Michael Gove is a Man on a mission.
This Mission is either to: Restore Britain to a period of perceived Glory, based on a fusion of traditional values and standards with modern methods... Or....
Or perhaps he's just staking a future place in the Bojo/D-Cam/Gove/Osborne leadership face off. A contest that could easily be decided by totting up the policy ideas each candidate has suggested that looks like a direct plagiarism from the Daily Mail Letters Page.
Gove, who previously took the humble step of issuing copies of the Bible with his name on them, has chosen a real doozy here. This one will have reactionary neophobes tugging/flicking themselves off in a 'Everything was somehow both better and worse and harder and better and better in my day' frenzy.
He's bringing back O-Levels. Hurrah! "Because GCSEs are too easy and in my day it was all grumble grumble moan...."
Firstly I hope that he remembers to thank the pornography and phone-box card industry for keeping the 'Good A and O level' Terminology in current usage, in fact he may have even been passed one of these card's by Gideon... Who will have found it... Only found it... Not called the number on it after using it to measure out a gigantic line of 'chop'
Yeah.. So... Bringing back an old qualification. Then? Well I have to say, my first thought when I heard this was an exclamation from Alan Gordon Partridge. 'They've rebadged it you fool'
Maybe that's just cynicism...
So let's see what a 'new O level' is going to be like? Well apparently there will be higher and lower tiered papers! Not like the Higher and Lower Tiered papers you used to get with those Stupid, Modern, Lazy, Whorish GCSEs. Different ones. Oh and some higher papers will be 'Closed Book' but not 'Closed Book' like those Crack-Smoking Happy-Slapping Sex-Tape-Making GCSEs. Priestly 'Closed Book' Papers, like in the past... One's that might teach you Latin poetry and not something modern like Dogging on Mcat...
Best of all though they will be harder. Because they are O-Levels. Which were harder because they are what Mail Readers did in their day. (Which must mean they are harder, because surely kids, with access to information and technology lightyears beyond our wildest childhood dreams, could NOT be smarter than we were.)
Incidentally, the perception of exams getting easier based on increasing results is nothing to do with making schools and examining boards entirely target dependent and encouraging them to basically give up education entirely for the last two years in favour of 'Exam Training'... and you'd be a fool, or a Trotskyist to say otherwise... (Still not entirely sure what that means)
Since I wholeheartedly believe this is possibly the best policy ever, here's a few other school things Gove could rename in order to make your average real world school more like a historical 'public school' that should only exist in fiction about boy-wizards, but sadly doesn't...
Canteen - Refectory. Inside the meals could all be renamed so they sound like Dickensien slop... Oh and since it's in the 'Past' you can ban 9 year olds from whistleblowing your shitty meals on a blog by simply insisting th internet doesn't exist yet, then giving her 'The Cane'
Teacher - Pedagogue. Serves a double purpose this one. Firstly it's a suitably archaic term. Secondly, it is close enough to paedophile that if the teachers start getting uppity about your wonderful changes, you can start a tabloid campaign against them and have their houses burned down.
Detention - 'The Cane'. I.e. "I was caught writing 'Is a bellend' after Michael Gove's inscription on that stupid unrealist book and I got the Cane'. Watch the Mailers foam at that one, you'd almost think that the idea of a youngster being forced to bend over and present their innocent, quivering buttocks for several hard swots from an older man/woman gave them some kind of pleasure wouldn't you?
So you can have those ideas...
And of course when all of us who have, suddenly worthless, GCSE qualifications get old enough to actually read the mail without sicking up our intestines we promise we won't get you to change it back out of our own, uttely misplaced, sense of nostalgia.
Gove, who previously took the humble step of issuing copies of the Bible with his name on them, has chosen a real doozy here. This one will have reactionary neophobes tugging/flicking themselves off in a 'Everything was somehow both better and worse and harder and better and better in my day' frenzy.
He's bringing back O-Levels. Hurrah! "Because GCSEs are too easy and in my day it was all grumble grumble moan...."
Firstly I hope that he remembers to thank the pornography and phone-box card industry for keeping the 'Good A and O level' Terminology in current usage, in fact he may have even been passed one of these card's by Gideon... Who will have found it... Only found it... Not called the number on it after using it to measure out a gigantic line of 'chop'
Yeah.. So... Bringing back an old qualification. Then? Well I have to say, my first thought when I heard this was an exclamation from Alan Gordon Partridge. 'They've rebadged it you fool'
Maybe that's just cynicism...
So let's see what a 'new O level' is going to be like? Well apparently there will be higher and lower tiered papers! Not like the Higher and Lower Tiered papers you used to get with those Stupid, Modern, Lazy, Whorish GCSEs. Different ones. Oh and some higher papers will be 'Closed Book' but not 'Closed Book' like those Crack-Smoking Happy-Slapping Sex-Tape-Making GCSEs. Priestly 'Closed Book' Papers, like in the past... One's that might teach you Latin poetry and not something modern like Dogging on Mcat...
Best of all though they will be harder. Because they are O-Levels. Which were harder because they are what Mail Readers did in their day. (Which must mean they are harder, because surely kids, with access to information and technology lightyears beyond our wildest childhood dreams, could NOT be smarter than we were.)
Incidentally, the perception of exams getting easier based on increasing results is nothing to do with making schools and examining boards entirely target dependent and encouraging them to basically give up education entirely for the last two years in favour of 'Exam Training'... and you'd be a fool, or a Trotskyist to say otherwise... (Still not entirely sure what that means)
Since I wholeheartedly believe this is possibly the best policy ever, here's a few other school things Gove could rename in order to make your average real world school more like a historical 'public school' that should only exist in fiction about boy-wizards, but sadly doesn't...
Canteen - Refectory. Inside the meals could all be renamed so they sound like Dickensien slop... Oh and since it's in the 'Past' you can ban 9 year olds from whistleblowing your shitty meals on a blog by simply insisting th internet doesn't exist yet, then giving her 'The Cane'
Teacher - Pedagogue. Serves a double purpose this one. Firstly it's a suitably archaic term. Secondly, it is close enough to paedophile that if the teachers start getting uppity about your wonderful changes, you can start a tabloid campaign against them and have their houses burned down.
Detention - 'The Cane'. I.e. "I was caught writing 'Is a bellend' after Michael Gove's inscription on that stupid unrealist book and I got the Cane'. Watch the Mailers foam at that one, you'd almost think that the idea of a youngster being forced to bend over and present their innocent, quivering buttocks for several hard swots from an older man/woman gave them some kind of pleasure wouldn't you?
So you can have those ideas...
And of course when all of us who have, suddenly worthless, GCSE qualifications get old enough to actually read the mail without sicking up our intestines we promise we won't get you to change it back out of our own, uttely misplaced, sense of nostalgia.
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