Macroscopic Wo...
Friday, September 30, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Fasten Your Seatbelts!
Guest Post by Allan AlachWell, as I’ve been predicting, along with many others, it seems, from this article by Kelvin Smythe, that national testing is on the way. I don’t know Kelvin’s source for this, but seeing as he was spot on with his story about the Ministry of Education seeking people to train for limited statutory manager roles in schools, we can expect that his source is accurate this time as well. It was only a matter of time, as many commentators have been saying, for testing to appear on the radar. National’s standards were never going to work, for many reasons, all of which have been well expressed in many different forums. My suspicion is that the protests and non-compliance from schools is exactly what was expected and that...
Posted in: Saturday, September 24, 2011
The Ministry of Mindcontrol is also the Ministry of Truth.
Guest Blog by Allan AlachI had hoped to be able to write an education focussed article for once, but in today’s political climate, education is way off the agenda.So we are now are in the next phase of the battle against national’s standards (which is what they really are), following the imposition of charters on to non-compliant schools by MiniMind, a.k.a Ministry of Mindcontrol a.k.a Ministry of Education.It seems, from the reports of MiniMind threats to schools up north, that Orwell’s label “Ministry of Truth” (Minitrue) also be applied to MiniMind, to give us MiniMind & Minitrue. For those who don’t know the story, on Friday September 10, two principals of small schools received a telephone call from a regional Ministry of Education...
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Schools - so last Century
The Minister of Education's 'experts' figuring how to improve standardisation of education not able to comprehend they are facing the wrong century!At the end of the nineteenth century schools were developed to meet the needs of an industrial age to transfer knowledge to often reluctant students and, in many ways, they have changed little since those beginnings. In contrast almost every other aspect of our lives has been changed through technological advances. Roland Barth, from the Harvard Leadership Centre has written, ‘many of our schools seem en-route to becoming a hybrid of a nineteenth century factory, a twentieth century minimum security penal colony and a twenty-first century Education Testing Service’.Unfortunately, for our collective...
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Placing in depth inquiry learning first!
Exploring the animal life in local stream, studying adaptation of the animals, investigating pollution, working out speed, depth and capacity of the water and, in one case in our province, exploring the river from its source on the mountain to the sea. This is the stuff of real learning.Creative teachers have always placed developing authentic realistic and first hand experiences followed by creative expression through the arts central to their programmes .Important to such teachers was the need to provide opportunities to develop all the innate gifts and talents of their students. Today the emphasis being imposed by the government is on literacy and numeracy and, along with the conservative nature of most teachers, this has lead to less real...
Friday, September 16, 2011
Mind Control from the Ministry of (Mis) Education
Mind control compliance 'helpers' are on the way!Guest Blogger Allan AlachA few days back two staff members from the Ministry of Mind Control, or in Newspeak, MiniMind (aka Ministry of Education) attended a BOT meeting to inform the BOT about all the good reasons for implementing national’s standards. Ostensibly this was supposed to be part of the negotiation process over the non-compliant charter, except that MiniMind preempted this through their ‘use these targets’ or else letter, deemed to take effect on the long scheduled day of the meeting.One MiniMind employee had been given the ‘salesperson’ role. He ran through a Powerpoint presentation, supposedly developed for the school, except that after a few slides it was obvious that this was...
Monday, September 12, 2011
A new Vision for Schooling
Every teacher should read Guy Claxton's book, 'What's the Point of School?' and ask themselves the same question. This will be change from wrestling with how to accommodate the current government's backward looking National Standards.Claxton writes that the 'purpose of education is to prepare young people for the future. Schools should help young people to develop the capabilities they will need to thrive. What they need and want , is the confidence to talk to strangers, to try things out, to handle tricky situations, to stand up for themselves, to ask for help, to think new thoughts.'Simple enough but, according to Claxton , 'they are not getting it...education has lost the plot'.The questions teachers need to ask are, he Says, 'are what capabilities...
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Forget the Nanny State - we now have Big Brother
Guest blog by Allan AlachSeveral years back we were bombarded with ‘nanny state’ rhetoric. Well, that has gone now, and has been replaced by ‘Big Brother” from George Orwell’s book “Nineteen Eighty Four”. Orwell’s prediction of 1984 was rather accurate it seems, except for being 27 years too early. From Orwell’s genius, we can see that the agency we know as the “Ministry of Education” (Education being the word used in the official language of Oceania, Newspeak) is actually a euphemism for “Ministry of Mind Control’, employing “Thought Police” to ensure compliance.Poor Winston Smith. We can start to sympathise with his predicament.So now ‘non-compliant’ schools have received what appears to be a pro-forma letter from their...
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Teachers have been led down the wrong path these past decades - time to control their own journey.
Teachers have been led down the wrong path ( assembly line) of a modern economic technocratic business model of teaching - all about measurement, comparison and standardisation.Nothing to do with the true purpose of education of developing the diverse talents of all students. Like workers in Henry Ford's factories teachers seem unaware of the effects of this standardisation approach.Since the mid eighties education,along with every other aspect of our life, has been under the influence of a 'market forces' approach to life - an approach based on placing economic needs above equally important wider issues of the common good. Only things that can be measured are felt worthwhile. Competition and individual enterprise were...