Monday, December 11, 2006

UK: School or training plan for all under-18s

Imprisoning kids in useless schools for even longer -- what a lovely authoritarian dream

Moves to compel teenagers to stay on in school or training until 18 have been set in train by the government, the Guardian has learned. Alan Johnson, the education and skills secretary, a strong supporter of raising the minimum school leaving age from 16, is understood to have asked officials to begin work on a green paper examining ways to implement the change, for publication next year. The paper will not propose forcing pupils to stay in the classroom behind a desk after 16, but is likely to seek to ensure that if they leave school they move into training, study for a new diploma or take a job with training and a qualification attached.

Mr Johnson has been inspired by reforms in Ontario, Canada, where children now face a legal requirement to stay on full-time at school or college or enter formal training until 18. Introducing a similar law here could help tackle Britain's woeful record on dealing with the significant and persistent proportion of teenagers who slip through the net of work and study. Government figures released last week show 13% of 18-year-olds in England and Wales are in the so-called NEET category - not in education, employment or training. The proportion has remained fixed throughout Labour's nine years in office, and a report this week for the Rowntree Foundation said failure to deal with this group had damaged the government's drive to tackle poverty.

Moves by Mr Johnson to use legal change to try to crack the NEET problem comes as research shows that obliging teenagers to stay on even a short time longer at school boosts their chances of continuing in education or moving into employment, as well as increasing their earning power. A study for the institute for social and economic research at Essex University investigated the progress of individuals reaching school leaving age between 1962 and 1997. During this period, leaving-age pupils whose birthdays fell in the first half of the school year were allowed by law to leave school at the beginning of the Easter holiday (a right Tony Blair's government swiftly abolished), while their younger classmates had to stay on until the end of May.

Researchers compared the progress of students in both groups and found that forcing teenagers to stay on in school until the summer increased the likelihood they would stay on in full-time education by 12 percentage points. It also raised the probability that they would gain a qualification at age 16 by between 2.5% and 3.5%. In addition, there were workplace benefits, with those who had to stay in school showing about 1% higher employment rates and earning 2% more. But researchers Emilia Del Bono and Fernando Galindo-Rueda also found that this boost at work occurred only once the school leaving age was raised from 15 to 16 in 1974, so that the extra term in school meant students took more O levels, CSEs or GCSEs. The lesson for the government, they conclude, is that spending more time at school only has a long-term effect if students use the time to gain a qualification that employers then reward. "In short, exam dates matter," the study says.

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Dumbed-down science "education" in Australia

Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty has attacked the way science is taught in Australian schools, with some students studying the lyrics of classic pop songs as part of the subject. In Queensland, Cat Stevens' song Where Do The Children Play? and Midnight Oil's hit River Runs Red about environmental degradation are studied in Year 8 and 9 science classes as part of an examination of science and society. Teaching resources prepared by the Queensland Studies Authority, responsible for the curriculum, include an analysis of song lyrics from the 1970s, '80s and '90s to explore "historical and cultural factors (that) influence the nature and direction of science which, in turn, affects the development of society". Science and society is one of five strands in the Queensland junior science syllabus, compulsory to the end of Year 10, which asserts that "science is a 'way of knowing"'.

But Professor Doherty, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996, rejected the idea that science was "just another body of knowledge". "Before science, you have to go back to before 1500; so people who think science is just one way of knowing the world should go back and live then before we had a cure for things like plague," he said. "Science is evidence-based. It isn't perfect but it's based on experiment and observation and repeating findings," Professor Doherty added. "It's a specialised way of looking at the world. It isn't just a matter of discussion; it's a matter of looking for evidence, which is the difference between science and philosophy."

Other prominent scientists and educators said the Queensland syllabus was indicative of the way science was taught in schools around the nation, with curriculums reflecting a relativist philosophy that undermined the evidence-based approach central to the subject's study. Australian Council of Deans of Science president John Rice joined Professor Doherty in lamenting the creep of relativism into science curriculums. "Relativism is misplaced and it doesn't do justice to the real philosophical thinking; it's a shallow understanding of that philosophy," Professor Rice.

Professor Rice, dean of science at the University of Technology, Sydney, said the trend in school science syllabuses around the nation was a move away from specifying the knowledge students should understand. Instead, curriculums focused on the processes students should use, forgetting that in maths and science "these things are learned simultaneously". "They focus terribly on pedagogy, and the way knowledge and content is described is flawed," Professor Rice said. "Content turns out to be a list of topics instead of an understanding of what you want students to learn." A modern science syllabus might include a topic on the physics of amusement parks rather than specifying an understanding of motion and how you predict what's going to happen to moving things.

Peter Ridd, senior lecturer in physics at James Cook University, was a member of the subject advisory committee for science that oversaw the development of the new Queensland syllabus, to be introduced from 2008 for junior and senior students. Dr Ridd, with a group of university physicists, prepared a list for the senior physics course of fundamental concepts central to an understanding of physics in mechanics, waves and optics, electricity, magnetism, heat and matter. But he said the syllabus lacked content, had insufficient detail to instruct students on physics and failed to include maths as part of the course. The use by Galileo and Newton of maths in scientific thinking revolutionised the discipline but Dr Ridd said school syllabuses today excluded maths in the study of science.

A Queensland Studies Authority spokesman said the new science syllabuses to be introduced from 2008 would specify core content and reflect national standards agreed to by federal and state education ministers.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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