Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.

They school them to confuse process and substance.

Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success.

The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value.

Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.

Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1973)    infed.org

There is a continuity within the Thatcher-Major-Blair 'reforms', namely the view that education has a utilitarian purpose: to fit pupils to work in a competitive society, and one in which there is systemic insecurity.

We should not be surprised by this, it's what neoliberalism is all about.

However, the view that education is not synonymous with "training", or simply about the imparting of "skills", is a legacy from The Enlightenment; a legacy which the current elite finds threatening.

Bill Rammell, then Higher Education Minister, told The Independent that:

' ... the fall in those studying classics, philosophy and history (is) "no bad thing" ... ' IND

The trend towards "mechanised" education has also recently been raised both by North London student Tom Greene writing in The Independent, by a leader in The Guardian, and by Peter Hyman in the Observer.

It's all a matter of the difference between: 'What's counted and what counts?'

England runs one of the most comprehensive testing regimes in Western Europe, and the consequent damage caused to real education is the subject of much comment:

What counts,   Our children tested to destruction,   SATs: Exam meltdown;

There is a wider problem raised, for example, in the Unicef Report.

In general, there's a strong sense that Primary schools 'have lost their sense of fun and play'.

The effects of SATs on subjects like Poetry, and Science have also been highlighted.

Finally, and supporting A.C.Grayling's argument, there is lack of attention to "high order skills" probably because they are less easy to test, and/or, because they are no longer required in the global 'utopia'.   'Parrots';

Universities must cut private schools intake, says Simon Hughes

Colleges are 'failing miserably' to reflect society, according to the Liberal Democrat deputy leader ...

Hughes told the Guardian:

"Every university should, wherever their fee level is, but specifically for a fee level above £6,000, recruit on the basis of no more people coming from the private sector than there are in the public as a whole ...

"I don't believe you have to look to the private sector to give you the quality of exam results and ability to make up the numbers to fill the places." ...

RichardWhittington
7 January 2011 11:21PM

No; the fault is not with the universities and their admission policies, it is with the abysmally low standard of the National Curriculum foisted on state shools during the New Labour days.

The problem is that the universities have not dropped their entry standards to reflect the lowering of quality of state school applicants, favouring by default privately educated pupils, whose schools were not bound by Labour's ideological constraints.

I've seen the science content of the National Curriculum. It is absolute crap. This is what Simon Hughes should be railing at.

Guardian  07 Jan 2011    Higher Education    State Theory of Learning

Simon Hughes: universities should limit private school intake

University fee plan for poorer students 'not workable'

One in 11 boys leaves primary school 'unable to read'

In 1975 the Head of the City of Manchester's Remedial Guidance Service told me that fiftern per cent of the city's pupils needed specialist help with reading.

One in 11 boys in England - one in seven in some areas - starts secondary school with, at best, the reading skills of an average seven-year-old.

According to data obtained by the BBC's Today programme, 9% of 11-year-old boys fell well below expected standards.

But in Nottingham that proportion was 15% and the situation was only marginally better in Derby, Manchester, Rotherham and Telford.

The government is bringing in a reading check for six-year-olds.

Education experts said it was hard for children struggling at age 11 ever to catch up ...

BBC NEWS  17 Dec 2010

£500m literacy drive is a flop

The Durham University study, led by Peter Tymms, concluded that the National Literacy Strategy, which includes the “literacy hour” daily English lesson, had made a “barely noticeable” impression on reading standards, which had barely improved since the 1950s.

The Times  02 Nov 2007    Michael Gove

Mapping boys' reading ability

Eleven-year-old illiteracy 'unacceptable'

Half of boys, age five, 'struggling in basics'

Struggling pupils promised one-to-one tuition

Government to roll out reading programme

Underfunded primary schools fail to teach basic literacy

Hundreds of authors urge PM to tackle child illiteracy

England slides down world literacy league

Reading and maths standards falling in Britain, says OECD

Four in 10 primary schoolers failing three Rs

England falls in reading league

UK children 'reading too early'

Ten years of bold education boasts now look sadly hollow

David Willetts is trying to conjure away the
dangers of higher education reform with the magic word 'choice'

Universities - under consistent attack for three decades and from all political parties – now take the final step across the Rubicon.

