Education - the last dying gasp

I've moaned often enough about educational entropy (you remember - each generation of teachers knowing a little less than the last), but I made a mistake.  I thought teachers still taught subjects (though why I should have thought that I don't know - the contrary evidence is blatant and ubiquitous.)  Some may try to, but the odds are stacked against them.  Education is no longer the province of teachers but of loonies, and I was going to say 'MPs AND loony bureaucrats' but loonies does a very good job of of embracing the lot of 'em.  Unlike teachers, loonies have a lot of time on their hands, and there's nothing they like more than appearing to be busy doing something in case someone notices that they're getting paid for twiddling their thumbs.  So when the latest crackpot notion comes down from the amateur social reformers in Parliament all the loonies in Whitehall,  quangos and town halls creak into action to generate  their latest batch of ukases.  That they are boring yet another hole below the waterline of a sinking ship doesn't seem to bother them.

The recent government review of the primary curriculum brought calls to reduce subject content in favour of personal and emotional development. The Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers tells teachers not to be “dinosaurs” about their subjects because they can “deliver an enormous array of other outcomes”.

Instead of teaching about a world outside “me”, the hollowing out of subjects requires teachers with expertise in “nurturing”, “engaging”, “mentoring” and “facilitating” a long list of formal targets for emotional attributes, dispositions and attitudes.

Turning these into “personal and social skills” requires teachers to plan emotional and social objectives before subject ones. They must negotiate with a growing array of para-professionals, such as pupil support officers and mentors. A history teacher has had to change his discipline strategies because a mentor thought they were not appropriate. A colleague in an FE college says that students walk out of difficult lessons to see their “anger management counsellor”. Children become adept at playing off teachers against these emotional supporters.


And no, those last three paragraphs are not me ranting.  They are taken from an article  in yesterday's Times by Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education and Social Inclusion at the University of Birmingham and co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education.


The full text is here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7071764.ece






PS


If you want to read a lot more guff about the new primary curriculum, have a look at


http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/new-primary-curriculum/


It's all in very simple language, with only a few grammatical howlers, and if you're a teacher with reading difficulties, don't worry, there's a very nice series of moving pictures in which a nice man tells you what to do.