It's a year since our return across the world. Today I drove home in Autumnal twilight from visiting friends near Leicester, up England's eastern routes and across the A69 following Hadrian's Wall, past Lockerbie and into Peeblesshire through the rain-drenched hills over the Devil's Beeftub at Moffat.
The landscape in this late season is softened by weeks of steady rain; muted, grainy sepia and rust. In the dark outside my study window the owl is calling.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Edumacation vicissitudes
We've been lucky with schools. Both our children started out in a small local Catholic primary school in Scotland where the emphasis was on community, learning in small classes, thinking about other people. The school doubles as an integrated specialist centre for physically and intellectually disabled students so our two learned alongside kids in wheelchairs, with Downs syndrome, with big hills to climb.
From there to New Zealand, to a large and culturally diverse primary school with a challenging diet of intellectual rigour, competitive sports, performing arts, active learning, public speaking and celebrating each other's achievements with a blizzard of certificates, awards and prizes for success in almost anything. It mirrored my own experience of education in New Zealand, again in a period of curricular emphasis on creativity, diversity of experience, integration of disciplines.
Back in Scotland the new curriculum, introduced while we were away and echoing the New Zealand model, is slowly finding its feet and promises to widen and deepen the experience of children in primary and secondary schools. While I am increasingly suspicious of the value of factory-style education in rigid peer-groupings, I can't deny that we've been lucky thus far.
Returning to visit New Zealand after only a year I was sad to find that in the primary education sector some lunatics have once again taken over the asylum. The diverse curriculum introduced in 2001, which attracted international interest for its innovation and depth, has been shelved in favour of a narrow-band approach focussed on "numeracy" and "literacy".
Election-winning slogans like "students leave school unable to read and write" and "New Zealand low in international numeracy tables" are guaranteed to drive such reforms, despite their meaninglessness. The averages used for league tables are distorted by a sizeable group of the culturally disenfranchised. The headlines about illiterate new employees fail to take account of education's delayed effect.
Young people with questionable numeracy and literacy skills now in the New Zealand workforce were at primary school in the late 1980s and 90s, a period when the same policy of narrow focus on literacy and numeracy was being strictly implemented. They are proof of its failure, not cause for reform.
Indeed international studies over decades, and the experience of western nations in the past 30 years shows that a narrow focus on numeracy and literacy in primary schools produces the opposite of its intended outcome. Why ? Because there's no point in being able to write a good sentence if you have nothing to write about. Because being able to manipulate numbers is pointless if you don't know what the results mean.
Good writers need interesting experiences to write about, without which there are no good books to read. Imaginative number manipulation needs imagination (d'oh!) and an experience of the empirical world to which to apply it.
Relevant childhood education is about breadth of experience, physical adventure, imagination, honing skills, reading and writing great stories and from real experiences, discovering knowledge, playing with possibilities and making sense of the world using as many different measures as possible: mathematical, artistic, literary, scientific, cultural, spiritual, theatrical, sporting, and in as many different forms as possible.
In a good education a child finds passions, which carry them through life in work, relationships, explorations, and they discover creativity which enables them to adapt to life's vicissitudes, take risks and sharp turns, accept and capitalise on its unfairness.
Without this tide at the start of our ventures, our whole life can lie in shallows. New Zealand schools' new narrow focus will produce yet another generation of kiwi students with narrow focus and a limited sense of context; beige fodder for industry.
It is a discarded opportunity and I'm sad about it.
From there to New Zealand, to a large and culturally diverse primary school with a challenging diet of intellectual rigour, competitive sports, performing arts, active learning, public speaking and celebrating each other's achievements with a blizzard of certificates, awards and prizes for success in almost anything. It mirrored my own experience of education in New Zealand, again in a period of curricular emphasis on creativity, diversity of experience, integration of disciplines.
Back in Scotland the new curriculum, introduced while we were away and echoing the New Zealand model, is slowly finding its feet and promises to widen and deepen the experience of children in primary and secondary schools. While I am increasingly suspicious of the value of factory-style education in rigid peer-groupings, I can't deny that we've been lucky thus far.
Returning to visit New Zealand after only a year I was sad to find that in the primary education sector some lunatics have once again taken over the asylum. The diverse curriculum introduced in 2001, which attracted international interest for its innovation and depth, has been shelved in favour of a narrow-band approach focussed on "numeracy" and "literacy".
Election-winning slogans like "students leave school unable to read and write" and "New Zealand low in international numeracy tables" are guaranteed to drive such reforms, despite their meaninglessness. The averages used for league tables are distorted by a sizeable group of the culturally disenfranchised. The headlines about illiterate new employees fail to take account of education's delayed effect.
Young people with questionable numeracy and literacy skills now in the New Zealand workforce were at primary school in the late 1980s and 90s, a period when the same policy of narrow focus on literacy and numeracy was being strictly implemented. They are proof of its failure, not cause for reform.
Indeed international studies over decades, and the experience of western nations in the past 30 years shows that a narrow focus on numeracy and literacy in primary schools produces the opposite of its intended outcome. Why ? Because there's no point in being able to write a good sentence if you have nothing to write about. Because being able to manipulate numbers is pointless if you don't know what the results mean.
Good writers need interesting experiences to write about, without which there are no good books to read. Imaginative number manipulation needs imagination (d'oh!) and an experience of the empirical world to which to apply it.
Relevant childhood education is about breadth of experience, physical adventure, imagination, honing skills, reading and writing great stories and from real experiences, discovering knowledge, playing with possibilities and making sense of the world using as many different measures as possible: mathematical, artistic, literary, scientific, cultural, spiritual, theatrical, sporting, and in as many different forms as possible.
In a good education a child finds passions, which carry them through life in work, relationships, explorations, and they discover creativity which enables them to adapt to life's vicissitudes, take risks and sharp turns, accept and capitalise on its unfairness.
Without this tide at the start of our ventures, our whole life can lie in shallows. New Zealand schools' new narrow focus will produce yet another generation of kiwi students with narrow focus and a limited sense of context; beige fodder for industry.
It is a discarded opportunity and I'm sad about it.
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