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Michael Gove...


It's got nothing to do with how he looks and talks, the exes fiddling, or even the awarding of the uncontested 500k contract to the 25 yr old former adviser.


It's not the curious approach to reducing the "tyranny" of targets and tests by, er, increasing targets and introducing more tests. Or to increasing schools' "freedom" by expanding central control.


It's the fact that he has the gall to pretend that what he is about is extending the education he benefited from ? diverse, classically-driven, expansive and explorative - to all, when all the evidence he himself is providing proves the exact opposite.


It's the fact that he thinks that if he blows piercing blasts on the dog whistle of squaddies in schools, a return to discipline and "Free" schools, then we won't notice the the ideologically-bound fostering of a private sector land grab in education provision and its damaging fetishisation of the production of multiply tested, targeted and lobotimised drones that were once called children.


He may be looking us in the eye but he's pissing on our shoes, and he thinks that we think that he's giving us a foot bath...

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All good points, Ted, but I think the bit about "multiply tested, targeted and lobotimised drones that were once called children" (well, at least the first two) has to be laid at the door of the previous government. It's something couldn't be put into a published league list, Blair/Brown somehow made it so it could.
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Whilst I agree to an extent, it's a little chicken and egg here.


The desire to test and tabulate children and schools, and to therefore determine rank, is as much driven by aspirational parents (who simply have to know that the school that little Toby will be going to is top of the pile locally) as it is by oleaginous politicians looking to score points.

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The Tory Boy caricature misses a whole lot of Michael Gove's background.


Adopted at 4 months by a fishmonger and his teaching assistant wife MG was initially educated in the state system, only moving out of it by virtue of being bright enough to win a scholarship to a local public school - he and his family no doubt following the good Scottish tradition of revering education. As a journo he was a Labour supporting striker. Not sure when or what prompted his Damascene conversion to conservative sense but to pillory him as a member of the elite classes is both ill informed and pointless.

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Tony Blair reached a particular low point in my estimation when, in an interview with Paxman, he refused to condemn the teaching of creationism in a school in the North East. All he kept saying in response was that the school was doing very well in the league tables. So that's all right then. Difficult to imagine Gove being any more enlightened. Faith schools under Labour, MacSchools staffed by squaddies and bankers under the Tories, difficult to decide which is worse.
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