Blog post on "Seven Myths about Educatio"

[JAC]

Interesting blog/review about a book of this title by Daisy Christodoulou. Isn't she a member of a new curriculum reform company discussed a few weeks ago?



http://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/20 ... ing-ideas/

[JIM CURRAN]

Thanks Jac, I had a conversation recently with someone, who thought, like so many other progressives that acquired knowledge had a limited part to play in a 21st Century education system. He explained to me that even the experts use the latest information technology to look for answers. What he failed to recognize is that the real experts have a vast amount of accumulated and memorized knowledge that provides the foundation necessary to ask the right questions and then to analyze in depth the answers given.
I heard someone recently on the radio make the comment that Google might be able to give you most of the answers but that it couldn’t give you the questions to ask.

[Heather F]

I've nearly finished the book and found it very useful. Particularly because I have found that the very people that advocate these myths also deny their existence and Daisy C goes to such pains to give secure evidence of how the myths are widespread.
I was very interested in her account of a whole cohort of A to C grade GCSE English students she taught in a deprived area. They all messed up a past paper because not one of them knew what a glacier was, which was crucial to understanding the extract. I am sure that if I was to ask my own (more privileged) A to C grade year 10 class tomorrow they would all have a decent idea of what a glacier was, even my 10 year old told me it was 'a sort of iceberg'. Those sort of accounts make a strong case for a more knowledge based curriculum if we are to create more equality of opportunity in our society.

[chew8]

In the all-through school I attended in South Africa, we had a general knowledge exam twice a year as well as exams in all our school subjects. This conveyed a clear message that general knowledge was important.

Re. 'glacier', however: I know for sure that I knew what a glacier was by the age of about 13 or earlier, not as an item of general knowledge but because we had been taught about glaciers in geography. I gave up geography at the age of 13, so this teaching must have happened before then. I think our school curriculum was probably very knowledge-based, and I don't at all regret it.

Jenny C.