On Apr 24, 3:55*am, "MatSav" wrote:


At my secondary comprehensive ("high") school, we had to make
choices at aged 14 (for me, that was in 1975) about what subjects
to study to GCE O' Level or CSE (the standard qualifications, at
the time, *for 16-y-o's in the UK). These choices were
constrained by the timetable planners, and some subjects were
compulsory.


You might have been at my school except for the fact it was all
girls! Except you had slightly more choice because our timetables
were such that you had to choose between history and geography (And I
was good at both of them) French and typing (except if you were in
the academic stream as I was you were pretty much forced to do French
and if you were in the non-academic stream you were expected to do
typing) and you had to choose between art, needlework or domestic
science- I picked art as the lesser evil being hopeless at the other 2
but a friend of mine who later went to do costume design for theatre
suffered because she needed to do art and sewing

It was compulsory to study English, Mathematics, at least one
science, and one foreign language.

We only had one science and one foreign language- we all had to do
human biology and French. One of us who planned to do something that
needed a physics O level ended up having to have special arrangements
to study at the local boy's school where the local boys so ignored her
(along with their teacher) that she dropped out

, and
teacher's advice tends to stick with traditional options - such
as engineering, banking, nursing, etc...

We were all told the brightest of us should consider the post office
counter and the rest of us Woolworths! Then again we'd been taught
from year one that we would only get jobs for money to spend on make
up etc because our ultimate mission was to meet a guy with a good
job...basically we would be failures if by the age of 21- we had not
at very least got an engagement ring from a guy with a steady well
paid job (Not a doctor or anything like that- we weren't worthy of
such an honour- but something in the local council/civil service was
good going)..by say 23 we should all be housewives with at least 1 kid
and another on the way....The state of our careers advice was when
someone mentioned going to study to be a nursery nurse the careers
teacher told her she was too stupid to pass the crucial GCSE in human
biology and a couple of other girls looked at it seriously...Lorraine
got through the human biology GCSE because she used to go to lunch
with someone who knew more than the teacher (Me. Our human biology
teacher was a PE teacher who did the whole course with the book on her
lap and wouldn't talk about sex....that's a story for another time.
When we were revising I asked if DNA might come up and she gave me an
ear bashing because that was too advanced......base pairs landed in
the middle of the compulsory part of the exam!) and because the
career's teacher did not approve of nursery nursing...5 of my fellow
pupils signed up for it on the spot!

Lesley

Slave of the Fabulous Furballs