You have to despair.
Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of ATL. She was being interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire on Monday (11 mins) about Gove’s new curriculum proposals…..strangely before he had announced them…and she admitted she hadn’t read them yet in ‘their entirety’.
This is why she opposes the new curriculum:
‘The proposals will be riddled with knowledge and lack skills and understanding.’
Shocking…that schools should be expected to impart ‘knowledge’.
Child abuse surely!
Derbyshire didn’t bat an eyelid and carried on as if such a daft comment had never been made….which is about par for the course for teacher union reps. on the BBC.
Dr Bousted is also very concerned about fractions for 5 year olds…and the time scale for introduction of the new proposals…and about some ‘snippets’ she had heard. The prospect for classroom chaos really is real she tells us.
Derbyshire asks if there is that much difference between the old and the new curriculum.
Bousted says: ‘We don’t know yet…we have to see the curriculum in its entirety.‘
Complete waste of time…..how can you get sensible comments when the person commenting hasn’t read the available proposals yet and doesn’t know what else will be announced ( and is ideologically in complete opposition to anything a Tory minister proposes)…..the BBC could and should have waited…Gove was to announce the new curriculum in the afternoon.
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Indeed. There we go again: the BBC endlessly yatters on about ‘diversity’ but there’s never anyone around in the newsroom to say stuff like ‘hey, isn’t passing on knowledge pretty much the point of education’?
Or that someone commenting on proposals she hadn’t read deserves ridicule rather to be listened to.
ATL supremo Mary Bousted, writing rubbish in the Guardian –
“I was not a model pupil. I don’t think I was considered especially bright for a grammar school – I was in the lowest sets for French and maths. It was a good school but it was of its time, in that it defined intelligence very narrowly. Other skills and aptitudes were not recognised.”
Perhaps she should have gone to a modern comprehensive instead, studying for GCSEs in getting pregnant and smoking dope.
“I wanted to know how English had come about as a subject. It developed out of the national crisis after the first world war. People saw that a common language and heritage was the way to bind the nation together and create a shared identity.”
Before WW1 we all spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of Angle, Saxon and Jute, and considered Alfred the Great a dangerous moderniser.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/sep/07/myfavouritelesson.schools
She went to a grammar school? Evidently intelligence was being defined too widely.
“Before WW1 we all spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of Angle, Saxon and Jute, and considered Alfred the Great a dangerous moderniser.”
Quite a sweeping statement for an ‘educator’
Wonder how we stumbled through the agricultural and industrial revolutions and established/maintained a global empire with all that unintelligibility
When do these people realise that they are doing Mr Gove’s work for him every time they come out with such nonsense
Er…actually the paragraph above that one was in quotes – I was just taking the mick out of her marxist subversive attitude to identity and language.
‘Other skills and aptitudes were not recognised’.
We recognise them now, which is why we’ve tumbled down the international education leagues.
Education has been dumbed down year on year since the early eighties. That is, for over three decades. One measure of this dumbing down is to look at grade inflation in a subject such as mathematics. Each successive year for the last three decades, there were more top grades in maths. Now it is unlikely that the students were becoming more intelligent or working harder, not at the top level anyway. Thus the possibilities are
1. Dumbing down the subject
2. Targeted coaching in a well defined area
3. Lenient marking.
The state of A level mathematics was such, that universities in the eighties, had to lay on foundation courses for students wishing to study any of the hard physical disciplines. Mass immigration of non-Englsih speaking students has made the situation much much worse.
The aftermath of this dumbing down is that, in subjects such as Maths and physics, we have teachers who were taught by badly educated teachers, who themselves were taught by similar teachers.
Now we want to turn the situation around, but unfortunately there aren’t a body of teachers available who can do this. Most are retired, and have no inclination to fight the fires.
Thus the panic in the teaching fraternity. They will have to teach what they don’t know.
We will have to import maths and physics teachers from Hong Kong or Korea.
Unfortunately there is no option left but the last., as other Anglo nations of the West have also gone down the same road.
Perhaps she should have gone to a modern comprehensive instead, studying for GCSEs in getting pregnant and smoking dope.
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you missed those staples of the modurn curriculum – spliffing ‘n’ stabbing.
From the BBC / Marxist Left propaganda rulebook: “get your retaliation in first” (so that you set the agenda and the enemy end up having to explain and/or deny on your terms.
Well observed Mustapha Sheikup al-Beebi
i still cant get over vickys appearance on this week last thursday,just bizarre.
Uh went fru da Nu Labor edukayshun sistem an it dinz do meez no arm an sheeit.
Wen uh leeve art college I gonna be a top rapper or feetzballer, ya get me innit an ting
The Left dominates education and has done for decades. The result is an appallingly uneducated public, many of whom are more or less incapable of independent reasoning,.
And that suits the BBC just fine. Conspiracies don’t need to be organised. All that is needed is for the conspirators to be working towards the same goal: which they are.
Another instance of Lefty influence in education was a recent ‘Today’ programme interview with a new teacher from an Army background and Christine Blower of the NUT. Blower was clearly ill-at-ease with the thought of Army people entering teaching, although she couldn’t quite say this, so had to skirt around it by saying that styles of instruction used in the Army would not always be appropriate in state schools.
The presenter (Humphrys, I think) then asked Blower what one piece of advice she would give to the new teacher at the start of his career. I was expecting a little gem about the craft of the classroom: some tip about keeping the subject interesting or maintaining control of the students. Instead, we got “Join the NUT” and chuckles from Humph.
This partisan remark should not have surprised me because Blower, if true to her job title and not acting in a political way, is primarily there to look after the pay and conditions of her union’s members; the quality of education in schools is a secondary consideration to her. Another subscription to the NUT would increase its power and allow it some control over the new member into the bargain.
A telling remark, confirming what we all know already i.e. the education system is there purely for the benefit of the teachers, or at least those with the union mindset.
Once upon a time ‘News’ was about things that had happened, now it is speculation about what someone might say in response to a speech that hasn’t yet been made or endless discussion that is no more informed than the listeners could imagine for themselves.
Speculation, Hype and Irritating Trivia – the new ‘News’.
When you know that Bousted, Blower and Keates head up the three teacher unions you can just see where three Stalin grannies has taken the nations childrens throughout the Labour Years.
And when a fopflop like Twigg is Labours windsock for those selfsame unions…you can only see things getting worse should Gove be toppled.
Gove`s not perfect, but so many Labour types in schools hate him so much that he`s a giant among the socialist pygmies that have nobbled our education system.
Blower, Boustead and Keates…the BBC of the dyslexics..thank you Labour, we`ll not forget your institutionalised grooming and abuse these last twenty years or so.
What heresy! Did not Mr Blair promise us that the three priorities of the New Labour government would be “Education, education and education” ? And of course GCSE pass rates rose every year for nearly a quarter of a century from 1988, until the Tories ruined it all under Gove!