Quick fixes: Going down an old conservative track already?

04Jun10

‘Reform is no use anymore, because that is simply improving a broken model…What we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else’

Ken Robinson, TED Talk, 2010.

I was writing about something else and I came across this article on the Guardian. The old days under a Thatcher rule where the rich got richer, and poor got poorer? Is this article showing that we could be having similar divides in our country starting within the schools, only a few weeks into this new coalition government?

In his more recent TED talk, Ken Robinson talks about education within the frame of it being a resource, but something which doesn’t acknowledge someone’s natural ability. In order to find someone’s natural ability, they need space, time, and are not just an entity in the system.

We were talking today about Ken Robinson, how in his TED talk about creativity in schools and in ‘Lessons for the Living’, he puts out proposals for a revolution in education systems knowing that these aren’t necessarily possible with the current structures that are in place. In his more recent talk, four years on, it feels as though he is just echoing his view from the previous talk. Education needs a revolution, and it can’t simply just be given a facelift when there is nothing underpinning it. These new academies that the Conservative government want to role out do not cater for the people who really need them, the allow the good schools to get better, and are not supporting the schools that necessarily need them.

I mention Robinson, the education system, and the new government in relation to what we are doing now because Prisons and the criminal justice system were not on the radar for any of the campaigning. Normally a party would have some new radical proposal, but not with this election. Are the prisons too much of a political hot potato? Are there no new radical proposals? Is the government stuck with what to do, or do they just think that this is working fine?

In order to make any radical difference within prisons, it is clear that there needs to be a complete overhaul, a revolution. When looking back through my notebook from our first week with Simon, there was the following quote I wrote down, but i don’t know where I got it from unfortunately:

‘One problem with crime is that it is invariably treated as though it were one thing, instead of many different things with varied causes, consequences and possible methods of prevention.’

The problems do not just exist in the prison, the prisons are near the end of the problem, it is all of the things that come before which make a person commit a crime and end up in there. Social deprivation, a lack of education, poor housing and troubled upbringings. These issues need to be addressed alongside the prisons themselves so that there can be a holistic move forwards. The answer is not necessarily to build more prisons, or expand a prison, what are the things that are happening outside of those prison walls, that end up having someone inside of the prison?

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