Education
School of life
Teaching is on the road to hell – the story of the national curriculum proves it
Michele Hanson
Teachers have been dragged through endless, mostly mystifying changes since 1988 – and still more are in the pipeline. Will the government stop making a dog’s breakfast of education?
@michelerhanson
Mon 12 Feb 2018 11.42 GMT
Last modified on Mon 12 Feb 2018 11.43 GMT
In 1988, when I had been teaching for about 20 years, something dreadful happened: the national curriculum was introduced. All teachers were obliged to attend workshops and read huge amounts of information written in a puzzling language.
I went to an afterschool workshop carrying a sack of literature we had been ordered to read. The instructor told us to take out the largest loose-leaf tome. 「Please turn to page 192,」 said she. We did so. 「Now turn to page 353.」 We did. 「Now take out that section and throw it in the bin.」
Ridiculous. How many million trees had died for this? How many gazillion hours had exhausted teachers spent sweating over these useless pages of gobbledygook? What a frightful waste of time, energy and resources. Luckily, I hadn』t read it. I had tried to read another booklet on English, but I came across a sentence 72 words long with barely a comma; for the life of me I could make no sense of it. I tried. I even phoned the Department of Education for an explanation. 「This doesn』t make sense,」 I said. 「Yes, it does,」 said the spokeswoman. Could she please explain it? She tried, but couldn』t. Could I speak to the person who wrote it? No. Why not? It wasn』t written by one person, it was written by a committee.
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That was the moment that I knew teaching was on the road to hell. Sure enough, off went the national curriculum, dragging the poor teachers with it through endless changes, initiatives, an update in 1995, overhaul in 1997, more changes in 2007, more flexibility introduced in 2008, then a new government in 2010, which ordered teachers to abandon the latest changes and return to the 2000 version, then more alterations in dribs and drabs. The government has never stopped fiddle-widdle-diddling with it, adding Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) for seven-year-olds, A* grades, SATs at age 11, AS levels, SATs at age 14 and baccalaureate, all described in mystifying jargon. I suspect it is to make the teachers feel stupid because they couldn』t understand it, when really it meant bugger all.
Adding to the mess, from 1992, was the malign, crushing effect of Ofsted, the new inspectorate – not understanding and supportive as the old HMI had tried to be, but a ruthless enforcer of impossible and pointless targets, relentless lesson plans and rigidly proscribed syllabuses.
Did the various governments realise they had made a dog’s breakfast of education? Are they at last easing up on this beleaguered profession? Not a chance in hell. Here we go again. Now they want more formal mathematics and English teaching in reception classes. Already there is a fierce backlash from people who know what they are talking about. Will the government take any notice? Tick the box. No or no?
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本文來源:https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/12/teaching-is-on-the-road-to-hell-the-story-of-the-national-curriculum-proves-it