The Emperor's New Clothes


More than anything else, it's a country's educational system what should ensure equal opportunities for all citizens, regardless of whether they are born in Chelsea or in Blackpool. The human mind is a marvel of nature and it works the same for everyone. But the British education system does exactly the opposite. By means of a huge deception it perpetuates class differences and the lack of equal opportunities for everyone. Add deep rooted corruption into the mix and things get as bad as they actually are in the UK. But nobody does anything about it. No one dares to say that the emperor is naked.

According to some it may still take a few decades for the situation to touch bottom. In the meantime whole generations will find themselves let down by the education system, and their futures jeopardized for ever.

This blog will show you how British state education is flawed and corrupt. Beware: the evidence is brutal. Stop reading if you don't want to change your high opinion of the UK's educational system.

If you are new to this site I recommend reading first the 4 unnumbered and/or the numbered entries in their chronological order using the TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Showing posts with label textbooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label textbooks. Show all posts

Thursday, 5 July 2018

There are even more reasons why the British education system is wrong

Tim Oates on why levels (and therefore targets) are inappropriate even for what they created for, how the UK is falling behind because it is the only nation using levels, and why they should be dropped as part of the changes national curriculum (but aren't):

Note that he mentions equity as one of the aspects where the level system and its assessment strategy is wrong.

If you have time and interest in this profoundly important issue you can watch this longer video and check out the links below.


http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/insights/national-curriculum-tim-oates-on-assessment-insights/ 



And here is his policy paper on why textbooks (currently banned from schools as they are considered not to allow for "adaptation to learners", read discrimination and segregation) are important:

http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/181744-why-textbooks-count-tim-oates.pdf



Sunday, 7 August 2016

Reinventing the wheel - has British education finally touched bottom?

One consequence of designing an education system that does not aim to educate, but to deceive parents and students, is that it involves dispensing with everything that did just that, including a whole generation of more experienced teachers, who were replaced with young ones who have never experienced anything but the perverse system they are asked to work in and perpetuate.

This is then the ideal testing bed for all sorts of crazy ideas, with whole generations of young people serving as guinea-pigs for outlandish experiments. The only requirement for these experiments to be adopted as standard procedure is that they serve, or are tweaked to support, the pretense of adapting to the learners' needs. Once this is achieved, then anything goes - 'carte blanche' is granted for a whole cabinet of curiosities in things education.

After a while, those involved in education will have forgotten the very basics of education, ideas such as that the teacher knows (or should know) more than the pupils if the latter are to learn anything, or resources like....textbooks! Yes, dear reader, if you have been brought up in any other educational system you will find it difficult to believe that in British state education it is considered bad practice to use textbooks -  the teacher should rather "adapt to learners' needs" by providing each pupil with different learning materials, according to their respective targets.

It is then impossible to know what a student should have learned at a given stage. As a parent you will never find out. The current generation of teachers don't even know what you are talking about if you ask for a 'book' for the year your child is in. There isn't a single textbook that contains everything one should learn and revise in a given year. It all depends on the students' abilities and the corresponding targets. 

This education system will not adapt to the students' needs by starting from the level they are in and bringing all to the same level by the end of their years in school. No. The education system will tell them from the start what they can and cannot do, set (and modify) the targets accordingly, and then always tell parents that the kid is doing fine, as he or she is working "to target". Even if the target is a "D", you will receive wonderful reports of how well your child is doing in working "to target".

Anyway, I digress. The point is that textbooks would spoil all this, so they are banned and forgotten, together with so many other basic educational tools and resources.

And then, inevitably, some people with a genuine concern for education discover these resources -perhaps by visiting other countries- and strive to re-introduce them as novel and innovative techniques. They reinvent the wheel and present it as a groundbreaking discovery: children will be "taught as a whole class and supported by the use of high quality textbooks". Yay!


I wonder if this is a sign that the British education system has finally touched bottom and is starting to improve. Or is it just wishful thinking on my part?