It wasn't broken so why did we fix it? PART ONE

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that our schooling system, at least in public schools, is broken.  All it takes is a series of school newsletters, a few in-house publications and a couple of kids' exercise books to figure out that not only can kids no longer read, write and spell, but neither can their teachers.  I am thankful that I was schooled from the mid-seventies before education was completely highjacked by lobby and special interest groups.  I am not so thankful that I trained as a teacher in the late eighties/early nineties after education was hijacked.

I came out of university all bright eyed and bushy tailed and filled up with notions like:

• teachers are facilitators

• immerse them in print and they'll just absorb reading

• the curriculum must be child led

• positive reinforcement is the way to go

• ignore negative behaviours

• start fresh each day

It took 16 years to unpick all that nonsense and to find some pretty nasty little animals hiding under the theories.

TEACHERS ARE FACILITATORS

Umm, no, actually, they're not.  I was paid out of the public purse to teach, not to facilitate.  Parents, the community and everyone outside of the powerful lobby groups was under the misapprehension that teachers were imparting knowledge to children, but we're doing nothing of the sort.  We don't have objectives anymore; the key word is OUTCOMES and a more meaningless word it would be difficult to find.  Twenty years ago a teacher might have recorded that the purpose of a lesson was to make the children understand that combining single sounds made words and the words could be put together in a sentence and the sentence has a meaning.  They expected that the child would learn the sounds, sound out the words, decode the sentence and then prove that they understood by answering questions about the text. Now, we encourage children to "interact" with a text.  Reading the text is interacting with it.  So is throwing the book across the room.  The child who reads the text can have that box ticked off in their outcomes sheet.  Likewise the kid who throws the book across the room can have it ticked because he was interacting with the text.  Children these days are supposed to "pick up" concepts because we facilitate the learning environment for that.  No more are teachers in the position of instilling knowledge in children.

Watch out in coming posts for elaboration on the other "notions".  If you're a teacher, please feel free to comment on how these notions have affected you, your teaching and most importantly, your students.