Teaching is to Emancipate

David Noble set up a great little experiment today using ipadio, an audio-over-IP application server, to host a virtual end of year education conference he dubbed TeachMeet Mobile. Using the mighty power of twitter, he drummed up some speakers for a one-hour reflective which is available to hear live here and after the event here.

My own contribution rides on the back of Drew Buddie’s review of how far the use of ICT in education has come in the last ten years and is meant to be a bit of a foil to any exuberance we might feel about being so far ahead of ourselves. My simple and short point is simply this: I am not convinced that the young minds we are preparing are best served by what I see as an endemic dumbing down of the curriculum. This isn’t a Scottish problem, it’s all over the place and has been brought about by an avalanche of change – in political thinking and correctness, in public funding of state provision, in weak social (read “non”) science research, in promotion of managers of expediency to positions where leadership are required, not least the head teachers of state schools, and the very curriculum itself, diluted to the point of homeopathic uselessness by feeble regression to an exponentially weakening mean level of ability.

The words of the new curriculum are laudable: I hear paraphrases in the modern idiom of the seven liberal arts and sciences and slogans such as “science at the heart of Curriculum for Excellence”, but until a fundamental return is made to decent standards of behaviour, literacy, parenting, leadership and public service provision, no progress will be had without those of us called mavericks being heard.