Education: two posts

In the middle of trying to write something moderately intelligent about the primary elections in the US.

Meanwhile, here's two posts about education that are refreshing:

Chris Dillow argues that it isn't the job of teachers to be policemen. It would be excellent if this idea caught on - along with ones like it isn't our job to be social workers, dietitians, or teachers of non-subjects like 'citizenship' or, even more absurdly, 'happiness', either.

And from Tim Worstall, unusually, something about education I think most teachers would agree with: we knew the 'academic' component of our post-grads in education was a waste of time, taught as we were by a bunch of people who could hack it neither as teachers nor academics, peddling out-dated theories that I would decline to describe as 'liberal'*. We all knew the only thing worthwhile in the whole damn year was the actual teaching practice. Now there's some research that backs this up, apparently. Praise be.

*Hippy bullshit, more like.