A Time of Magic

These days it seems to be accepted that children will be violent in schools whilst teachers can’t respond with a touch never mind a smack.

Whilst it seems wrong to return to the days when caning was there as an option, it seems as though the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. For example, we recently found out that it’s forbidden to touch a child in any circumstances. That sounds a laudable thing on the whole but the problem was that the child was touched (restrained) because he was violently beating another child. Not a fight mind you, just a brutal attack by one child on another.

Interestingly, the subsequent interview was entirely focused on the business of touching a child and didn’t even enquire as to the injuries which the victim received. That’s definitely very, very wrong. The whole process ended up seeming to give approval to the violence which I’m quite sure was never the intent behind the rules which it drew upon and yet that’s what happened with punishment actually being, unbelievably, applied to the victim as well as the aggressor.

In this school, it would appear that nothing effective can be done either to stop violence nor to protect the victim of any violence.

One of the problems in choosing an online university these days isn’t that the number of them is small but because the choice has grown enormously in recent years.

The big plus point in that is that instead of a small number of so-so universities there are some of the major players (still overly expensive) and a serious number of sensible universities like Western Governors. Although not widely known, that’s a situation that seems sure to change with their move into national promotion of their online accredited programmes. That little word “accredited” is quite significant too as many of the early online universities didn’t have that status which in practical terms made qualifications from them largely worthless.

Changed too is the presentation: these days WGU offers a professional looking website. That shouldn’t need saying but sadly that professional look just ain’t there in a number of the early online offerings. They’re much more complete too with an online MBA offering. The significance of the online MBA is that an awful lot of people who should have an MBA just don’t have the option of taking time out of their life to go on an MBA programme; something that many online universities either forget or just aren’t up to providing.

The problem is that you’ve normally little choice in what books you need to buy.

Out will pop a recommended list of textbooks from your university and basically you need to buy them. Sometimes you can thin out the list a little but in many cases you can’t as you don’t know ahead of time what ones you’ll need and, of course, the library just doesn’t have enough copies of those books to go around. Secondhand? Well, sometimes but in some subjects the new editions are required and you’ll just be wasting money on older second hand ones.

It’s one of those largely hidden costs of courses that can sometimes substantially increase the overall cost of those courses if the lecturer gets a bit carried away with their recommendations: after all, it doesn’t cost them anything and, in some cases, can even make them money though commissions.