Realist begins with:
"What Crap."

Eventually continues with:
"Teach kids fundamentals."

and with:
"It annoys me that bleeding hearts want to help troubled kids emotionally....."

And finally ends with:
"Teach kids about ....how to deal with others and communication,...."

Does that tell you something "Realist"?

Even more difficult when the polticians and media colude to create a climate of "terror" and "fear", so they can go and plunder the Middle East. I'm glad I haven't been experiencing my 'formative' years during the last 6 years. Good grief, methinks the author looketh in the wrong direction!

I would think that teachers and schools can have either a positive or a negative affect on students, depending on what the teacher does and how the schools are being run.

This would be particularly the case for boys.

"We've set up project teams and one of them is the boys education project team, which is made up of interested teachers. They then work on an action plan and they set up their own key outcomes which is to basically increase teachers' awareness of the educational needs of boys, and then they work with them to develop the specific learning strategies, talk about the different types of methodologies, about much more hands-on, practical. Boys need that, technical. And then they're in the process of collecting and analysing the data on the achievement. And it's about teaching the boys explicitly, how to organise themselves, high order thinking skills, positive reinforcement, because boys need that. And there's a lot of affirmative action programs for boys that we are doing, like getting boys to run assemblies, and having a boys' magazine, lots of things like that."

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2002/720116.htm

Unfortunately I think that this school is the rare exception rather than the norm.