Month: February 2020

  • Curriculum: The Influence of ED Hirsch

    https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/best-practice/curriculum-the-influence-of-ed-hirsch/

    Greg Sloan is head of Media Studies at Haggerston School. He challenges the way that the ED Hirsch-styled cultural literacy is being imposed by central government. As an alternative Sloan proposed bespoke local curriculum cultures.

    Sloan questions why the academic arguments for a National Curriculum have “simply disappeared” and asks whether “a narrow band of cultural literacy champions in the Department for Education” have been allowed to decide what is taught to young people. Sloan quotes the then schools minister who describes how after the 2010 election civil servants were confronted by politicians wielding copies of the American core curriculum.

    Sloan:

    “However, the ideas of Hirsch are controversial because they propose that there are set ideas that all people should know and set lists of knowledge that all children should be taught. By knowing these things people will then be culturally literate enough to move (successfully) through the world. Essentially it means teaching people facts. It doesn’t take much theorising on this Gradgrindian approach to education to reach some fairly obvious and clear problems.”

    Further:

    “Allowing students to be individuals and to allow a breadth and depth of education is something that Hirsch sees as damaging rather than emancipatory. His outline for a culturally literate society is one in which there is a core knowledge understood by everybody and for this to happen there needs to be more standardisation, not less.”

    Sloan points out how arbitrary the choice of “key themes” (facts, essentially) that are chosen in Common Core:

    “a call for greater equality in schooling standards is not the same as asking for an inevitably limiting set of topics to be discussed on repeat in every educational setting. If anything this idea could do many students a disservice. By narrowing their curriculum down to lists it dissolves the enthusiasm for a breadth and depth of knowledge alongside an enthusiasm for self-investigation of the academic world that the most privileged students often possess.”

    Sloan questions whose culture is being presented in the common core and points out that the attitude is that the current classics are the cultural status quo. Sloan makes a call to “resist any attempts at perpetuating a canon of culture predominantly from a false idea of western civilization”. He argues that an idea of a “canon” also needs to be resisted and that there should be “a constructive dialogue between the tastes of the teacher and those of the students”.

  • 49% of adults in UK do not read books!

    49% of adults in UK do not read books!

    Blame tv, blame radio, blame social media and video games if you want. The fact is that nearly half of the adult population haven’t read a book within the last year, according to research by Kantar Media.

    just 51% of adults in the UK read at least one book in the previous year. Not only is this a decrease from 56% in the prior year, it also means 49% – essentially half – of adults in the UK didn’t read a single book in a full 12 months.

    The article I read argued that there was a correlation between three things: an increase in young people’s use of mobile phones, poverty and government austerity (shutting of libraries).

    Hearing that half the country doesn’t read (I wonder if there’s any link between that figure and recent political results?) is, for someone who reads a great deal and believes that books are absolutely essential to be a fully-functioning modern human being, quite upsetting. I’d be interested in the break-down of ages to see if it’s younger adults who are skewing the non-reading figures upward.

    I’d also point towards the way that schools are teaching reading as a cause of the growth in antipathy by young people towards books. Treating books as a tool for simply extracting information or as vehicles of assessment puts children off reading for life. I recently worked in a school where EVERY reading activity had to be based around language analysis. The fact that the school, like so many secondaries nowadays, didn’t have a school library compounded children’s dislike of books. Over the last few years I’ve had a number of Year 11’s – intelligent, capable children – separately tell me that they were glad when their GCSE English Literature exams were over because they would never have to read another book again. One even said he was going to set fire to his copy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

    I’d say that a vibrant reading culture in schools with libraries stocked with modern, engaging books would do more to develop a child’s vocabulary and cultural knowledge than vocabulary drills and knowledge organisers.

    This is 21st Century Britain, though. We don’t want people enjoying books. How the hell would the Department of Education be able to measure enjoyment? Enjoying books doesn’t prepare you for the world of work. Don’t be silly!

    (I also wonder how many teachers don’t read. I double-also-wonder how many English teachers don’t read anything other than the texts they teach and Facebook? I have my suspicions.)

    UPDATE: this 2018 article from The Atlantic reveals that levels of reading in the USA have not improved since 1998. The writer argues that this is due to the restrictive way early years teaching is conducted and a very narrow conception of what constitutes reading comprehension.

    The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under this system, but the neediest suffer the most.

    I remember reading an analysis of UK literacy about 20 years ago which argued that levels of literacy in this country had remained the same between 1900 and 2000. Since then we’ve had a deliberate obscuration of how reading is assessed in primary and secondary schools so that we understand children’s reading progress only through some arbitrary government standards (KS1-2), a free-for-all approach (KS3) and relative to other students (KS4). It would be good to see some independent research about actual UK levels of reading. Do organisations like NFER still do this sort of thing?

    While I was on The Atlantic website, these articles also caught my eye:

    Every Child Can Become a Lover of Books

    Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers

    Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

  • Comics I Read, January

    Comics I Read, January

    Looking back on the month, it seems like I’ve read very few comics. It works out at an issue a day roughly. In my head I seem to read much more than this.

    I started the month reading back over Flash: Rebirth, Flashpoint, The Button and DC Universe: Rebirth. This was to get the Doomsday Clock series straight in my head (it didn’t). I read Peter Thunderbolt because I read somewhere that it was a better way of handing a Watchmen sequel (sort of). Dollhouse Family was great and I’m on board with reading the rest of the limit series. Legion is fine and I’ve enjoyed the start of the new post-Empire Star Wars series. I read the start of The October Faction as I’ve considered watching the Netflix adaptation but haven’t got around to it yet. I’m in a little bit of a “low” mood with comics at the moment: nothing’s exciting me currently.

    Anyhow, this is what I read:

    01/01 - Shiver (Junji Ito Selected Stories)
    01/01 - Flash (2010) #9-12 (Road to Flashpoint) 
    02/01 - DC Universe: 0 (2008)
    03/01 - X-men #4 (2019)
    04/01 - Star Wars #1 (2020)
    07/01 - Flash: Rebirth #1-6 (2019) 
    08/01 - Daphne Byrne #1 (2020) 
    08/01 - X-Force #3 (2019) 
    08/01 - Peter Thunderbolt #1 (2019) 
    09/01 - Peter Thunderbolt #2-5 (2019) 
    10/01 - LoSH: Millennium #1-2 (2019) 
    11/01 - LosH #1 (2019) 
    12/01 - LosH #2 (2019) 
    12/01 - The Dollhouse Family #1 (2019) 
    13/01 - The Dollhouse Family #2 (2019) 
    14/01 - The Dollhouse Family #1 (2019) 
    15/01 - Hellboy Winter Special (2020) 
    15/01 - LoSH #3 (2019) 
    16/01 - The Low, Low Woods #2 
    25/01 - The October Faction #1-6 
    29/01 - X-men #5 (2019) 
    30/01 - Star Wars #2 (2020) 
    31/01 - What If... Magik Became Sorceror Supreme (2019)