The government has just realised that teaching anything, including grandmothers to suck eggs, is counter-productive. All attempts to up-skill the English workforce are doomed as people never are inspired by what they are taught in school.
No-one has ever been inspired to read or write by English classes and no scientist has ever got the bug by doing some simple experiments in the laboratory.
In a cunning plan to reduce further the wildlife-literacy of the UK population the Westminster government is seriously considering making natural history a taught subject at school.
A Department of Lack of Education (DoLE) spokesperson said ‘We have shown that this government hates nature apart from Pheasants and Red Grouse and our next move to turn off the population from the natural world is to introduce a GCSE in Natural History.’.
Do you know? I think this might backfire – if you agree then click here.
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You’ve defeated me on this one Mark, I’m not sure where you stand! I’ve signed the petition. Not because I don’t agree with the ironic sentiment of the post. Nor because I don’t find Chris Baker’s recent guest blog pretty compelling. But ultimately, whatever the government thinks, good education is not hugely dependent on curriculum. And in fact if you sample people’s recollection of school, many will recall especially English classes as inspiring, maybe history next, but science also in there too. So then the question becomes, could a natural history curriculum be a good thing in the right teacher’s hands, would it give new permission for good teaching and thereby enable good learning? I think it could. Just as the modern curriculum inhibits ‘thinking skills’, so it places little value on acute observation.
‘Learning outside the classroom’ has (forgive me) failed for many reasons but one of them is lack of a strong link to curriculum. A natural history GCSE could provide that link as well as a route into the biological sciences that does not involve dissecting dead rats.