How ‘Progressive’ Education Patronises the Poor
My article for Spiked Online.
The only responsibility schools have to working-class kids is to give them a good education.
Source: How ‘progressive’ education patronises the poor
Secondary School
The Earth is Flat – I Didn’t Want To Believe it Either
According to the rapper BoB, the Earth is flat. His recent tweeting activity included this insight as well as pictures to prove he was right.
Also, how does one explain this?
Or this?
BoB is not alone, though – there is, of course, the Flat Earth Movement who agree with him.
Hell, they go one . Further, they have VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE.
200 ‘proofs’ of a flat earth here people.
If that won’t convince you then maybe this better-edited one will:
This video even has the great insight that while the scientists ‘claim’ that the water is subject to gravity, that’s not what we see.
Has anyone seen gravity? Anyone? Anyone at all?
And the conspiracy theories involving Freemasons and NASA aren’t far behind. What is missing, however, is how the Ancient Greeks came to the idea of a spherical earth. No doubt there is a time travel conspiracy there too.
Those people who genuinely believe that group work on the internet is a good way of learning, supporting the supremo charlatan Mitra, might want to think about how children will be able to filter out good and bad ideas. Or are they to ‘make up their mind’?
I suspect, unfortunately, that the answer to the last question will be yes. A belief in equality seems to have morphed into a conviction that all ideas have worth and are equally valid. One can’t say that an idea is wrong because it might hurt someone’s feelings.
Tough. While everything should be open to discussion, let us not pretend that the evidence for some ideas and theories is not overwhelming. The bar to disprove the Earth is spherical is incredibly high due to the accumulated evidence. As teachers, we owe it to our pupils to explain this explicitly and with examples, as well as debunking some of what is on the internet.
The need for knowledge is there regardless of the web. But given the Internet, the need is in many ways greater. Future generations need to know to cut through the misinformation there. What questions to ask about sources, why some are more valid than others. And I do believe that we should start as we mean to go on, at primary level. I don’t believe that any primary child should be researching on the internet until at least Year 5 and even then they should have a bank of websites they know are reliable (e.g. BBC) which they know to turn to.
It highlights the importance of the fact that if we are going to allow children to use the technology, we also need to teach how it can and is abused to propagate bad ideas and how these can be countered and avoided.
Human beings are capable of shedding bad ideas and theories. We need to teach when, how and why we do this so that they can build on past achievements rather than going round in circles regarding ideas that have been thoroughly debunked.
Why Don’t Intervention Strategies Use Progressive Methods?
If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.
Ignacio ‘Estrada
Hands up if you have worked, or are working, in a school that has Estrada’s quote proudly displayed as an inspirational poster?
Well, inspirational for the progressive teacher maybe. I always saw it as a lament aimed at anyone who dared still use traditional methods; we should all know by now that children simply don’t learn that way. Instead, we should know to teach them using progressive methods because that is the way they learn.
If this is true, then why don’t intervention programmes use ‘child-centred’ progressive methods. Now there are interventions that promote themselves using progressive terminology, which is understandable in the current educational climate, especially in primary schools. But these words just hide the reality of highly structured, explicit/direct instruction programmes they are.
Take ‘Speed Up,’ which markets itself as a ‘kinaesthetic’ programme to develop handwriting (I’m not sure how handwriting can be anything else). I taught it as an assembly time intervention for six months. It involves exercising the relevant muscles through press ups for example. Then explicit instruction and modelling, then practice, practice, and yep you guessed it, more practice. While I had to adjust timings, I did follow the methods to the ‘t.’
Numbers Counts, a widely used maths intervention in primary schools, is another case. Its website states clearly children will engage in ‘active learning.’ I observed my TA (at the time) teaching this intervention on some occasions while on PPA.
By ‘active’ it meant participating and that the children sometimes play games, (they also write cute postcards about what they had learned, which they give to the teacher or their parents). This is very much a direct instruction programme focused on closing gaps in knowledge. The lessons plans are highly detailed, and they need to be followed step by step. The children repeat and reinforce the knowledge they learn until they are secure.
If discovery is better than using traditional methods, then why is it not the basis of this intervention? At most there are four children in a group with one adult, much better odds of being responsive to each child and facilitating their learning.
All the successful interventions I have seen/used follow the same pattern. Explicit/direct instruction and modeling, followed by children repeating, reinforcing and practicing until they get it.
This begs the question:
Why don’t we just cut out the (intervention) middle man and teach using traditional methods in the first place?
It seems insane to show using progressive methods and then, when these methods fail, send children to learn via traditional methods in an intervention group. What a waste of time, energy, effort and money.[/vc_column_text]
Let’s update the quote shall we:
“If a child can’t learn the way progressive ideologues believe we should teach, maybe we should ignore them and teach traditionally because that is the way children learn.”
Tarjinder Gill