Cameron: Schools should increase focus on sport...

Oops, should've thought about how sad I'd sound just then.

My school gets £7,000 a year per pupil, instead of wasting their money on smart boards they could buy other things, easily. After all, this is more money than fees for the local private school.

However, he should stop forcing sport on everyone. Some people are good at Maths, some good at music, some are good at sport. We should all aim to be fit but we don't all need to do sport. However, I'd like to see more unusual sports like sailing, rowing and fencing tried out with pupils to interest them.


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And when do we fit this in? School curriculums are already being stuffed full of "we need to put more focus on X"

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I'm all for encouraging sport. However, there needs to be some changes. It's cruel to expect someone that doesn't like sport (as so many school kids don't) to be forced into hours of Rugby a day in freezing temperatures, for example. Currently, the un-sporty ones don't make much of a protest as P.E is only an hour or two per week; increase this time and you increase their misery. Whether they like exercise or not it could be seen as a necessary evil, but it seems unrealistic and primitive to force students into sports they desperately hate - the benefit is health, not skill at a particular sport. Therefore, movements should be made to offer more sports and an alternative in conjunction with the main. For example, on a day which would normally be football day, yoga or aerobics should be offered. While this increased choice would increase spending etc. I think it's a vital condition of increasing sporting focus.

A second effect of this might be a slight financial balance as health increases and therefore long-term NHS spending decreases.

Of course, one could argue that the extra (tax) money needed for this could be better directed. Health is important, but is it more important than policing, for example?

That's because the school system is broken.

Up until year 9, schools should just teach English, Maths and how to analyse a piece of literature.

Then at GCSE age you can introduce history, geography, physics, chemistry, biology.

Then at A-level you introduce the full spectra of subjects we have currently for A-level students.

You may think that I'm crazy, but the fact is if people were more confident in the basic skills of reading, writing, analysing and maths, then they'd be far better positioned to move onto other things. This would allow the GCSE or whatever they are replaced by to be more advanced, and this would allow the A-levels to be more advanced too. It would also leave more time free throughout the whole school career to do sports, instruments, and other activities.

Instead time is wasted teaching false science and history and geography too vague to be of any use to anyone; maths is the language of science, and English is the language of everything else (in the UK at least) and so focusing more on the development of those two languages, the very things that allow you to do other subjects, should be paramount, follow by sports.

They should teach science too otherwise some people (me) wouldve handcuffed themselves to their houses.

In years 1 through 9? Why? All that happens is your told the same things over and over, whilst simultaneously being told the last way you were told it was wrong. It's a pointless waste of time; were people better equipped to do learn science, though having better maths and English, then you could just get it right the first time, or at least, skip many of these false steps out altogether.

Because it would be mind numbingly boring. Id be in favour of abolishing maths as a subject altogether and then just teaching it as and when its needed in the subjects you need it in.

Then you end up in a situation where to teach the science, you have to first teach the maths, and because the maths, i.e. the language, is unfamiliar, it's difficult to see the science. Just like if you don't know what half the words mean, because you've only just seen them, then reading a book is essentially a pointless exercise; you have to keep checking what the words mean, thus detracting from the effect they may have in relation to the rest of the book.

Maths is as far from boring as anything scientific, it's merely presented in a horrific manner at school. As I said, the schooling system is broken; it needs rebuilding from the ground up.

Maths is like science with the point removed. With the point goes the natural learning motivation of greater understanding.

That's because the school system is broken.

Up until year 9, schools should just teach English, Maths and how to analyse a piece of literature.

Then at GCSE age you can introduce history, geography, physics, chemistry, biology.

Then at A-level you introduce the full spectra of subjects we have currently for A-level students.

You may think that I'm crazy, but the fact is if people were more confident in the basic skills of reading, writing, analysing and maths, then they'd be far better positioned to move onto other things. This would allow the GCSE or whatever they are replaced by to be more advanced, and this would allow the A-levels to be more advanced too. It would also leave more time free throughout the whole school career to do sports, instruments, and other activities.

Instead time is wasted teaching false science and history and geography too vague to be of any use to anyone; maths is the language of science, and English is the language of everything else (in the UK at least) and so focusing more on the development of those two languages, the very things that allow you to do other subjects, should be paramount, follow by sports.

In years 1 through 9? Why? All that happens is your told the same things over and over, whilst simultaneously being told the last way you were told it was wrong. It's a pointless waste of time; were people better equipped to learn science, through having better maths and English, then you could just get it right the first time, or at least, skip many of these false steps out altogether.

Maths is a language, just as English is. You learn to read and write English before you start doing humanities, and so to should you become familiar with more maths before beginning to do science and engineering.

What level of maths have you actually completed, might I ask?

Hilarious. You genuinely think it would be a good idea to ONLY teach Maths and English for the first 9 years of your school life?

So by the time your 15 or so you'll have no idea about any sort of scientific reasoning, creativity or general knowledge about the world. You'd essentially be a robot with the ability to speak, talk and do calculations but unable to understand basic day to day concepts. Nice.

I just think a 14 year old should know that the earth goes round the sun and light travels faster than sound and what gravity is.

You talk about a "pointless waste of time" well maths seems to be the biggest. If we did your proposal then after year 9 and learning the basics of maths it shouldn't be taught at gcse level, because 90% of it is absolute bs that noone ever uses

AS equivalent at around c ish. Its like teaching chemical equations without the chemicals, like learning to read using the dictionary before novels. You wouldnt take something such as reading and remove the self evident point and then add it in later. You learn to read because you wanna read the book. Just like you should learn maths with the point attached. At very least they should have a separate applied maths for people with souls. Humans are natural learners. Someone needs to study what motivates learning and how it works and use that as the driving force in a new curriculum rather than forcing it. If left to their own devices people would take stuff apart, want to know about space and what things are made of, how their bodies work and so forth. They wouldnt go get a book about quadratic pissing equations