Saturday, October 14, 2006

Brown and Cameron on Education

Here's a Telegraph piece on Gordon Brown's call for radical changes in schooling in order to give boys a chance to catch up. Let's see, would it be of help us?

"Among the possible solutions were more activity-based learning for boys, more access to computers, more sport, more community service - and tighter discipline."

No, the simple answer. The last suggestion tends to cause Ds to shut down completely. I vividly remember responding in similar fashion myself. I felt that if my thinking could not be taken seriously, and could not be acted upon, then there was little point in me doing it at all. A reasonable response to coercion and misery, I would say, and so the problem of mass education continues.

Meanwhile, David Cameron in his conference speech demanded "a massive investment in personalised learning". We very much doubt that this will turns out to be anything other than political cant, but should the Tories get in, we home educators can always gently remind the educrats on our doorstep that we are only doing exactly what our leader tells us to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL! I can't help finding this panic about males losing their dominance very funny, especially when girls have, in average, a smaller brain.

The old fashioned and very repeated dumb suggestions are funny too.

Anonymous said...

Interesting - I can't remember where I read it recently but there has been an apparently proven correlation between brain size and intelligence. Maybe it *is* more intelligent to do the minimum, instead of dutifully trying very hard, at mindlessly boring examinations... D