With the removal of all national funding from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and its drastic reduction in others, higher education in the UK has ceased to be a public good.

It is now a wholly private and tradable commodity ...

... [Willetts] plans to introduce a new system of “kite-marks” validating degrees and providing customers with the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

These kite-marks will indicate how highly employers rate universities so that, as Willetts was quoted as saying,

“At last, students will be able to see the courses that can get the jobs they aspire to and those that do not perform well”.

This is a very particular way of determining the quality of education.

The question it raises is not ‘Who will educate the educators?’ but ‘Who will assess the assessors?’

Waving his left hand, Willetts tells prospective students that they won't have to pay any money, will be free to choose whatever university they want and will be better informed about the products available.

But with a wave of his right hand, he makes the public university disappear, invites a range of new interests to access wholly new income streams flowing out of the pockets of students and their families, and puts in place mechanisms by which the government set the criteria according to which universities will be judged ...

openDemocracy  15 Dec 2010    Higher Education

Ministers declare war on degrees without prospects

Anger as science excluded from new diploma

Thousands of youngsters taking science, languages and religious studies at GCSE face being written off as ineligible for the Government’s new English baccalaureate, it emerged yesterday.

The Government’s White Paper on education last month, said it would be awarded to anyone gaining five A* to C grades in English, maths, a science, a language – modern or ancient – and a humanities subject.

However, ministers have now announced some GCSE science and languages courses will not count towards it..

In addition, GCSEs in religious education will not be considered as a humanities subject ...

Applied science and language GCSEs, taken by more than 20,000 youngsters, were excluded from the list of qualifications to be recognised.

In addition, only history and geography would qualify as a humanities subject ...

Information technology is also not on the list of subjects to qualify for the ranking.

One observer said: “It seems you can get it for studying biblical Hebrew but not a modern day understanding of technology.” ...

Independent  14 Dec 2010    Michael Gove

A look back to the School Leaving Certificate

'English Baccalaureate' to combat drop in academic GCSEs

'Great news'

Letting the Ideology Show

Napoleon Gove can dictate its terms but the school curriculum is bogus

RE 'could be marginalised '

Why does Gove believe dead languages and Ancient History are more important ... ?

UK schools fall in global ranking

The survey by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) is designed to compare standards between different education systems around the world.

In 2000, when 32 countries took part in the survey, the UK came 7th in reading skills - but the figures for 2009 show that out of 65 countries, the UK has fallen to 25th place.

Countries such as Poland, Estonia, Canada, Norway and Singapore are above the UK in reading ability, in a table headed by South Korea and Finland.

The study also includes regions within countries - and the Chinese school systems in Shanghai and Hong Kong are among the most successful.

If Shanghai had been a country, it would have been the single most successful in this global survey.

A quarter of pupils in Shanghai were able to tackle complex maths problems, compared with an average of 3% across the OECD survey.

In maths, between 2000 and 2009 the UK has fallen from 8th to 28th and in science from 4th to 16th ...

BBC NEWS  07 Dec 2010    

PISA 2009 Results

What lies below the surface of the student protest?

As noted here on OurKingdom by Niki Seth Smith, the media can be relied upon to draw on the usual assortment of 'types', stereotypes that enable dismissal of the student movement and its arguments as ‘hippy’, anarchic, or childish.

Whilst the media play this game, student groups across the country are occupying their universities and carrying out teach-ins, seminars and workshops ...

To judge the legitimacy of the student protest simply by its image would be to ignore the motives of the protestors and the wider significance of their actions.

Firstly, they are protesting against the prospect of rising fees and decreasing funds in Higher Education.

This issue is specific to the student’s situation, and protesting against them could be seen, at least in part, as driven by self-interest.

Then there is criticism of the marketisation of the university system, which is seen as part of the coalition government’s ideological attack on public services.

However, there is also the question of political disaffection and economic injustice.

