Alight Gove?

Teaching’s just too easy to mock. Michael Gove our Education Minister, obviously named by the family’s forelocking tradesman, has a Play Dough face that will surely be remoulded before all this is over by somebody’s fisted forearm. Teachers are up in forearms, they haven’t been given guns yet, over his latest initiatives to bring the lazy, overpaid, good for nothing skivers into line. For some strange reason our liberal free market democracy turns to quaint communist ideology when it comes to education. A Trabant for every boy and girl manufactured by massed ranks of disaffected, spied on, boiler suited automatons marching four abreast to turn levers. This seems particularly perverse for our most human of endeavours. Whilst the rest of us pump our youth full of pop, enrage them with rap and turn their brains to sap with soaps teachers are expected to single-handedly drag the resulting disaffected ragtag into a sufficient state of maturity to receive real-life-relevant knowledge. And whilst spannering on this ramshackled production line they are overseen by legions of foremen from parents, their dogs, Ofsted, Gove, league tables, and now accountants and ‘vent your anonymous spleen’ websites. It can’t be easy not punching the Play Dough. And all this for less money! So the students are racked between Hollyoaks et al where “nobody ever bothers to learn anything” and unfathomable “effort is necessary” maturity, and teachers between a momentary lack of post graduation imagination and a pension. If it’s a marriage it’s not made in heaven. But Gove has one trick that might unravel this unseemly mess. If he reduces the pension so it’s not worth waiting for ……….