Thanks to
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reabhecc for alerting me to the existence of
this AHA blog. Which in turn linked to
this article on proposed education reforms in the UK. I think my head may go 'splody now.
In January the government commissioned Sir Jim Rose, a former chief inspector of primary schools, to trim ten existing required subjects to give extra space to computing skills and to accommodate two new compulsory subjects: a foreign language and the now-optional “personal, social, health and economic education” (eating fruit and veg, refraining from hitting one’s classmates and much more). On December 8th he published his interim report—and many fear that, as well as losing fat, education will see a lot of meat go too.
Sir Jim proposes merging the subjects into six “learning areas”. History and geography will become “human, social and environmental understanding”; reading, writing and foreign languages, “understanding English, communication and languages”. Physical education, some bits of science and various odds and ends will merge into “understanding physical health and well-being”, and so on. His plan would “reduce prescription”, he says, and, far from downgrading important ideas, “embed and intensify [them] to better effect in cross-curricular studies”.Since from some point in the last century, schools are *always* the place that crackpots go to try monumentally stupid ideas about how to "redesign society", this shouldn't surprise me, I suppose. And, of course, this sort of woolly-headed "chuck things into a pot and call it a stew" thinking is what gave us the maladroit "Department for Children, Schools and Families" in the first place. But come ON!
I don't know if they're handling things any better, but at least the Scottish Executive has a Directorate of Schools, a Secretary of Education, and a Minister for Schools. A little more focus about what you;re supposed to be doing and a little less flannel never hurts!
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