Learning the hard way

I must admit, when I first read the headline to this - "Armed Forces personnel to go into schools" - I thought they were finally going to do something about the rampant indiscipline and bullying that permeates our schools these days - and that's just the teachers.

But no - it's another one of Dave's Big Ideas.

Service men and women will go into schools to mentor young tearaways, while troops will receive free teacher training and university tuition, the Conservatives will pledge.

In essence, it's a good idea - just arse about face. What they should actually do is get things young "tearaways" mentored by servicemen in boot camps. In other words, get the disruptive little sods away from the schools so that kids who want to learn can get on with it and stick them in cadet schools where the little darlings learn a little discipline and a few home truths without being able to say "you can't touch me - I'll get the law in!".

The free university tuition is a good idea, but I wonder just how far it will go? Or how cooperative the universities will be?

Still, it IS a good idea. So credit where it's due - though I'm sure that more than a few servicemen, once they realise that their options in the classroom are restricted by left wing obsessions, will soon realise that they were on less of a loser fighting the Taliban than they would be in the classroom.

It would be nice if they took it a step further as well, so that for every former serviceman or woman who becomes a teacher we take a leftie teacher and stick them on the front line in Afghanistan or Iraq - Teachers to Troops we could call it. I've no doubt that a few months dodging RPG shells around Helmand would change the points of view of even the most hardened leftie liberal educationalist.

Ultimately, the absence of suitable "role models" in schools is testament to the left wing ideology that dominates the education system. Some kids might not be the brightest sparks, but they soon cotton onto the fact that they can run rings around teachers who are obsessed with "understanding" the tearaways.