually inept, and more than a tiny bit reminiscent of Rowan Atkinson playing the title role in Simon Gray's Quartermaine's Terms.A few grudging scraps have been thrown to the prevailing -isms of 21st century education, like a pupil Read more ...
Christopher Monks
“Without music, life would be a mistake”: Nietzsche. Sadly for many – indeed tragically, Nietzsche would say – music education in the UK has become so inconsistent that now, music barely features in some children’s lives at all. For years, county music services have been tied in to long contracts with services and teachers, some of whom have consistently delivered outstanding musical education, while others are tired and disconnected from the needs of the pupils they are teaching. It is detrimental enough not to have a musical education, but potentially even more damaging to a child to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nobody said it was easy being an infant prodigy. Take Hugo, ranked in the top 0.4 percent of the population. He knows everything there is to know about train engines, train stations, rail networks etc, has them committed to his photographic memory. At 10 he is, basically, on some sort of spectrum, and he knows that too. “This is my brother Oscar,” he said. “He’s a more normal child.”Is it just coincidence that Child Genius (****) kicked off on the day Michael Gove announced details of the new I-level? Gove would approve of the star participants, who are all strong on maths and facts. They Read more ...