Friday, March 4, 2011
Will Jamie educate young drivers?
I don’t know how many of you have been following Jamie’s Dream School, but if you haven’t you’re certainly missing out on some compelling viewing.
As young drivers it’s likely that, like me, you’re not long out of school so many of the scenes and much of the classroom banter will seem eerily familiar.
Like Jamie Oliver himself, my reaction at seeing classrooms full of unruly, distracted and persecuted-feeling teenagers was one of horrified self-revelation. Was I really like that – was I that bad, was I worse? Did I have that little empathy and respect for my teachers? Have I grown up so much in only five years?
It seems to matter little to the 20 students in Jamie’s dream school that their teachers are celebrities. They’re simply not as impressed by the assembled thespians, knights, lords, doctors and documentary presenters as I imagine they would have been at being taught acting by someone from the cast of Hollyoaks?And poor David Starkey! The elevated, slightly fusty historian is so bewildered by the motley crew of secondary school dropouts that he gets in front of the class and instantly assumes the template of the teacher at school most likely to suffer a mid-lesson cardiac arrest.
“You’re here because you failed!” he says before going on to call a student fat, all without any provocation.
Perhaps something is missing from the programme and I’ll be interested to see if there’s any mention of this missing element over the coming episodes. What about some road safety education?
With young driver car insurance premiums being far too costly for many and more young people dying in road accidents than from any other cause, road safety education definitely deserves a place on Jamie’s curriculum.
And perhaps Starkey could learn a trick or two from Hoot! where we reward people for doing the right thing. It’s called using the carrot, not the stick and, you know what, it works.
Image © treehouse1977 via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence
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posted by Fuse @ 8:41 AM 
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