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Our children need boring teachers

David Mitchell, The Observer

How about this for a futile endeavour. The chief inspector of schools, Christine Gilbert, last week announced a ‘crackdown’ on boring teachers. Quite how she intends to banish tediousness from the classroom is unclear, but the real question is: Why she should even try?

The truth is that some of the things children need to learn are boring. There’s nothing much you can do about that. You can’t make pupils
fi nd maths scintillating; in the end, they just have to ‘gird their brains’ and get to grips with it, or risk limiting their future prospects.
Besides, even if you could turn school into a non-stop, multimedia thrillfest that effortlessly inculcated children with knowledge of everything from the Magna Carta to the periodic table, it would be a totally inappropriate preparation for life. Nothing ever got achieved
without a bit of boredom. Learning to cope with ennui and to persevere, rather than giving up and blaming other people, is a vital skill, perhaps the most vital. Another word for it is concentration. Pupils who leave school without realising this fact have really been let down.