Re: bn

Frances Kemmish wrote:
> Matthew Huntbach wrote:
> > On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, Frances Kemmish wrote:

> >> I don't know what your political views are, really, but you do come
> >> across as someone with a huge chip on your shoulder.

> > Because I'm sceptical about cheap-and-easy fixes proposed to solve problems
> > which are actually rather complex - "bring back grammar schools and all
> > our educational problems will be solved" is a typical case - or for other
> > reasons? I don't like sloppy thinking, and that often leads me when I see
> > someone putting a one-sided argument to raise the objections to it. Does
> > this come across as having a huge chip on my shoulder?

> No; it has more to do with sweeping comments such as:
>
> "Sure, the odd bright working class kid made it into the Grammar, but
> commentators often make out Grammar schools were stuffed full of bright
> working class kids, rather than that there were a few of them, left
> feeling socialy awkwarrd, in an overwhelmingly middle class environment."

So it's fine to make sweeping statements attacking comprehensive
schools and blaming them for social immobility, but it's to "have a
huge chip on your shoulder" to suggest the criticisms are overblown and
there was some merit in ending the situation where pupils were
permanently divided by a test at the age of 11?

> Some of your earlier comments about attitudes to Roman Catholics had the
> same sort of, frankly, whining tone. One is left to assume that these
> are the result of your personal experiences, and they do not mesh with
> my own.

So it's fine for newspapers like the Guardian to make sweeping
one-sided attacks on the Catholic Church, and fine that a vicious
anti-Catholic novel becomes a world best-seller, but to "have a huge
chip on your shoulder" to try and put the other side?

So I defend things which it's become fashionable to attack, and for
that I'm to be put down as a whiner with a chip on his shoulder?

Matthew Huntbach

.

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