The student protest is in part a reaction to a longer process starting with Thatcher and passing through New Labour, the expenses scandal and the financial crisis.

Politicians are increasingly perceived as separate from citizens, as are the rich from the poor.

The protest is not simply against Nick Clegg’s promise-breaking or the Torys’ elitism, but the political system as a whole, and it is not limited to the students.

As noted by Anthony Barnett, the reaction of many has been: ‘At last somebody is protesting’ ...

So far, large sections of the media, the police force and the political classes have sought to de-legitimise and dismiss the students.

But as the protesters’ disaffections go beyond Higher Education reform, dismissal of them is tantamount to avoiding debate on a wider series of social and political issues ...

openDemocracy  04 Dec 2010        

A 'massive moral failure'

Towards the Good Society

School reforms 'could lead to more segregation'

Creating a market between schools is exactly the name of the game.

The Gove regime will create a two-tier system.

The pupil premium will not over-ride parental pressure to ensure that 'their' school is 'oik' free.

So the 'oiks' will remain in council-run schools which will be seen - like the old secondary moderns - to be second class, and second rate.

Costs will go up since a market needs surplus places.

As with the NHS, so with the schools: the attempt to provide a service free and run it as a market is an oxymoron.

The warnings come in the department's own economic assessment of the Schools White Paper, which was presented to Parliament by Education Secretary Michael Gove last week.

It describes how the changes it is making to the schools system - increasing the number of autonomous academies and free schools, and reducing bureaucracy around school admissions - will create more of a market between schools ...

[The report] warns of an "increase in stratification" and says "there is a risk that parents select schools based on peer groups, where schools compete to attract particular groups of people, where barriers to choice result in segregation" ...

The report also looks at the government's policy of allowing private and voluntary providers to set up so-called "free schools".

It suggests there are high costs associated with the plans. These include the extra start-up costs and higher costs linked to what will probably be a small number of pupils in such schools.

It says: "There may be lower running costs but these may be offset by the diseconomies of scale associated with small schools.

"A degree of surplus places is necessary in encouraging school choice and competition between schools and this will provide some benefit where standards are increased, but there is also cost to providing surplus places which should be noted." ...

BBC NEWS  02 Dec 2010    Michael Gove: Tory Education 'Reform'

Weak teachers the biggest problem in schools – Ofsted

In the watchdog's annual report, inspectors found 37% of teaching was merely "satisfactory".

The quality was too "variable" and not good enough in half of England's secondaries and over two-fifths of primaries.

Almost half of schools (45%) were judged satisfactory or worse this year, with 8% rated inadequate.

Gilbert said: "The weakest area, and the area that I am most concerned about, is teaching. In many of our good schools we see pockets of weaker teaching.

"There is too much teaching that is dull and uninspiring. This means that too many young people are not equipped well enough to make the best of their lives." ...

The report highlights good performance in academies – state schools independent of local authorities.

Of 43 inspected, 20 were deemed good, and 11 of those were outstanding ...

(3 were judged inadequate. Most of the academies inspected were formerly failing schools.)

The report says: "There are some common characteristics to outstanding teaching in academies.

It is achieved by establishing very high and shared expectations across all classrooms.

Learning is often highly structured, informed by teachers' excellent subject knowledge."

Guardian  23 Nov 2010    Ofsted

Ofsted

'Sleight of hand' used to push up grades claims expert

"If you are a head teacher you'd want to get the best results you could and so you seek out the best awarding body offering the best way forward.

"The awarding bodies know that and so they make it possible for everybody to succeed.

"So everybody is pushing at the edges of the rules. It's the professional foul really, it's the sleight of hand - everybody is testing the tolerance to the limit."

This is the view of Professor Mick Waters, a former director at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority ...

Speaking to 5 live Investigates he also claims that the new exam regulator for England, The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) is a "toothless" watchdog ...

Ian McNeilly, Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, echoed these concerns, and warned that standards are also being watered down by allowing pupils to keep resitting key exam modules to improve grades ...

