Dumbing Down or Smarting Up?

Posted by Allen Baird, Partner on Jan 7, 2009 in education | 0 comments

OK, so you’ve heard me go on for some time now about the crap (that’s a technical term) state of our education system: too narrow, goal-less, unilateral in teaching method, one-size-fits-all, target-driven, test-ravaged, non-applied, faddish, etc.

Well now it seems that someone up there in the clouds of politik-land agrees with me.

Not that I can claim personal responsibility for the proposed primary school subjects overhaul.  But every little helps.  What they’re planning is to replace traditional subjects with broader ‘areas of learning’ in order to give teachers more flexibility and pupils the skills they will need – and do need! – in the real world.

What caught my eye was that one of these areas is entitled understanding health and well-being.  A government adviser said that there must be “greater emphasis on life skills, including making lessons about emotional well-being and social skills a compulsory part of the curriculum.”  Pupils should have the “personal, social and emotional qualities essential to their health, well-being and life as a responsible citizen in the 21st Century”. 

If this means a focus on personal responsibility, emotional intelligence and confidence, then its all good stuff, and about time too.  All this drivel about dumbing-down is a misunderstanding of the depth and scope of that these subjects include, as well as what the purpose of education should be.  As W B Yeats put it, Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. They need to get their reactionary heads around this truth.

I  have only two minor concerns.

One, why is this shakedown limited to Primary Schools?  Unless the two level of education are interrelated, the leap from one to the other will completely bamboozle pupils.  Indeed, it should probably start at Secondary level – it’s there that an integrated and meaningful approach will pay the most dividends.  So why don’t they?  Slavish conformity to present qualifications, that’s why.

Two, I’m a little uncomfortable with the association of well-being with citizenship.  Let’s keep party politics of any sort out of it, can’t we?  The purpose of education is not to produce a well-oiled machine of state, but free and mature men and women who can think for themselves!

Find out what others are thinking here.

Image credit: timailius.