Thursday, January 26, 2012

Six of the Best 219

It has been a day for Liberal Democrat bloggers to think the unthinkable on education. On Lib Dem Voice Tom Smith circles nervously around the issue of grammar schools.

Too lib·er·al [adj.] has no such inhibitions: "Pupils, from low-income families, should have the ability to apply for a government certificate to meet the tuition costs of a private school. The poorest in society should not be excluded from the best private facilities in the country; we cannot achieve greater levels of social mobility if we restrict the poorest to the state sector."

Basing police officers in schools was the sort of policy that made New Labour purr. But an article by Lizzie Schiffman on Huffington Post suggests that it has the effect of criminalising more youngsters. Recent research in Chicago "found that 20 percent of all juvenile arrests in 2010 took place on school grounds. Nearly one-third of those arrests were for simple battery charges - offences that in previous years would have been written off as schoolyard skirmishes and punished with suspensions or other penalties doled out by the school."

Rob's Blog is appalled by Conservative-run Cornwall Council's ban on tweeting from meetings.

With the current debate over Scottish culture and independence near to the surface, Out in the Shires looks at Ronald Neame's 1960 film Tunes of Glory.

Brain Pickings tells the story of a disastrous 1897 expedition to the North Pole by balloon.

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