BBC NEWS  07 Nov 2010    

Government may cap tuition fees at £7,000, says Vince Cable

Business secretary scraps Lib Dem policy of opposition to fees and accepts thrust of Lord Browne's report into university funding ...

jarmolkiewicz
12 October 2010 5:06PM

It seems that every day we are faced with new consequences of the harsh reality we are in - that we are becoming a 2nd tier economic power that simply cannot afford to provide many of the things we took for granted in previous generations.

Most of our growth in the last 15 years was based on tax revenues on the back of a global credit and real estate boom that disproportionately benefited the UK (together with now fast declining north sea oil revenues).

Brown expanded the welfare state and public sector employment and spending on the back of these revenues without any consequent accompanying increase in our national economic productivity.

The tax revenues are gone and are not coming back anytime soon. We are left with a frightening deficit, spiraling national debt and unavoidable spending cuts.

We had better get used to used to our new reality.

There are several billion other people on this planet who fairly recently lived in abject poverty and survived on a couple of bowls of rice a day but who now are prospering in new industries in their countries and aspiring to have western lifestyles with western energy and food consumption levels and their currency competes with ours for these resources (notice massive food and energy inflation we all now suffer?) and our labour force competes with theirs for work from these globalised industries.

We had a period of 60 years of economic dominance which provided the standard of living unique to the west - that is now gone.

The reality of higher education is fairly simple.

We abolished polytechnics that provided, in many cases, excellent vocational education that was highly regarded by industry

We massively expanded university entrance but much of the new entrance studied degrees that are of little direct or indirect use to employers and do not encourage industry to invest in our country

Standards in state schools are appalling and in many cases working class children struggle to learn anything in hugely disrupted classes that amount to little more than free daycare.

Grade hyper inflation has hidden the extent of the problem but we slip relentlessly down international league tables.

The consequence is that working class children now rarely enter the professions or finance where in the 50s, 60s and 70s, they poured in despite discrimination against the working class in those areas in that era.

We should provide free university education to those studying science, engineering, maths or computing degrees.

These graduates are the foundation of our future economic prosperity.

Nursing, medicine and other highly vocational degrees essential to our society should also be free.

We don't have the luxury to make a Media Studies degree or a Socioloogy degree as affordable as an Engineering Degree when the reality is that the latter is far more beneficial to our country and we have very limited resources.

People need to start thinking about where the money comes from.

Guardian  12 Oct 2012

Browne Report recommends unlimited tuition fees

Bloggers in support of Lord Browne's proposals take the position that those entering higher education should pay their way.

This, of course, begs the question as to why single people should pay for other people's children to go to school, or why the healthy should pay towards the care of the sick.

The wider consideration of the benefits to society as a whole are vanishing off the radar.

It's another victory for autonomous individualism.

Lord Browne said:

"Our higher education system is world-renowned but too often it enshrines the power of universities and not the power of students.

"These reforms will put students in the driving seat of a revolutionary new system.

"Under these plans, universities can start to vary what they charge but it will be up to students whether they choose the university.

"The money will follow the student who will follow the quality. The student is no longer taken for granted, the student is in charge." ...

Independent  12 Oct 2010    Autumn Spending Review

Universities 'to face £4.2bn cut'

Lord Browne review: cost of university tuition will hit £36,000

Universities must set their own tuition fees

At a glance: Browne report

Are our liberties threatened by the fear of real freedom?

Our liberties are threatened by (a) the corporate agenda pursued by the media (b) the diversionary tactics of corporate capital (c) the anaesthesia of consumerism (d) the educational failure (deliberate?) to inculcate crap detection, and finally the ennui of a cumulative infantilism

The liberal left is suffering from intellectual amnesia about the attack on liberty that happened under New Labour ...

Strong and controversial views on any topic, religion, ethics or politics remain unacceptable in the present cultural climate.

Even the “absolutist” position on free speech that AFAF holds is no more than that of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty but it is seen as extreme ...

The cultural climate that is the legacy of New Labour has created a new intellectual mood that requires that we hold moderate and uncontroversial views.

It is a new, therapeutic, intellectual elitism, a civic quietism in which holding strong views or engaging in heated debate is only appropriate in formal situations such as the many faux debates in “Youth Parliaments” and the like ...

