John Rae (educator) - Media Appearances

Media Appearances

During the 1980s, Rae wrote newspaper articles and regularly appeared as a panellist on programmes such as Question Time on BBC 1 and Any Questions on BBC Radio 4, and as an interviewee on Newsnight on BBC 2, in which he often argued for the need for schools to be tolerant and to "apply common sense" when dealing with minor infractions of the rules or end-of-term 'high jinks', and that a sense of humour was almost a pre-requisite of "firm but fair" discipline when dealing with teenage pupils, and especially teenage boys. He said that drug-taking was entirely unacceptable, but that pupils should only be expelled if they had committed serious offences, such as supplying and/or selling drugs, or had dishonestly claimed to be innocent when given the chance to 'own up'. He also said that he believed that a co-educational school environment had many merits. He also emphasised that, in his opinion, it was not merely the right of parents to choose to educate their children at independent schools, but also the right of educators not employed by the state to provide education.