My daughter tried to tell me off this morning for referring to Pocahontas as an Indian. Apparently its racist and only the term 'native american' can be used. During the conversation I learned that in her school the game hide and seek cannot be termed as such because it might offend Sikh's. In the junior school they sing a song called 'baa baa fluffy sheep'

I asked about terms such as darkies and ram jam, she almost had a siezure.

FFS!!!

The list of things I disagree with, that my daughter has been told at school, is endless.
The question arises, what exactly are school for? .....apart from disseminating dodgy information, creating an enormous drop-out rate, and, much of the time, reducing education to a boring process of spoon-feeding.

Trouble is that none of us seems to have the energy to do anything about it

it could also be argued that someone who is going to follow in his father's footsteps and take over the family butcher business, is in less need of a full comprehensive education. Latin and algebra aren't going to be any use to him!!! They have to draw some generic lines in the sand, it's a difficult thing to decide what should go in and what should go out, unless we are going to have specialist schools, then decide which schools are most suitable for the kids. That creates other problems of allocation of numbers and not enough in one, too many in another etc. One thing we should all agree on is that reading and writing skills, and basic number skills have to be up to scratch. Encouraging kids to think things through, having forums and debates should be in there as well. It certainly wasn't there when I went to school - every subject consisted of information fed to us which we had to interpret correctly to pass written exams. I'm the first to admit I had little idea about politics, and little idea how people interacted in the real world once I found myself in the adult working environment.

Ding ding putt putt 1-99.

Mr I, you may have already done this, but why don't you take it up with the school? Or look into her moving schools, a big step I know, but if you're not happy with the education she's getting there are other options/choices.

The trouble is that this kind of thing comes from government guidelines. All state schools will have the same policies

The trouble is that academically, Bluecoat is an excellent school so to move her on the basis of my outdated principles would be wrong.

Good point, if she gets a decent education then that's worth a hell of a lot these days.

You could mention your disquiet about this at the next parents' evening though! If there are good reasons for this sort of thing then fair enough, but it does increasingly become a parody of itself and is ultimately only lip service so means nowt at the end of the day..