RapidAssistant wrote:RDR wrote:What was most pointless to me was the system that was in use at the time (I'm 40 years out of school), the junior and senior secondary one. It was nice to be told at 2nd year, effectively you were stupid and thrown on the scrap heap, and barred from certain subjects totally. The focus was on 'technical' subjects, didn't matter you were totally useless at metalwork or woodwork and would have actually liked to do history or English. The best you should aim for was an apprenticeship - boy!
Allied that to teachers who couldn't give a toss, who liked to remind you every day that you were thick or useless and like someone else further up this thread says they were only interested in the bright 'sparks' not in trying to develop potential and a system which didn't bother about discrimination in the slightest.
Am I bitter?
You bet I am. So having seen all three of my daughters through the system, now, despite its flaws its still 100% better.
Eventually, I did it the hard way, work, night school, college, university and professional qualifications, so the potential was in me and I got to prove them wrong...but how many were there who could have done so much better??
Oh yeah - I can concur with all of that! I'm a bit further behind you agewise but my experiences in the early 1990s were pretty similar. Sure, by that time they had Standard Grades which were supposed to give everyone a reward, even if it was a poor one. (A Grade 7 is called a "Course Completed", rather than a "Fail" - it's not P.C to say that word now....), but the discrimination started again when you did you Highers, where the old system lingered on. If you didn't get a half decent Standard Grade, you were frozen out of doing the Higher, which in turn stopped you from aspiring to higher education. No point in wasting time with slow developers, who will just hold back the investment in the high flyers. I was the former at Maths, I just couldn't get any of it at all and struggled badly (made all the worse by my time being consumed through being forced to do Higher English against my will, read my post at the beginning of this thread) = my Maths teacher told my Mum at parents evening that I didn't stand a hope in hell of qualifying for a science or engineering course at Uni, never mind surviving it - and I'd be better off thinking of another career.
Anyway, I showed the b***ards when I later defied the odds, got into Uni and got a Masters with Distinction in Engineering after a long, hard and bitter 5-year struggle, and ended up becoming a half decent mathematician - I even posted a copy of my degree certificate to them out of spite. And there is nothing quite more satisfying than doing something out of spite, is there?!!?!?
Parent's evenings were not a concept that had developed in my day. Even if they had you wouldn't have got my dad out the pub to go. In any case the only time parents were called to the school, you were in BIG trouble, like when I didn't bother to go for two weeks. The school wasn't concerned at all the reason was I was being threatened by a gang (who subsequently slashed another boy) and I was sent to see the rather oddly named 'Guidance' teacher, whose guidance was 6 of the belt and I'd better not effen skive off again. Sensitivity in Scottish Education in those days didn't exist.
Many years later I did try to get hold of my school records as I was fairly sure I wasn't quite as thick as they would like to make out and in fact a quota system operated on who went up to the senior high school with those from certain backgrounds being effectively weeded out. Of course no records could be found....strange that....
As to subjects, well at junior secondary they liked to concentrate on what would now be called 'vocational skills', so anything manual or towards a trade of some sort. So metalwork, woodwork and tech drawing for the boys and domestic science for the girls.
Arithmetic so you could measure and add up, so essential for a trade but maths, no.
I liked history, but you were taught next to nothing about that, cause why did idiots need to know anything about history?
English, in so much that you could write and spell fine, but any interest in poetry and the teacher declared you were a big p**f.
Science classes were just a laugh, with 50 odd in the class the idea of doing an experiment, far less seeing one was beyond comprehension.
It left me with a total hatred of education which I didn't overcome until years later I went to night school and college and actually met educators who were interested in you and wanted to motivate you.
He advocated for the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich and labour against capital.