A propos of nothing, except I just read it,
If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.
If voting could change this system it would be against the law.
[Attributed to Idaho Blackie, in the liner notes to Utah Phillips‘ We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years.]
Knowsley Council in Merseyside, has abolished the use of the word school to describe secondary education in the borough. It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres.
Originally in the British newspaper, the Independent, I found it on the Wales-Wide Web.
Go read Graham Attwell’s blog entry, especially the comments and the links in them.
Here’s one:
When you read the material supporting the ‘Knowsley Experiment’, it really is the proverbial Curate’s Egg. There’s some progressive educational theories, spin, Blairite ‘newspeak’, consultants’ verbal diarrhoea, paying homage to Microsoft and the downright dangerous.
and it’s downhill from there, and well-argued (and not very complimentary to American education, either).
Of course, if the testing and “benchmarks” (there, that shows how with-it I am, doesn’t it?) are all still in place and unquestioned, then…
If you watch the beginning of this 45-minute video I blogged about previously, you’ll hear Cambridge University lecturer, Dominic Wyse, tell how
since 1988 and the National Curriculum, politicians have exerted greater and greater control.
Will this tendency suddenly change or lessen? What do you think, boys and girls?
The situation in the US just boggles my mind. My first recent brush with it came after reading this post, then after reading Savage Inequalities and Doc, and again after reading this post.
Now, after reading this exchange between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch on the blog Bridging Differences (HT to Borderland for the link), I understand the situation a little better, although it still boggles my mind: the gap between the rhetoric (“land of the free, home of the brave, best country in the world, if you don’t like it – leave!”) and the reality is so wide that “gap” doesn’t cover it. It’s more like the reality is the opposite of the rhetoric.