Independent  07 Oct 2010

Corporate Media    Libertarianism    The Pursuit of Happiness?    The Third Face of Power

What's wrong with our schools?

Given that education is meant to be the key that unlocks the barrier to social mobility and we have spent a fortune on our schools over the last couple of decades, why is the social gap no longer narrowing?

Or, to put it in nice simple language, why do rich, thick kids do better than poor, clever children?

If you take exception to either the language or the sentiment, do not blame me.

I am quoting the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, who also said that other countries are moving ahead faster than we are and it is getting worse ...

So what happens when the disadvantaged children go to school?

By the time they are 14, they are two years behind their more privileged peers and by the time they hit 16, they are massively less likely to go on to higher education, let alone the best universities.

In other words, the gap widens during the school years, rather than narrows ...

The social gap is not about the extremes - Wellington College at one end and Kirkby at the other. And the elite will always be with us.

No, the real battle is being fought on the centre ground - the territory dominated by what David Cameron calls the sharp-elbowed middle class.

People like him, he says, and his wife. People like me and, perhaps, people like you. People who feel they are already being squeezed in this age of austerity.

We have the advantage and we want to hold on to it.

It is not that we want to do down the most deprived; it is just that we want to do the best by our own children.

And if we end up hijacking the best schools for them, the politicians are no more likely to clip our wings and risk our displeasure at voting time than they are to shut down the independents ...

BBC NEWS  19 Sept 2010    Growing Inequality    Tory Education 'Reform'

Unequal Opportunities

Aimhigher

Michael Rosen on Toby Young's Free School

Toby, don't kid yourself. You are the status quo. The status quo for a hundred years was about selection and segregation.

For a short period, this was broken down, largely at the behest of middle class people many of whom found their children were being excluded from grammar schools by use of the IQ test.

We had always had comprehensive primary schools, (amazingly, no problem for anti-socialists), and then came comp secondaries. In most places, this was a fantastically successful experiment with more people benefiting from education than had ever enjoyed it before.

In some places, where social problems beyond the control of the school were and are a big deal, some schools have struggled. And bit by bit, the comprehensive ideal has been eroded through, yet again, selection and segregation. Your school, Toby, is just another example of that.

There's nothing 'radical' or 'free' about it. We pay for it, and you do the selecting and/or segregating.

You don't have to work with other schools, or with the rest of the community of your area to work out how this works out for the best for everyone.

That was the charge of LEAs. Your 'freedom' is the freedom of 'do your own thing' with a small group of children who are being sliced off from what 'the rest' are doing. And we pay for it.

As it happens, I'd also be very interested to see if any of these 'free' schools actually absorb any of the progressive ideas of education or simply reproduce the ideas of the private sector.

So I wonder, will any of them challenge the status quo where children have no control over what they learn, how they learn it, what systems are used to segregate, divide, stream and set them, what systems are used to reward and punish them, what systems are used to run the material fabric of the school.

It is largely through this system of no-control, no participation, that we learn to respect the status quo that tells us that we are indeed better and worse than each other (as explained by test results and smiley face charts that reward, detention systems), that the majority of us aren't clever enough to run anything, and that in many circumstances we are 'not good enough'.

However, if you divide off high achieving kids into special high achieving schools (largely because their parents were high achieving) you also teach these children that they are better than other people and should rule over others.

Guardian

Michael Rosen

Our education system is collapsing into a form of mass indoctrination

The problem is that we live in a world where if it's not measurable, it cannot be commodified, therefore it's useless.

Pupils are being prepared for a world where no one's wants to know what they think, or what they know - in the sense of knowing how and why, rather than what - and the last thing the 'movers and shakers' - who meet up in Davos every January - want is subordinates who ask awkward questions.

A liberal education has too often been replaced by an indoctrination of the young in the answers they need to memorise and regurgitate for exams.

It is so all pervasive that we simply do not see any longer what has happened, and the education establishment – teachers, academics, administrators and those in the quango penumbra – does not acknowledge the impoverishment rather than the flowering of the lives of our young people.

