If it's "traditional" it must be bad...

One of the pillars this charade rests on is that the educational system appears to be "modern". Nowadays it's sufficient for something to be labelled as modern to be generally accepted, as it is assumed that anything "traditional" must be inherently bad. So what better strategy than present it as a modern way to educate to distract from the real purpose of the whole deception.

So in order to look "modern" and boost acceptance the British educational system has dispensed with traditional approaches and principles, and among other things no longer teaches abstract thinking. To do so it has aligned itself with the principles put forward by cognitive psychologist Piaget who suggested that abstract thinking was superfluous in early years.

The result is that children are, for example, no longer taught the commutative law of multiplication, i.e. that 6 x 4 is the same as 4 x 6. Instead, once they may come across 6 x 4 = 24 and may or may not learn it, and in some other occasion someone will tell them that 4 x 6 = 24 and they will take it as something completely separate from the former piece of knowledge. In English language it means not learning any grammar. Nowadays not even secondary English teachers know what "parsing" is, or what "past participle" means (honestly, I have experienced this).

In this climate it comes as a surprise that the UK Literacy Association give its annual "literacy school of the year" award to a school that "applies traditional methods such as phonics and grammar lessons". It looks like a breath of fresh air. But it is less of a surprise to hear how these words suddenly disappeared from the news reports. Did someone decide that saying this goes against the "modern" image of British education? If so, it must be someone with sufficient power to get news outlets to actually change their reporting within a few hours. I am never inclined to give credibility to conspiracy theories, but this is really striking. Hear for yourself:

News report on BBC Radio Bristol during the news at 9am:

(if in a hurry, you only need to listen to the first few sentences)

And here's how the same story was reported one hour later:

The irony in all this is that by trying to be "modern" they are being "traditional" in the worst sense of the word: Piaget's views are now long superseded and dated, for example by the work of his follower Vygotsky, who brought back the need for abstract thinking. It is the lack of abstract thinking what is at the root of the terrible results of British pupils in English and Maths, which in turn are a basic tool to learn all other subjects.