LIKE most weeks, there has been plenty of nonsense talked.

 

The Confederation of British Industry has called for high-flying graduates without teaching qualifications to be drafted into school classrooms.

Maybe this should not come as a surprise. Teachers have been maligned, unfairly in the vast majority of instances, by many in the business community over the decades.

Perhaps we should not expect CBI Scotland to be fully aware of the amount of training that the highly-professional teachers we have in the Scottish state school sector have undertaken.

It seems, in these days of online guides to just about anything you can imagine, that too many people think they are experts on pretty much everything.

And maybe some of those involved in CBI Scotland believe that, just because they went to school, they could teach a class.

This week, we have also had Professor Alan Gilloran, deputy principal of Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, declare that medicine "is plumbing".

The latest batch of ridiculous comments and proposals has brought back memories of the 2007 Disney-Pixar animated film Ratatouille, specifically chef Auguste Gusteau's bestselling book, 'Anyone Can Cook'.

This mantra proves inspirational to cute rat Remy, the movie's hero.

However, Ratatouille, is, obviously, not based on reality. CBI Scotland's proposals for the education sector north of the Border are, in contrast, supposedly grounded in the real world, even if they do seem fantastical.

It is not the case that anyone can do anything, as can be seen clearly by looking at a whole raft of professions and trades.

"Citizen journalism" seems to be all the rage these days. However, many of the attempts at such activity merely highlight the crucial importance of training, skills, knowledge and experience in this field. There is, undoubtedly, a vast gulf between the professional and amateur efforts.

Ratatouille is a great story but, while anyone can cook, not everyone can do it well. And chefs in Michelin-starred restaurants would hardly be impressed by the notion that someone with no training and a cookbook could do their jobs as well as them.

It is also worth bearing in mind that Andy Hornby, the man running Bank of Scotland owner HBOS when it came close to collapse in the autumn of 2008, actually earned his stripes in the retail sector. Fred Goodwin, who headed Royal Bank of Scotland when it had to be rescued by the UK taxpayer nearly seven years ago, trained as an accountant.

Believe it or not, there also seems to be a view in the business community that you do not even need relevant qualifications to be a headteacher.

The CBI Scotland report expresses a desire for more headteachers to be appointed from leadership roles outwith the education sector, declaring: "The CBI has promoted the idea of leaders from outside the education sector coming in to run schools."

But does CBI Scotland have any clue about what is involved in being a headteacher?

It floats, as an alternative to its proposal of recruiting headteachers with no experience of schools, the idea that headteachers should leave education for a period to gain experience of the business world.

This might, you would imagine, be somewhat disruptive to the running of a school. Surely not too many institutional shareholders would be happy if the chief executive of a publicly-quoted company were to go off on a sabbatical to gain experience of something else.

And why is it that classroom teachers, or headteachers, require experience of the business world? They are there to educate children. That is what they are experts in, and we should afford them the proper respect and let them get on with it.

We hear way too much whingeing about under-performance by a minuscule proportion of teachers. Decades of covering the corporate sector would suggest there is a far greater incidence of under-performance in the business world, frequently at the highest levels.

This is sometimes driven by the pursuit of short-term agendas, encouraged by badly-designed bonus systems which are in some cases, such as in the banking sector, fairly unacceptable from the viewpoint of society.

So why would we want to risk headteachers' experience being tarnished by exposure to such behaviour by a small, but nevertheless significant, number of high-fliers in the business world?

What on earth is wrong with education for its own sake? What children need is a broad education, which they can apply to whichever careers they might choose further down the line.

It is fine to alert children to opportunities in certain sectors, but there are myriad ways to do this without sending headteachers out to work in businesses or drafting in the unqualified to run schools. The idea of "leaders" with no prior experience of schools being parachuted in as headteachers is somewhat terrifying.

It is easy to become heartily sick and tired of the ever-growing notion that managers can run operations in any sector, applying so-called leadership skills to industries of which they have absolutely no experience.

You sometimes get the impression, given the propensity for cost reduction in the corporate world and increasing signs of ill-judged reorganisation in parts of the public sector, that a lack of understanding of what is actually involved in the operations is an advantage for those executives who earn fat bonuses by making cuts.

After all, they are often not around long enough to deal with the damage caused, moving swiftly into other highly-paid roles. Or, if they perform particularly badly and do get found out, there is always the cushion of a big payment by way of compensation for loss of office.

But such a lack of understanding is certainly not good for the organisations these people oversee, or those they serve, whether it be customers, patients or schoolchildren.

It is ridiculous to suggest that anyone can do anything, regardless of the move towards "lifelong learning". People, whether they be teachers or engineers or whatever, have to work long and hard to gain qualifications and experience to do their chosen jobs well.

Would Mr Gilloran actually want a plumber to operate on him, even if the tradesman had watched an episode of 'Holby City' first, or a doctor to fix a problem with the u-bend?