This sad story extends far beyond the shores of Britain: in the emerging superpowers in the East, students sit inert in large school and university classrooms, passively absorbing material dictated to them by grey men and women, which they repeat in their essays and dissertations, straining every sinew to produce the "right" answer.

The creative, the imaginative or individual response is marginalised, and the whole process of education with schools and universities becomes mechanised and industrialised: mass-production factories of the mind ...

Independent  17 July 2010    

The importance of knowing how

Schools Minister: children are deprived of knowledge

A generation of schoolchildren has grown up without knowing who Miss Havisham was and thinking Nelson won the Battle of Waterloo, Schools Minister Nick Gibb said yesterday.

In his first keynote speech since taking office, Mr Gibb – who is responsible for the delivery of the national curriculum – made it clear he believed schools no longer put enough emphasis on imparting knowledge to pupils.

He called for an emphasis on "facts, data and narrative" in history and "the rich language of Shakespeare" which, he said, "should be the common property of us all". He added, speaking to an education conference organised by the think-tank, Reform: "Yet, to more and more people, Miss Havisham is a stranger and even the most basic history and geography a mystery."

A survey of first-year history undergraduates revealed that twice as many students thought Nelson was in charge at the Battle of Waterloo rather than Wellington.

Ninety per cent could not name a single British Prime Minister of the 19th century.

"Knowledge is the basic building block for a successful of life," Mr Gibb said ...

Independent  02 July 2010    

The Importance of Knowing How

Social mobility in England 'lags behind other countries'

The study – commissioned by the Sutton Trust – suggested that pupils born into families with a history of underachievement were still much more likely to be resigned to low-paid jobs when they grew up.

Sir Peter Lampl, the charity’s chairman, said failure to improve social mobility risked pushing the UK to the “bottom of the class in education’s world order”.

"Education mobility points the way to the level of future social mobility in this country,” he said.

“While there are some signs of progress, we are still not serving the needs of the current crop of school pupils as well as we should and parental background remains a much more significant determiner of children's life chances in the UK than elsewhere.” ...

“A major obstacle to education, and consequently social mobility, is therefore the high levels of social segregation in English secondary schools.”

Researchers at Essex University analysed the test scores of thousands of children born in 1989/90 ... and compared them with results of equivalent exams by children born at a similar time in other nations.

The findings show that in England, 56 per cent of children of degree educated parents were in the top quarter of test results at the age of 14, compared with just nine per cent of youngsters whose parents left school without any O-levels – a gap of 47 percentage points.

This was twice the equivalent gap seen in Australia – 23 percentage points – and bigger than the 37 point gap in Germany and 43 point gap in the US ...

Telegraph  26 Apr 2010    Inequality:Does it Matter?    

Parents' class is the key in England's exams system

Top comprehensives 'more exclusive than grammar schools'

'Communitarian Citizenship'

Neoliberalism and education

Debt should not overshadow education in the election campaign

Labour has had three terms to sort out schools, years in which it has tipped money into the system on a scale that may never be repeated.

Yet, as with the health system, unprecedented levels of investment have yielded disappointingly little ...

The government's response has been to throw money at problems in the hope they will go away, while concentrating on achieving instant superficial improvements by erecting new buildings.

Alongside this, it has been enslaved by the notion that big is always better and that vocational and technical subjects should always be prioritised over academic ones.

It often assumes that schooling is the same as skilling. It is also obsessed with controlling teachers through targets.

Targets can deliver. But in the end, a target culture reduces education to bureaucracy and crushes initiative ...

Whichever party wins control after the election, it will need to start thinking more holistically about what education is for. The debt crisis looms large, but we must not allow this issue to blot out everything else in the campaign.

If there is one thing more important than sorting out debt, it is sorting out education.

Independent  06 April 2010        

Testing can undermine children's rights

OECD: UK has worse social mobility record than other developed countries

The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries ...

Highlighting the UK's lack of social mobility, the Paris-based thinktank said the chances of a young person from a less well-off family enjoying higher wages or getting a higher level of education than their parents was "relatively low" ...

