'Retrain ex-troops' as teachers

When I was a lad I attended a boys secondary school during the 1960's. A couple of our PE teachers were ex-army PT Instructors. These guys were psychopaths and sadists. They would check to see if we had underwear on under our sports shorts; force us into cold showers and stand back laughing; slipper our bare buttocks for talking and allow their favourite bully boys to beat up the rest of us! Great days.....

More on the same story in the Guardian

Former soldiers should be retrained to teach in inner city schools in order to tackle disruptive behaviour and bring their own brand of "moral authority" to the classroom, a thinktank said today.
Military-trained teachers could help to tame violent or unsafe classrooms, while providing meaningful employment for ex-servicemen and women, said a paper by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Another rediculous solution to a problem whose roots go far beyond the classroom walls. It'll be like Beavis and Butthead's PE teacher!

I wasn't aware that these sorts of schemes had been in placein the US for over a decade, bonkers.

What's wrong is that again, it's clearly shifting the cause as to why kids are "disruptive" into the realm of "poor discipline".
Seriously, at a time when education is still up shit creak, teacher job satisfaction is low and retention rates are dreadful, it's pathetic that they think bringing in "Ex-servicemen [who] are sure of their own moral authority and are not intimidated," will actually change anything.

This isn't some conspiracy theory bollocks Jack. It's just a slap in the face to teachers who actually might wanna get on with teaching their subjects and would rather have better wages and smaller classroom sizes than money wasted on retraining troops with the expressed purpose of bringing more discipline when they should be addressing the causes of "problem" behaviour.

Or are you just doing your casual reactionary thing? I can't tell anymore.

Or murdering him

Alan, you're just a retard.

Conor, I hardly think I'm the one being casual reactionary, since you said "I just have this vision of some ex-troop having a flashback in geography class every time he looks at a map of the middle-east and central asia, about knifing some Iraqi in front of his family.", because yea, that's what sldiers do, right? They're all cold blooded evil killers!

What's so bad about people from a different background being trained as teachers?

The extent of my reading on this is the Guardian article on this, and arguing with the social workers at work about it, but the gist of the the Troops to Teachers scheme (I haven't read the specifics of what the think tank proposed - ctually the BBC article comes over a lot more mental than the Guardian one) is about providing training for people for when they leave the army.

Since there's a shorage of teachers, how is it "insulting" to try targetted recruitment? It's hardly "money wasted" (again, wtf! If you're going to accuse me of being reactionary, you can hardly start saying public money spent on one area of training is "wasted") if it means people who are otherwise much more likely to be un/underemployed are trained as teachers, is it?

As I said, they're not gonna be thrown from the front lines into a class room - they're going to be trained as teachers. You're just sore that it de-professionalises teaching, and suggests that there are other ways you might learn to teach than by going to uni. Altho given some f the mental shit you've told me that science teachers believe, I'd have thought you'd be pretty doubtful as to how useful a degree was in equiping people to be teachers!

Of course I don't begrudge anyone a job, Jack. It's as if you didn't even bother reading the article or my posts at all.
In terms of its expressed purpose of tackling "disruptive behavior" it's bullshit and reactionary as fuck. I'd ratrher see teachers paid more and with smaller classroom sizes as a way of dealing with problematic classroom issues.

But sure na just get boot camp sergeants in.

Except it's obviously not a joke.

Conor - you mean based on a badly written write up on BBC News, aimed towards what makes a nice headline the target is discipline, yea? The report is roduced by a think tank, who secure extra money and advertising if they can get in the media. Best way to do that is give some nice quotes that fit acurrent news agenda - at the moment problems of ASB, knife crime, discipline in schools etc. etc. The BBC article is especially bad on this.

However, if ou look at it properly (as I did, when we argued about it at work, given that it's a somewhat relevant topic) and look at the Troops to Teach programme, it's not about that. It's simply a training programme for people as the leave the forces (the US military puts a lot more into this than the UK, as they need a much higher recruitment rate so need to make it more attractive)

http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/jobopportunities/a/troopstoteacher.htm

Nothing about bringing discipline or drill sergeant attitudes to the class room - "School systems are finding former military members to be very valuable assets. They bring leadership skills, a concern for their students (similar to their troops) and a lot of experience to the classroom.". This is in the US, where they are going to make an even bigger dealabout bringing discipline to inner city schools than here - but isn't focusing on discipline, because it's not media directed.

It's a relatively basic idea, and I'd hav thought it wouldn't really be the most contraversial - it's just been given a media spin by a think tank media guy, doing what think tanks do - tuning their reports and press releases towards what will get in the media. If they're gonna actually use it at all, it's going to be based more on the successful US programme, rather than some media soundbytes.

Obviously it'd be great if teachers got paid more. Obviously Im not saying otherwise - but this has nothing to do with that. You don't begrudge public spending in one area because it could be "better spent" in another. And I would have thought a good way to reduce class sizes is to train more teachers, no?

If you ask me it sounds like a bright idea of some midranking upwardly mobile bureaucrat trying to tie up two longstanding problems without really putting some thought into it.

Next week: heroin addicts are trained as nurses.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7247160.stm

More your cuppa decaf tea Conor?

Shit!!! Do you really mean that!!! But I thought you were an anarchist!!!

She got us there Conor...

Here, listen I was pretty good at the crowd control/classroom management thing. In fact it was deemed one of my strengths by examiners, even when at the expense of "subject delivery" especially in the really shite school I was in.
That is by no means a good thing and something I'm kind of ashamed of, I hated being a cunt, but they make it part of the job and it becomes normalised in the context of attitudes towards kids as "problems", and "lacking discipline". I wouldn't even attempt to say it is a positive quality.

You do realise that what your proposing involves greater links between universities and the armed forces and is largely a product of the armies falling recruitment levels. I don't really see how you can possibly argue that this is a good thing, it may be kinda inevitable since its become clear that the UK needs more troops on the ground since it has to fulfill a garrison role and also needs to retain its ''specialist'' status in comparison to american forces thus recruiting from universities is the logical option, but its still fucked up.

I meanyour viewing it simply as a means of training ex-troops, whcih is highly naive, considering the US quite clearly uses college funding a s a lure to get people to join their armed forces. The one thing to be said about british universities is that they're open to most of society, you can get a loan you don't need to get patronage and funding from companies and the army like so many kids do in the US,

And seriously i think the comments about soliders who are homeless/temporaryly housed just being there because they couldn;t get a decent job or good training is pretty fucking retarded. I mean seriously if someones got post-traumaic strsss disorder, they aren't going to make a good teacher ffs

Cantdo, Jack can argue it's a good thing because he's Jack, and we're all just being wooly liberals.

Perspective from an ex navy dude who's now a teacher
The navyman who became a teacher
He doesn't seem to think links between schools and the military is a good thing at all.

When students in his school, which draws pupils from some of the most deprived areas of Devon, say they are planning to join up, he says he feels "very sad".
Mr Clinch says armed forces' recruitment activities may not be as obvious as they used to be but they go into schools with the aim of signing young people up.
"It's young, mainly working class kids that they want. The officer class are treated differently - they are going to manage these recruits," he says.

It'd work out quite well if they just swapped teachers for soldiers one-for-one. The teachers would be crap at shooting and blowing things up; boring people to death causes much less collateral damage. On the other hand we'd finally have accepted the true nature of schools and they be staffed by people better suited to potentially explosive policing actions.