Education

Goodbye, Winston

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British secondary schools will drop Winston Churchill from a list of figures to be mentioned in history teaching. Also dropped: Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King. The schools will now be emphasizing “lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating.”

Also:

Schools are also being told to tear up the timetable of eight lessons a day and introduce classes lasting a few minutes – or several hours – by mixing different subjects together.

Five-minute lessons on spelling, French or German could be “drip-fed” throughout the day.

The architect of the new curriculum, Dr Ken Boston, insisted traditional approaches had been “exhausted”.

Check your calendar. This is not April 1.

Related: The Trivialization of Science Teaching.

(cross-posted at Photon Courier)

Priorities

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California has a growing shortage of registered nurses–an estimated shortfall of 40,000 by the year 2014. There are lots of people who want to learn nursing, but can’t get into nursing school because of a shortage of instructional capacity–an estimated 17,000 qualified applicants are now on the waiting list.

So what does the University of California system want to do?

Start a new law school. This, despite the fact that the California Postsecondary Education Commission has found that the state has no shortage of qualified attorneys.

Joanne Jacobs has thoughts on this matter.

(cross-posted at Photon Courier)

The Trivialization of Science Teaching

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A U.K. physics teacher writes about the destruction of his subject by the new government-estabished syllabus.

(via the excellent Natalie Solent)

See my related post from 2005, Skipping Science Class.

SECOND UPDATE: An interesting collision between science and “Theory,” as the latter is practiced in many university humanities departments, can be seen in the episode known as The Sokal Hoax. (More here.)

Also, these books are relevant to this discussion: Higher Superstition and Fashionable Nonsense.

FIRST UPDATE: From the Telegraph:

The curriculum in state schools in England has been stripped of its content and corrupted by political interference, according to a damning report by an influential, independent think-tank…No major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference, according to the report published by Civitas.

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Quote of the Day

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Whenever I hear it said that people are ceasing to [be] told about something tremendously important at school – like history, classical music, foreign languages, Latin and Greek, ancient history, etc. – I react with the suspicion that, far from this presaging oblivion for this or that discipline or body of knowledge, for something to be ignored at school is a prelude for a significant if not huge revival of popular interest in the thing.

–Brian Micklethwait

Knowledge vs Knowingness

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Lead and Gold excerpted a very interesting article by Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor who was killed during the early days of the Iraq war. In the article, published in February of 2002, Kelly draws a distinction between knowledge and knowingness;:

Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.

(go read the entire excerpt)

It strikes me that many trends in today’s society–especially in academia but by no means limited to it–are at least partly about enabling the attitude of knowingness.

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