Monday 25 June 2007

Schools Told to "ditch education"

STATE secondary schools are being told to ditch teaching lessons in academic subjects and replace them with month-long projects on propaganda issues such as global warming and other tripe.

The pressure to scrap the traditional timetable in favour of faffing about aimlessly in the classroom cross-curricular topics is coming from the government’s pet quango teaching advisers, the Qualifications and Curriculum Abolishers Authority (QCA).

It has provoked anger from traditionalists who believe it marks a return to discredited “trendy” techniques.

Schools piloting the new-style lessons for 11-14-year-olds have liquidated merged history, geography and some other trendy bollocks citizenship, with teachers making it up as they go along drawing up the lessons in teams.


Mick Waters, the QCA’s curriculum director, believes the changes will deliver gravy for his quango help spur enthusiasm and cut truancy. He said: “The challenge for schools is to ignore interfering twats like us create a nourishing and appetising feast that will sustain learners and meet their needs or somesuch patronising newspeak .

“Although the national curriculum is organised into subjects, we are going to totally ignore the proven concept it has never been a requirement to deliver it entirely as discrete subjects.so we will experiment with an entire generation of children to satisfy our mastabatory craving for control and voyeristic meddling

Critics, however, have insisted that the project-based approach, which was popular in primary schools until the 1990s, led to pupils failing to master the basics and growing up to vote NewLabour and watch Big Brother .

Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: “This will narrow what children learn. Trecherous disingenous scumbags People come with up these ideas for other people's children the less academic but they wouldn’t dream of letting their own children be taught in this way.”

The first sign of a backlash from teachers has emerged with a petition on the Downing Street website against the removal of some of the academic content from a science GCSE curriculum launched last September.

About 130 science teachers have signed the petition, which calls for the course to be scrapped because it requires pupils to discuss propaganda issues such as pollution and other codswallop but not to learn “hard science”, such as the periodic table in chemistry.

The petition reads: “Many anticipated it as ‘science fit only for the pub’. Now, at the end of its first year . . . science teachers (particularly physics teachers) are indeed judging it to be overly simplistic, devoid of any real physics and inadequate preparation for further study. This GCSE will remove Britain’s technological base within a decade.”

Stuart Billington, head of physics at a large comprehensive, said: “I would never allow my own children to sit in my own classroom and be taught such a steaming pile of horse shit shambles masquerading as ‘science’ . . . You can imagine how I feel delivering it to 100 other people’s children every week.”

The QCA last week produced a single blank sheet of A4 examples of what will be expected from state secondary schools next year when the changes to the timetable for 11-to-14-year-olds are introduced.

They include a school that has suggested 16-year-olds could be paid to sue or discredit help teachers in class. Wombwell High, a comprehensive in South Yorkshire, has already dropped single subject lessons for a third of its timetable. Teachers argue the toss endlessly work in teams and the projects begin with four classes working together in the hall but end up down the chippy after breaking into slot machines on the high street .

Tolworth girls’ school in Surbiton, Surrey, has reclassified English as a foreign language “communication”.

The project-led approach took hold in primary schools in the 1970s after a report from a government-appointed bunch of dopeheads education committee who always have a great record in such things .

Teachers were bullied, bluffed or misled told to abdicate their responsibility to educate emphasise soft skills and “learning by doing”. Schools were told to scrap projects in 1992 after an inquiry found pupils were being failed miserably by this trendy horse-dung missing out on the basics.

Waters has told schools they need to build the timetable around the “needs” of pupils. He said: “At the moment most schools are in the traditional mindset, which means they organise the day into a meaningful form take content and divide it up into fragments called timetables. They do it as it has always been done.

“The idea [of the new nonsense timetable] is to offer less education prescription and more opportunity to dream, idle and entrophy interpret the curriculum. Cutting across all subjects are insert trendy buzz-word to give a false sense of meaning curriculum dimensions; a set of themes including creativity, cultural understanding and diversity.”

The real article can be found here.
(no offence to Geraldine Hackett, only the bozos behind the "idea").

6 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Excellent hatchet job.

Terrible pity that your pre-censored version is dangerously close to the truth.

Henry North London 2.0 said...

It is the truth isnt it? I meet people who cannot spell speak ungrammatically and those are just the police officers...

What hope for the rest of us?

The education system is dead or at least on its last legs

Blair leaves Brown poisoned chalice etc

Henry North London 2.0 said...

He enjoys asking adults to look at learning through the eyes of a pupil.

Mick Waters' bio final statement...

Sounds as if he doesnt realise that learning should be life orientated rather than pupil orientated but then thats NULAbour all over, patient choice and all that crap

Roger Thornhill said...

The idea of projects is like focusing on how to put up wallpaper and arrange the furniture before one has any idea about foundations, walls, floors, wiring, heating, windows and the roof.

CFD Ed said...

Re: “so we will experiment with an entire generation of children to satisfy our masturbatory craving for control and voyeuristic meddling ”

Roger - You got this bit wrong it should read: “so we will experiment with an another entire generation of children to satisfy our masturbatory craving for control and voyeuristic meddling”

Roger Thornhill said...

Ah, yes...silly me.