More qualified leavers
Of the 76,436 pupils leaving Scottish schools in 1970-71, 35,510 reached at least S4 and 34,237 had some Scottish Certificate of Education qualification. This provides another indication of the continuously rising number of pupils staying on at school, and the corresponding decrease in those leaving with no qualifications.
Growth through responsibility
Jimmy Reid left school at 14, which causes him neither pride nor pain. Next Friday he will be installed as Glasgow University rector, the latest in a line stretching back three centuries that includes such scholars and statesmen as Adam Fergusson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Peel, Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone, and writers from Macaulay to Compton Mackenzie.
Pupil violence feared
Most pupils are well-behaved, but a small minority is making the normal process of education impossible, said Mr Stanley Allan, president of the Scottish Schoolmasters’ Association, to the Scottish Trade Union Congress in Dunoon. If the government were foolish enough to allow an extra year to become merely another year of imprisonment, a holocaust of disciplinary problems and opposition to authority would hit schools and society.
Fewer medical students
Glasgow University medical faculty will admit only 130 students next session, the first in which a five-year syllabus operates. Last year women made up 49 per cent of the intake. The faculty has decided that for the next three years a maximum quota of 40 per cent women should be imposed. This is still higher than in all other schools but the Royal Free Hospital, London, it said.
Professor drops sex for politics
Two years ago Hans-Jochen Gamm, education professor at West Germany’s Darmstadt Technological University, published a book advocating that secondary schools be equipped with rooms where pupils could make love, for “successful sexual encounters increase productive energy”. Now this ageing enfant terrible (47) has turned to radical politics. His new book, Misery of Late Bourgeois Education, avers that it is not the task of students to lead the attack on the “late capitalistic” state, but of apprentices under vocational school teachers’ leadership.
