Ask a Stupid Question, get a Stupid Answer, strange how that childhood comeback has come back in the form of: ask the wrong question and you will always get the wrong answer.
For example ask: ”What's the best way of delivering 90% of someone's educational experience online?" and you will eventually get 'A Virtual Learning Environment, everyone needs one', as the answer.
But ask: "What's the best way of delivering a high quality education?", and you will get an answer involving well-motivated, well-trained and well-resourced teachers with smaller and smaller groups of students.
As a result of this particular misconceived question, millions of pounds, hundreds of thousands of people hours and multiple Gigajoules of mental energy are going to be wasted forcing every school in the country to adopt a VLE.
Another example of a wrong answer because the question was wrong would be ‘OFSTED’, by asking, “How can we force schools to change?”, as opposed to, “What do schools need to assist the change we will be working hard to convince them is necessary?”
Can you think of the questions that should have been asked when we got these answers?
SATs, National Curriculum , Curriculum 2000, PFI, Building Schools for the Future, BECTA Self Review Framework, TLRs, PPA, Threshold, ASTs, Chartered London Teacher Status, Local Management of Schools, Capita, National Literacy Strategy, The Primary Framework, The Interactive Planning Tool, DiDa and on and on and on…..
2 comments:
Nice point, I work at a UK University and the students think the VLE is a total waste of time. They have learning courses doing arbitrary exercises, once they have done the minimum requirment they never use it again. If it were a good thing, they would use it without much encouragment.
You mention the National Curriculum.
I do think the National Curriculum is a very good thing. I was in the last year of kids not to have this. And when I think back to what I was doing at school in the 1980s, there is no comparison to what my kids are doing now. They have 100x times more structure and are doing useful things with their time. Most of my school hours were wasted on pointless stuff that the old teachers were comfortable teaching.
(I just added you to my directory)
The National Curriculum was first talked about (demanded even) by teachers in the 20's. The Schools Council was talking about it in the 60's and 70's. It makes totally good sense - but why was it created? not for the reasons you will find admitted to: it was part of the Thatcherite Beat the Teachers and LEAs programme. They asked questions about controlling teachers, destroying Labour controlled LEAs, returning to a quasi-Victorian golden age where working class people knew their place (in the TB ward, on the line at a factory) and the NC MkI was their answer - have you ever seen that miscarriage?? it was a nightmare! the 2000 revision was only a slight improvement, in less specific language.
Of course we needed more structure to our primary school curriculum, we needed agreed objectives, shared resources etc etc but the question was never 'how can we do the best for our children?', so the answers came out horribly, horribly wrong.
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