Some kids learn by listening; others learn by doing. Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School, a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are, as Mulgan puts it, “for real.”

 

 

 

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Glossary

• resilience – an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change
• decile – a quantitative method of splitting up a set of ranked data into 10 equally large subsections
• virally – used to describe the way in which something quickly becomes very popular or well known by being published on the internet or sent from person to person by email, phone, etc.

1. What did they discover was the most important need in schooling in the UK?
2. What are the characteristics of the Studio School?
3. How does the project differ form mainstream schooling?
4. How did GCSEs exams go for the pupils who had been put on field trials?
5. How was the school advertised?

Practice Makes Perfect

Read an extract of the article Why Your Kid Isn’t Going to Princeton and a Bunch of Other Top Schools and choose the best synonym (a or b below) for the words in bold.

Many of us likely forgot one of the most striking things about the last great college sports scandal – not the illegal early recruiting 1. stings, not the under-the-table payments to incoming athletes and their parents, and not even the many perverts caught in the locker and training rooms. It was a revelation from the Varsity Blues scandal, where fancy, famous, and 2. affluent parents bribed coaches and other admissions officers and used fake resumes to get their 3. mediocre offspring admitted to prestigious colleges through the locker room door by claiming that they were serious jocks.

As the stories slowly unfolded, what became 4. apparent is that some of the kids involved didn’t even want to go to college. In each case, the main driving force was a clever con artist named Rick Singer, who combined his mastery of the college admissions process with his ability to manipulate and stroke the pathetic parents’ egos, their competitive social concerns, and their desperate need for 5. bragging rights. These folks may have gone to inferior schools or none at all, but their kids were going to the moon, and they’d tell the whole world about it. Talk about living vicariously through your kids. Of course, this isn’t exactly unexpected or difficult to understand. (…)

1.

a) swindles

b) attempts

2.

a) destitute

b) well-off

3.

a) extraordinary

b) undistinguised

4.

a) evident

b) likely

5.

a) humble

b) crowing

6.

a) directly

b) indirectly

Key: 1a); 2b); 3b); 4a); 5b); 6b)

In order to read the whole article, go to: https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/why-your-kid-isnt-getting-into-princeton.html

Discuss:

• What springs to mind when you think of ‘school’?
• What are your best and worst memories of school?
• Why do you think it is that many children don’t like school?
• Did you have to wear a school uniform?
• What’s the most important thing a school should teach children?
• Would you say school is too much like a production line in a factory?
• Agatha Christie said: “Nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them [so] they seem…unable to produce their own ideas.” Do you agree?

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