It added that there was a hefty wage premium associated with growing up in a better-educated household and a corresponding penalty for being raised in a less-educated family ...

In the UK, the OECD found that 50% of the economic advantage that high-earning fathers have over low-earning fathers is passed on to their sons.

By contrast, in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries, less than 20% of the wage advantage was passed on ...

mugclass
10 Mar 2010, 1:58PM

In my town, if you live in one of the less well off area, your children will go to one of three schools, all of which have just received damning reports from Ofsted. For a bright child from a low income family there is no hope. You will be educated in a school with high truancy, high level of behavioural problems, high levels of disruptive behaviour, a high teacher turnover and frequent teaching by supply staff.

My husband and I were fortunate to benefit from the grammar school system, and although our families were both low income we went on to excellent universities and good careers.

Labour have managed to achieve great equality - the equality of ensuring that if you are from a poorer background, no-one will do well. They have achieved equality of failure.

Guardian  10 Mar 2010    Economic Democracy    Inequality

OECD

A Family Affair

Frustrated pupils 'bored by their factory schools'

UK low in social mobility league, says charity

... surprisingly, children spend very little of their time in school thinking. There is almost an unspoken deal: we'll spoonfeed you the required nuggets of information to pass your exams if you behave and do your homework on time. Our education system is not designed to get children to think. Why?

Because even now, after some streamlining of subjects, teachers have huge amounts of content to plough through. Because teachers often do not have the techniques or confidence to engage in open-ended, probing questioning. Because in some schools there are crowd-control issues that get in the way.

There is perhaps one further reason. We don't prize thinking in this country. We are suspicious of the intellectual; it's almost as if we believe too much thinking is not a good thing ...

englishhermit
16 Aug 09, 12:50am

Careful now. Who is going to man the call centres and work in the banks if they have been taught to think?

There are too many jobs about where thinking is not only not required but would preclude selection for the job in the first place.

What is required is the ability to follow instructions on the screen without deviation from the script.

Beep. Beep. Ching. Beep. Beep. Ching. It's the machine people from Planet Screen.

Observer  16 August 2009

The Rose Report appears to reprise most of the educational controversies of the last fifty years, many of which were thriving when I was at teacher training college in the early sixties.

In those days it was received 'wisdom' that primary schools were about creativity, and the ownership and control of schools was non-controversial: the LEA provided the money - such as it was - and a very weak inspectorate left teachers to get on with it.

Now, as The Independent's leader rightly indicates, the Tory-Gove agenda is about taking schools away from what Margaret Thatcher called 'socialist' LEAs, and preparing them for the day when the IMF tells the UK to privatise them.

A bureaucratic-centrist curriculum will almost certainly not be privatised - another indicator of the corporate state - and what is learned will continue to be a political football along the lines of a sterile debate between 'modernist' versus 'traditional' modes of learning.

AC Grayling raised a crucial point about the curriculum in his New Scientist article "The importance of knowing how" which distinguished between knowing facts, and evaluating them.

Critical thinking is, arguably, the last thing politicians like Balls and Gove would wish to see developed since their nostrums might then be subject to the closer inspection which they deserve.

However, it is impossible to divorce education from the society in which it is embedded, and neoliberal society (oxymoron!) expects - without spelling it out - that children be equipped to enter a global economy in which employment carries endemic risk and uncertainty, and previous social support systems are ebbing away.

The dilemma is the extent to which this is made explicit, and also the extent to which the process of education enables pupils to challenge the theoretical basis of such an economy.

Such a curriculum would also - justifiably - raise the profile of both the ethical and ecological considerations which the current global economy ignores.

This is not the radical reform primary education needs

Government's failure over the past decade has been in overloading the curriculum, imposing too many tests and attempting to manage schools directly from Whitehall.

And there is scant evidence that ministers have learned from past mistakes. Only this week they announced that education on "emotions" should be compulsory in primary schools from age five.

Sir Jim himself acknowledges that the existing curriculum has grown too "fat". But it is not clear that his recommendations would trim it.

What our primary schools need is a clear and concise list of knowledge and skills that children should possess by the time they move into the next level of education.

