But my time teaching in some of London's inner-city schools has taught me much. I have seen things you would never believe.
As every year ticked by, I became more and more frustrated with the lies we teachers were having to tell the public. We had to pretend that our schools were better than they were in order to trick parents into sending us their children.
British children are now rated 16th in the world for science, 25th for reading and 28th for maths, according to the OECD's 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report. The 2000 PISA report ranked British children as fourth for science, seventh for reading and eighth for maths. We now spend more than 80 billion ($123bn) a year (double what we spent in the 1990s) on education and yet British schoolchildren have plummeted in the international league tables.
So I wrote a book, To Miss with Love, with the intention of it being published anonymously because I knew just how dangerous it was to speak to the truth. But then, before publication, I spoke at the Conservative Party conference in October last year about our broken education system, revealing some of my thoughts on what needs fixing.
As a British teacher recently told me, there was nothing I said in the speech that teachers don't say everyday in staffrooms across the country. We simply aren't allowed to say it out loud. The state school system literally prevents its teachers from speaking their minds.
The riots in London came as no surprise to British teachers. We experience general chaos on a daily basis in our schools.
Some British parents say that they cannot discipline their children because their children threaten to call the police and cry abuse. Every time their child misbehaves, rather than being able to discipline them appropriately, the parents remember their neighbour or their friend or their cousin who was handcuffed in their own house and hauled away by the police, their children put into social care for a night, all because of some made-up story.
The same thing happens at school. The bad children are constantly receiving prizes simply for remaining quiet or for turning up on time. The teachers, in order to win round the bad children, are taught by their line managers and teacher training institutions that praise is what is needed to motivate children. So we all use it to saturation point, devaluing the worth of the gold star. Meanwhile, the good children, who are left in the dark because no one notices, eventually become bad in an effort to gain some attention.
The schools struggle to keep order, partly because of the low standards of the education system but also because teachers are encouraged to constantly do group work and entertain the children.
Children must never be bored, and if they are, or if they disrupt, it is the teacher's fault.
Children are never held to account for what they do.
Is it any wonder that some of the children decided to show the police that they were in charge and went out looting?
The tradition of competition which we celebrate in the world of sport has become unfashionable in the academic classroom. Innovation requires that children never be given grades and are never allowed to know where they stand in comparison to their peers.
Tradition in education has become a dirty word and is reserved for the elite while innovation is what is given to the poor.
General thinking around school being boring makes it possible for us to have reached a stage where teachers are no longer expected to teach and instead they must be facilitators of learning with constant group work going on, where the teacher is rarely standing in front of the class, but instead moves amongst the children who are all busy doing something.
The idea here is that ``doing'' is more interesting than ``listening''. And that might very well be true. But the problem comes when we think that ``doing'' needs to happen most of the time.
So in the past 30 years, the concept of teaching knowledge in our classrooms has nearly disappeared altogether. Teaching historical facts or lists of vocab which rely on memory skills is considered old-fashioned. Instead, we think it better to inspire children to be creative through constant group discussion and project work.
Putting desks in rows in considered archaic, rote-learning is abandoned completely, even the idea of classrooms having walls is rejected _ encouraging chaos all around _ and our children quite literally are leaving school without basic knowledge in subjects such as English, maths and history.
A recent study from the University of Sheffield showed that 20 per cent of the children leaving school in Britain are functionally illiterate. Schools, quite simply, need classrooms. And classrooms, in turn, require walls. When I first told my father that we were spending billions of pounds on schools building walless classrooms, he was baffled. You see, he grew up in poverty-stricken Guyana where he went to a school that had no walls because they couldn't afford them. So for us to now spend billions recreating what the developing world is trying to move away from seems like lunacy. But that's exactly what we're doing.
If we want to equip our children with the power to change the world, they must first have knowledge of it and understand it. Unfortunately the ``progressives'' think that somehow knowledge is right-wing and boring.
This is where I believe there could be a real role for free schools in our inner cities in Britain. This month, our first batch of British free schools opened - there were 24 of them. Free schools are free to do what is best for their children and do not have their hands tied behind their backs by the state. They are able to reject the cultural pressure that is felt in some of our ordinary state schools, and do something different. They are free to provide children with the tradition that is found in our better private schools.
Free schools can offer an extended day, lessons that are about knowledge acquisition, and competition to drive up standards. They can provide classrooms with desks in rows.
The only way our poorest children can succeed is for them to receive the same quality of education as our richest.
They need the privilege of a traditional education.
Why did the London riots happen? Because 20 per cent of British young people are functionally illiterate. They do not know the difference between right and wrong.
Because the education that is best for the best is being kept only for the very few.
Trendy teachers cheat the poor and lay the groundwork for riots, Katharine Birbalsingh, The Australian, 23 September 2011 : http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/trendy-teachers-cheat-the-poor-and-lay-the-groundwork-for-riots/story-e6frg6zo-1226143966471
