One consequence of designing an education system that does not aim to educate, but to deceive parents and students, is that it involves dispensing with everything that did just that, including a whole generation of more experienced teachers, who were replaced with young ones who have never experienced anything but the perverse system they are asked to work in and perpetuate.
This is then the ideal testing bed for all sorts of crazy ideas, with whole generations of young people serving as guinea-pigs for outlandish experiments. The only requirement for these experiments to be adopted as standard procedure is that they serve, or are tweaked to support, the pretense of adapting to the learners' needs. Once this is achieved, then anything goes - 'carte blanche' is granted for a whole cabinet of curiosities in things education.
After a while, those involved in education will have forgotten the very basics of education, ideas such as that the teacher knows (or should know) more than the pupils if the latter are to learn anything, or resources like....textbooks! Yes, dear reader, if you have been brought up in any other educational system you will find it difficult to believe that in British state education it is considered bad practice to use textbooks - the teacher should rather "adapt to learners' needs" by providing each pupil with different learning materials, according to their respective targets.
It is then impossible to know what a student should have learned at a given stage. As a parent you will never find out. The current generation of teachers don't even know what you are talking about if you ask for a 'book' for the year your child is in. There isn't a single textbook that contains everything one should learn and revise in a given year. It all depends on the students' abilities and the corresponding targets.
This education system will not adapt to the students' needs by starting from the level they are in and bringing all to the same level by the end of their years in school. No. The education system will tell them from the start what they can and cannot do, set (and modify) the targets accordingly, and then always tell parents that the kid is doing fine, as he or she is working "to target". Even if the target is a "D", you will receive wonderful reports of how well your child is doing in working "to target".
Anyway, I digress. The point is that textbooks would spoil all this, so they are banned and forgotten, together with so many other basic educational tools and resources.
And then, inevitably, some people with a genuine concern for education discover these resources -perhaps by visiting other countries- and strive to re-introduce them as novel and innovative techniques. They reinvent the wheel and present it as a groundbreaking discovery: children will be "taught as a whole class and supported by the use of high quality textbooks". Yay!
From BBC News: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-36772954
I wonder if this is a sign that the British education system has finally touched bottom and is starting to improve. Or is it just wishful thinking on my part?
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