Perfection and being human.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an alliterative poem written in about 1390 by an unsung anonymous genius who lived only a few miles from where I climbed and walked in my teen years. The poem has fascinated and obsessed me for the last forty years.
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/gawain.htm

Gawain, the youngest knight in Arthur's court and a bit of a ladies' man, agrees to undertake a challenge which leads to a quest to find a Green Chapel and meet a formidable opponent. As a prequel to this quest Gawain arms himself with a shield whose device, an endless knot or pentacle, is described in a very precise and lengthy section. It is an emblem of Gawain's wish to be a perfect and integrated knight. On this quest he meets with various tests which severely try this perfection. Please read the poem! I will not bore you with the erotic and comic seduction scenes, nor the astonishing descriptions of a wild winter landscape, nor the evocation of hunts so vivid you can smell the sweat of the horses. And as for the landscapes, architecture, interior decoration, armour and sexy frocks!
The final denouement is such that Gawain is made to realise the impossibility of his aimed for perfection. Being human and fully alive is not compatible with a constructed ideal.

Which brings me to my bugbear at work. The English education system has a series of judgments which inspectors make to categorise individual schools. These range from "failing" to "outstanding". A couple of years ago the school where I teach had a report of "good with outstanding elements". The Headteacher wants the school to become "outstanding" in the next round of inspections due in the New Year. A laudable and understandable aim surely. Alas what seems to be happening is that the pressure the staff are feeling is getting in the way of what was outstanding in the last round: our care for, and relationship with the children. These pressures are administrative, to get the paperwork perfect, to make sure our plans are perfectly cross referenced with our colleagues, and, of course, all the peripherals that our education system seems to be bedevilled with must be perfectly adhered to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwDt94Z62gY

We are human. We are gloriously, messily human and our pupils respond to that. They are children for whom their previous schooling has failed. They are children with ASD, ADHD, ADD. They come from families where care and nurture have been difficult. Some have physical difficulties, some have emotional problems. Almost all have problems with self esteem. What these wonderful children need most of all is a group of relaxed, consistent adults with time for them and the love, care, patience and humour to forge real links with them. Only when we respond as accepting, flawed human beings ourselves, do our children begin to feel good about themselves. Our last inspectors found this care and we were congratulated for it. It seems a pity that this humaneness is put in jeopardy by a push for spurious perfection.