Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Gove hammered by radio caller
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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It would actually be interesting to have a think about what is education for ?
Maximum 100 words, write on one side of the paper only. You have 10 minutes :-)
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Get back to me on that when I've finished being educated, around 2056 by my reckoning ( if I'm lucky enough to last as long as most of the women in my family)
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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John
Yes, 'what is education for?' is the central question at the heart of this debate. The motivations of successive governments you would think have been to try and guide people into employment. Not sure how well that has been achieved.
When Britain had a significant manufacturing base we had a system of apprenticeships and some went to university and on into management roles (business or government). That's basically what happened.
Along came global political change from Eastern Europe to China at the end of the 80s and business consequently went global as borders opened up and cheaper labour for manufacturing became available. The UK (and many other countries) have struggled to fill the employment gap since they exported their manufacturing functions.
UK govt seemed to react by converting polytechnics to universities and suggesting everyone get themselves a university education. Some of that has worked as the services sector took up a lot of the slack after much large scale manufacturing left these shores. The UK is also big globally in the creative industries (however jobs here too are now going overseas to places like South Africa and therefore affecting young peoples employment ambitions).
If employment law in the UK and other countries allows people to move to where the jobs are then maybe Gove is right to highlight languages more. But history and geography, no I don't think so. If these two have to be replaced with anything I'd put in Science and the Environment. If education of our children is about matching their skills to the needs of the future of our world then those two areas I think are important (along with maths, languages and the arts).
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Permalink Reply by Maddy on
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We always talk about "training children for work" but how about teaching our children in such a way that they can think creatively about the kind of world they want to grow up into, rather than trying to match them to an economy that frankly no longer exists. In ten or twenty years time there will be jobs that we can't even dream of now, and for which today's skills may no longer be relevant or useful.
My son went to a Steiner school until thirteen and has since moved to a local comprehensive, so we have had experience two very different kinds of education, both with their good and bad points. I took him out of the Steiner school because they could not, or would not, deal effectively with his particular learning difficulties and he was beginning to be very unhappy there, but I can't say he has been much more supported in state school - the rhetoric and structures are there, but the practice generally falls short.
The state school curriculum is in many ways more interesting and relevant to the issues of the modern world (for example Science incorporates ecology, health, ethics etc) than that followed in the Steiner school, but there is something about the way things are taught - the constant emphasis on testing and getting the right answers, even down to a precise formulation of words, seems to drain the life out of them. They are 'revising before they learn', as a friend put it, with everything taught as a prelude to how you will be tested on it.
Creative thinking not only has no place in this system, it is even discouraged as it may lower your mark. I don't remember things being this rigid when I was at a highly academic grammar school in the 70s. This is not the teachers' fault, after all they are judged, as are schools, on their pupils' performance in this exam-obsessed system which to my mind tests a very narrow range of skills and intelligence. The children who are doing best in this system are not necessarily thriving any more than those who are failing - they are under unprecedented pressure and have to rigidly keep on track to get their top grades.
My son has particular difficulties with this approach as he is a highly intelligent, creative thinker and stubborn individualist. The Steiner curriculum, which was both slower and somehow more 'rounded', suited him and in many ways encouraged him to enjoy the process of learning, rather than pack in information. But as I say there were problems there too dealing with children who didn't fit the mould.
I hope that the way things are now om education is just another example of how things have to get worse before they get better. I saw the animated talk you posted, Liz, and thought it was a fantastic wake-up call for how we should be preparing our kids for such an unknown, rapidly changing and exciting future.
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Permalink Reply by james walsh on
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With the soon to be released IPod 'real time portable language translator' coming out next month, what's the point in learning a foreign language ? Won't this do to language training what electronic calculators (used today in schools) did for mental arithmetic calculation ?
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Language is for pulling. You're not going to pull significantly with a 'real time portable language translator'.
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Oh James !
Do you really think people learn a foreign language to be able to communicate with foreigners?
We learn a foreign language in order better to understand our own :-)
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JohnMc & D* Agreed, but (as usual) you have not tackled my point which is the effect the device will have upon language teaching. Is it good bad or both ? Don't start talking about something else please :-)
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It's difficult to say without seeing the device, but on-line translators are pretty hit-and-miss. You remember the story about Churchill getting upset about De Gaulle " demanding " something when he was only asking for it ( French demander = ask ) . If the Ipod thingy can deal with nuances like that I take my chapeau off to it.
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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You only need to use the 'gurgle translator' and have a good knowledge of both languages to see how useless such devices are..
http://translate.google.de/#de|en|Deutsche%20Sprache%20schwere%20Sprache
I'm afraid there's no way around the hard slog of learning a language, which IMO is great fun and opens up worlds as well as providing a second/third way of thinking.
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Stephen* who mentioned google ? why do you folk veer off on such acute angles from what's being said ? i mentiond IPOD NOT google. We all know that the google translator is crap, please try to keep up :-)
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Does Michael Gove speak anything other than English?
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