Chance of a Lifetime

Book excerpt: The purpose of this Paperback is to start a debate about the real problem of how we should educate our young people. It is based on the book Chance of a Lifetime: How the other half loses by Jonathan Langdale and John Harrison. To be winners today, young people have to be good at school (or very lucky). Clearly, a great many of them aren t good at school, but we believe they are all good at something. Because the Great and the Good became the Great and the Good because they were good at school, the received wisdom is that their kind of academic schooling is good for everyone it must be! Look how successful they are! Thus the best schools must be facsimiles of their schools and schoolchildren must all be judged by their standards the gold standards of GCSE A*-C and A Levels followed by university. If only everyone was as academically clever as they are, wouldn t the world be a better place? And the children who fail at their kind of schooling are just that failures. Over the years we have blamed the failure of secondary education on: The governors The head teachers The teachers and above all The pupils. Chance of a Lifetime shows that: It isn t the governors It isn t the head teachers It isn t the teachers and It certainly isn t the pupils It s the academically focussed secondary school itself.