School children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are “middle-class” creations, and “mere stepping stones to wealth,” says an adviser to the British government (Finder’s fee: Joanne Jacobs).
Lessons will cover a series of personal skills, if Professor John White gets his way, reports the Daily Mail. “Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.”
White, a member of a committee set up to advise Government curriculum authors on changes to secondary schooling for 11 to 14-year-olds, favors a shift away from single-subject teaching to theme or project-based learning. Aims should include fostering a student who “values personal relationships, is a responsible and caring citizen, is entrepreneurial, able to manage risk and committed to sustainable development.”
Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said Professor White’s view was “deeply corrosive”.
“This anti-knowledge, anti-subject ideology is deeply damaging to our education system. It is this sort of thinking that has led to the promotion of discredited reading methods, the erosion of three separate sciences and the decline of mathematics skills. I just find it astonishing that someone with his extreme views has been allowed to advise the Government on education policy.”
Words fail me.
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An Arkansas mother, upset with her son for bullying a classmate and stealing his iPod, made him stand on a street corner ringing a bell and wearing a sandwich board detailing the error of his ways.
He’s very embarrassed. And I told him, I said the way you feeling right now, I’m embarrassed, too,” Bertreice Dixon, mother of 12-year-old Montavious Lewis told a Little Rock TV station, “By, you know, be tough in front of his friends, and like I told him, you gonna have to change your ways or else you’re gonna go down a road where you gonna end up in prison or dead.
Montavious doesn’t deny the charges. His school’s making him cut the grass this summer as a punishment. Parent Dish columnist Rachel-Campos Duffy asks, “Is this tough love or psychological abuse? Is her punishment excessive or does she know her child, his history and environment better than we do? Is she a heartless authoritarian mom or a champion of the ethos of personal responsibility?”
Comments on the Parent Dish message board, well over a hundred, strongly side with the mom. Can’t say I disagree. Times and standards change, but some of the discipline meted out by my father, an blue-collar Italian of the old school, would have led to his being hauled away in shackles today. If I had done what Montavious copped to as a child, I probably would have been grateful to escape with only public humiliation. Of course I never did anything like Montavious is accused of, which may be the point.
Update: Get this child a sandwich board and a bell.
EF is the new IQ, Newsweek reports. “Executive function” is the ability to resist distraction and focus. Experiments conducted psychologist Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia suggest EF may be more important to academic success than traditional measures of intelligence.
Diamond convinced a large low-income urban school district to let her experiment with its preschoolers. Half the classrooms, involving hundreds of children, adopted a new curriculum specifically designed to boost EF, while the other half used a more traditional academic curriculum aimed at basic literacy.
The EF curriculum has many strands, but here are a few just to give a flavor. Instead of keeping the classroom quiet, kids are actually taught and encouraged to talk to themselves, privately but aloud, as a way of helping them exert mental control. In one exercise, for example, the kids have to match their movements to symbols. When the teacher holds up a circle they clap, with a triangle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk themselves through the mental exercise: “OK, now clap.” “Twirl now.” This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain’s ability to switch gears, to suppress one piece of information and sub in a new one. It takes discipline; it’s the elementary school equivalent of saying “I really need stop thinking about next week’s vacation and focus on this report.”
Preschoolers with sharper executive capability reportedly outperform their more traditional peers in basic skills, especially mathematics, when they hit kindergarten. “In other words, as counterintuitive as it seems, early exposure to dramatic play and cognitive games better prepares kids for mastery of traditional academics,” Newsweek reports.
I wonder what Dan Willingham will have to say about this.
Update: Willingham posts in the comments for this thread.
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