Wednesday 22 July 2009

Introduction

I am an experienced secondary school teacher and the aim of this blog is to share thoughts about what really happens in education. A prolonged culture of externally dictated initiatives and targets has made education less personal than ever, and 'success' is, in fact measured in a manner which has become trite and damaging to young people.

Teachers are, in my experience, generally very good people who really care about children. However, once they lost the responsibility to self govern effectively and to determine the direction of education policy, the faceless bureaucrats took over. Success was no longer determined by the healthy relationships between teacher and pupil with the reward of seeing a child advance, but had to be quantifiable and based on the whims of bureaucrats. Byzantine attainment targets and programmes of study replaced local curriculum policies aimed at local youngsters, colourful lessons became sanitised by identical lesson styles to be delivered by automatons, children became 'learners' determined, not by the holistic content of their whole being and personality, but on the basis of spurious targets which, in themselves, are based on shaky science. No wonder our children are so unhappy, when the warmth of the informal has been replaced by the relentless attainment testing of the clipboard carrier.

Your children became statistics to be graphed (I believe that is now a verb in the brave new world of education), as opposed to wonderful individuals to be nurtured.

It is this philosophical change which continues to depersonalise education and to take away the joy of education. This blog, will talk about what happens in education on the front-line, free of the apocryphal window dressing of the bureaucrats.

2 comments:

  1. I would like to ask you, if you would be prepared to write for us on educational matters, as they come up, on

    http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com

    You may cross-post if you want, with stuff you have already written, or you may write originally.

    Please email me privately on
    ddaviseducation@aol.com

    if you would be interested.

    Thank you
    David Davis (not that one.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. David,

    I have replied to you privately

    ReplyDelete