Results don't make the grade
I HATE to rain on anybody's parade but since our esteemed Health minister has decided that I am 'full of doom and gloom' I might as well.
I confess I missed it but I'm sure some keen observer of the education scene can tell us exactly when exam results became a matter of island, nay national, importance, to the extent that all schools open the doors to the media so that the exultation of the exam passers can be reported on while carefully avoiding the less exultant.
I found out my A-level results, at the very end of August 1971, at the top of the old lifeboat slipway, from my big brother's girlfriend. And I think the most significant part of the transaction, from my point of view, was that she admired my new brown loons.
As Deborah Orr said in the Guardian on 15 August: 'The trouble is, an education system that knows the grade of everything and value of nothing is an education system that has forgotten what education is for.'
So which island school is going to be brave enough to be the first to close its doors to the media at exam result time?
It might even start a national trend and leave the poor old media with even less to report in the silly season.
I can't remember whether I celebrated my academic success in the Dolphin or the Couture Inn: I'm afraid to say that I was so ill-educated that I had not even heard of the Foresters' Arms in those days.
TIM BARNES,
2, Salter Street,
St Peter Port,GY1 2BW.
