The Plot Flatterns - The Old Parkside School

On the front page of last weeks Wallsend version of the "News Guardian" (Thursday May 15th. 2008) it reports that views are being sought as to what should be built on the sight of a former school in Mullen Road, Wallsend.. The old Parkside school having been merged with Ashleigh school in North Shields to produce Beacon Hill all age special school. Now this merger is okay by me as it produces a community of 120 pupils which is good.
But they have asked what to do with the sight of the old school. Well what is wrong with it being a school? Since I left school in the late 1960s the trend has been to making schools bigger and bigger. Economy of scale and other similar arguments being to the fore. And yet while this increase in size has happened the standards of education have, we are told, gone down. Young people leave school lacking the skills of reading and writing and the lore of mathematics. (Which doesn't actually surprise me when they call these three disciplines the 3 R's when they are actually an R, a W and an M.) I believe that we must begin the reversal of school sizes and get back to small, and local, community based schools. Schools in which everyone knows everyone else, teacher or pupil, governor or parent.
We are told that there is a scarcity of teachers, especially men in primary teaching and anyone in Maths and Sciences. If so how are we ever going to get smaller schools and have every discipline covered? We live in a world that is wired up with optical cables. We surf the net for all kinds of information, not all of it savoury. Computers are ubiquitous. It should be relatively simple to cable up a range of small community based schools so that the specialists can teach from some other local community. This is "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally" applied to a local situation.
Now of course this would cost money. Everything costs money that's why we have to pay our Council Tax. And I will admit that I have not yet done the Maths. It would also need the co-operation of the teachers, especially the head teachers, to get this to work. Changes in the working day, week, term and year would almost certainly be needed and this will affect teachers.
How we educate our children is even more important than what we teach them. We all know that we all need to do sums, read and write, if only to by the groceries of place a bet at the bookies. But the way we get taught has repercussions all the way through our lives. If we hated the experience we will not indulge in it as we mature. If we love it we will do anything to keep the experience going. Being in a large institution where the teachers are remote and the playgrounds are rife with bullying and other unpleasantness you cannot have a positive view of "education." Small, as Schumacher said, is beautiful.