Once that has been established, the job of policymakers is to step back and give teachers the freedom to impart knowledge in the manner they deem appropriate.

The proposal last week from the Conservative education spokesman, Michael Gove, to extend the secondary academy system to primary schools points the way forward.

Giving schools the freedom to run their own budgets and decide how best to teach the curriculum looks rather more like the "fundamental" reform the primary education sector needs than anything the Government has produced. The Independent 01 May 2009

Computers key in primary review

Jim Rose: education becomes a sideshow

Jim'll fix it

Neoliberalism and education: the autonomous chooser

The importance of knowing how

MPs call for simpler curriculum

Teachers 'de-skilled'

The national curriculum for five to 16-year-olds in England is too heavily controlled by government, the Commons schools select committee has said.

The curriculum should be slimmed-down, according to the cross-party committee of MPs.

And schools should only have to follow the curriculum in the core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT.

The government has accepted some reform is necessary, but says the curriculum is crucial to raising standards.

The committee's report said there should be a cap on the proportion of the curriculum prescribed by central government.

"Our view is that it should be less than half of teaching time," the report said.

It said teachers had been "de-skilled" by high levels of central government guidance and prescription.

"At times schooling has appeared more of a franchise operation, dependent on a recipe handed-down by government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers." ...

BBC NEWS 02 April 2009

Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.

The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.

In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognise it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer

In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.

One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes ...

Observer 08 March 2009

Laureate attacks poetry teaching

Sats put primary pupils off science

The importance of knowing how

This education system fails children by teaching them to parrot, not think

What is education for?

What's counted and what counts

North London student Tom Greene argues that the needs of examination markers is now driving education:

This process (marking) would be fine if it was reflecting the work that was done by students, rather than shaping what and how is taught to them. Exam preparation, and increasingly education, is now about adapting to this system; forcing an examiner, wearily red-penning through piles of paper, to give you that top grade. Students are drilled to jump through hoops that the examiner is holding.

Exam preparation is part of education - but they shouldn't be one and the same thing. The mechanical exam process is moulding a mechanical education. In traditionally opinion-orientated subjects such as History and English Literature, subjectivity is being replaced by a clear-cut method of approaching exams. For GCSE English you have to write essays that conform to three-word criteria (eg "Inform, Explain and Describe" or "Analyse, Review and Comment"). In AS English the coursework and three-hour exam are all marked under five "Assessment Objectives" - I know all five off by heart.

Tom Greene | The Independent | 17 August 2006

The real risk is not dumbing down, but an unduly narrow focus which rewards spoon-feeding over critical teaching and leaves stressed students with little time to read round.

Pupils may reject subjects that interest them in favour of those they think it easier to do well in.

Figures yesterday showed a revised, "more accessible" maths A-level not only produced many more top grades, but also attracted more students.

Anything that encourages 16-year-olds to study maths is welcome, but it is sad if it can only be done by emphasising the certainty of success rather than the challenge. ...

Leader | The Guardian | 18 August 2006

A real education service would not require the minister to dabble in curriculum, er, 'development' via an almost weekly torrent of initiatives.

Former Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, was emblematic of this particular fever.

He 'ordered' schools to teach the classics - such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens - to 11 and 12 year olds:

Policy director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, Ian McNeilly, who is also an English teacher, said:

"For students who are not yet ready, teaching texts of such linguistic complexity is completely counter-productive."

He accused Mr Johnson of trying to secure a few more votes from Middle England "by not allowing standards to slip".

"But you don't have to do that by shoe-horning a classic author into the classroom," he added.

"The guy's a bird brain. If he wants to make an informed decision he can give me a ring. His decision is completely uninformed."

BBC NEWS 16 February 2007

The content of the curriculum is of crucial importance, not simply in deciding what pupils shall study, but - more important - in deciding what shall be left out.

The price of any curriculum is the other curriculum that might have been; the other person the pupil might have become.

But for now, it's the plaything of the latest 'here-today-and-gone-tomorrow' politician, making her/his way up - or down - the political greasy pole.