Nitwittery in education

In an ideal world, an education system would be run by well-educated, highly intelligent people with plenty of experience in their field who've studied psychology as well as their specialist subject. They'd understand child development and how children will or won't learn. They'd like children and young people and care about what happens to them. Their aim would be to do their best to help them grow into happy, successful adults, ready to face the world with confidence, no matter what the disadvantages some will have had, brave and flexible enough to seize whatever opportunities they're offered to suit their abilities. By being treated with kindness and respect, young people are more likely to follow that example.

In our world, or the British part of it, the education system is run by ignorant, arrogant nitwits who imagine that their most recent bright idea, dreamt up a long way from a classroom, will earn them the thanks of a grateful electorate and a good return on their investment in monetary terms, regardless of the mental health of the units of production. All of this will be measured by frequent testing so that there's hardly any time left for true education, particularly in the arts.

I loathe Gove, Gibb, Morgan and company. They're not fit to be given the responsibility for more than tying their own shoelaces and are in need of remedial education themselves. Education is too important to be left to politicians.

Further reading:
LA Times: Why Finland has the best schools.
Michael Rosen in the Guardian.

Happy Birthday Sir David

On the set of 'Life in Cold Blood'

Today is Sir David Attenborough's 90th birthday. He is rightly being lauded in the media, both public and social. Reading about his achievements, this quotation from 'Life on Earth' (1979) came to mind.

"Man's passion to communicate and to receive communications seems as central to his success as a species as the fin was to the fish or the feather to the birds. We do not limit ourselves to our own acquaintances or even our own generation. Archaeologists labour to decipher clay tablets rescued with painstaking care from Uruk and other ancient cities in the hope that the same citizen long ago may have recorded a message of more significance than a boastful genealogy of a chief or a laundry list. In our own cities, dignitaries arrange for messages to be sent to future generations by burying writings in steel cylinders strong enough to survive even a nuclear catastrophe. And scientists, convinced that man's most refined language of all is that of mathematics, select a universal truth that they believe will be recognised through all eternity — a formula for the wavelength of light — and beam it towards other galaxies in the Milky Way to proclaim that here on earth, after three thousand million years of evolution, a creature has emerged that has for the first time devised its own way of accumulating and transferring experience across generations. This last chapter has been devoted to only one species, ourselves. This may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur. The processes of evolution are still going on among plants and birds, insects and mammals. So it is more than likely that if men were to disappear from the face of the earth, for whatever reason, there is a modest, unobtrusive creature somewhere that would develop into a new form and take our place. But although denying that we have a special position in the natural world might seem becomingly modest in the eye of eternity, it might also be used as an excuse for evading our responsibilities. The fact is that no species has ever had such control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth."

The quote is the last in a 'Humanist Anthology' published by the Rationalist Press Association and available from the British Humanist Association.