Soft Machinations

Image:  The cover of The Soft Machine Volume Two (1969). Design by Byron Goto, Henry Epstein.

It’s not often that All Change Please! reads something about a politician and thinks: ‘Yes, by Jove, I think he’s got it’, but that’s exactly what happened in response to a recent piece about Ed Milliband in the Guardian when he was reported to state: “We need to ensure vocational education is seen as just as much of a gold standard as academic education.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/may/21/ed-miliband-snobbery-vocational-courses?

Obviously he’s been reading ‘Going For Gold‘!

At the same time All Change Please! also felt a smug sense of anti-Govian satisfaction when it read a report alerting everyone to the fact that what employers really, really want is not so much evidence of academic potential, but more experience of so-called ‘soft skills’.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9282665/Young-people-increasingly-shut-out-of-first-jobs.html

Now All Change Please! has already written about so-called ‘soft subjects’, which, while assumed by the popular media to describe any subject with work-related content rather than so-called harder academic so-called  ‘deep thought’ subjects, is in fact simply a reference to any subject not on the Russell Group’s list as being appropriate for entrance to one of the small, elite group of universities they represent.

So what of so-called ‘soft skills’? According to Wikipedia:

‘Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance an individual’s interactions, job performance and career prospects. Unlike hard skills, which are about a person’s skill set and ability to perform a certain type of task or activity, soft skills relate to a person’s ability to interact effectively with coworkers and customers and are broadly applicable both in and outside the workplace.

[They...] include proficiencies such as communication skills, conflict resolution and negotiation, personal effectiveness, creative problem solving, strategic thinking, team building, influencing skills and selling skills, to name a few.’

Now one could be forgiven for supposing that it is the so-called soft subjects that deliver so-called soft-skills, but that does not necessarily follow. Just as it’s possible to teach academic subjects in non-academic ways, so it is also possible to teach soft subjects without giving enough emphasis to the development of soft skills.

Some serious machinations are therefore going to be needed to resolve the issue of how best to deliver soft skils.

Meanwhile the title of this post, ‘Soft Machinations’ is of course in the first instance a corruption of ‘Soft Machine’, a band that All Change Please! followed devotedly in the late 1960s when it should possibly (or more probably not) have been spending more time on its homework, and then in later life went on to teach in the school in Canterbury that the main members of the original band had first met at some years earlier – but that’s another story. The band’s name was taken from the book of the same name by William S. Burroughs, first published in 1961, in which the ‘Soft Machine’ is a name used for the human body. The main theme of the book concerns how external control mechanisms invade the body.

But what’s more interesting is that the book was written using the literary ‘cut up’ technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing, invented in the 1920s by the Dadaists and popularised by Burroughs and others in the 1960s.

Again, according to Wikipedia:

‘The ‘cut-up’ and the closely associated ‘fold-in’ are the two main techniques:
Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. Fold-in is the technique of taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page.’

Now, given the sense they make, I reckon this must very probably be the way that most government education policies and National Curriculum documents are put together?

Think do you what?

Invisible Learning

Last week the media were gleefully reporting the forthcoming conceptual art show at the Hayward Gallery, entitled ‘Invisible: Art about the unseen 1957 – 2012‘. The exhibition features works that contain content that essentially does not exist, such as an invisible ink drawing, and a police report of a stolen work of invisible sculpture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/18/hayward-gallery-invisible-show

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/blank-canvas-london-gallery-unveils-invisible-art-exhibition-7767057.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/9275545/Invisible-art-exhibition-to-set-imaginations-alight.html

So, what else could All Change Please! do but to proudly curate its own imaginary show mischievously entitled: ‘Invisible Learning: A nostalgic look at the current state of formal education and the unseen absence of learning 1950s to 2012′.

The first work that greets the visitor to Invisible Learning – a triptych – convincingly illustrates the concept of obliterated learning. It begins with a blackboard with the chalk erased with a blackboard duster, effectively turning it into a whiteboard. Adjacent is another piece in which an electronic whiteboard is completely covered in black marker pen, effectively turning it into a blackboard. This is followed by the iconoclastic ‘Essay obliterated by red ink‘.

On display at the Hayward is Tom Friedman’s ‘1000 hours of staring‘ – a blank piece of paper the artist stared at for five years. In response, Invisible Learning presents us with a blank OCR Multiple Choice Question answer sheet which a pupil has spent five years staring at. This is followed by a reference to Yoko Ono’s set of instructions telling viewers to imagine they are looking at a work of art, presented in the form of the current National Curriculum documents and exam specifications telling teachers what their students should imagine they are learning.

While the Hayward exhibition contains ‘Invisible sculpture‘ – a plinth that Andy Warhol once briefly stood on, the next section of Invisible Learning includes a series of items of educational technologies that were once used briefly by famous people while at school.

So here is Bill Gates’ actual BBC micro that he first learnt to program on, the slide projector used to show art-history film-strips to the young David Hockney, and a piece of chalk originally thrown at Richard Branson when he wasn’t paying attention in a lesson.

Meanwhile, instead of Jeppe Heine’s ‘Invisible Labyrinth‘ on show at the Hayward – an invisible maze though which visitors ‘negotiate their way through a maze wearing digital headphones activated by infra-red beams’,  Invisible Learning visitors will experience the ‘Labyrinth of Learning‘ in which they negotiate their way through a maze of irrelevant subjects and examinations activated by the current government.

Based on John Cage’s famous 4′ 33″ ‘silent music’ piece, the Invisible Learning exhibition continues with 35’00″ of ‘silent reading’, in which a bell is rung to denote the beginning and end of the piece.

Then, in contrast to Yves Klein’s 1961 ‘In the Void Room‘ which featured an immersive walk-in installation painted entirely white and lit by a series of neon lamps, Invisible Learning is proud to present a special immersive gallery in which visitors can wander through empty learning spaces and corridors.

In this disturbing space a single chair is provided for visitors to sit and recall the endless sense of isolation experienced day after day sitting in the classroom.

And in this special installation two lone teachers still drone on endlessly, even though their classes went home years ago.

The final work in this section contains another sculptural piece, provocatively entitled ‘Chairs on tables‘, ritualistically created in every learning space across the country at the end of every school day. One is forced to wonder in what aspects of later life this creative learning experience will prove invaluable.

The last gallery contains perhaps the most evocative work. At the Hayward, Teresa Margolles takes water that has been used to wash the bodies of murder victims in Mexico City’s morgue and uses it in a humidifier: ‘Visitors walk through a room just aware of this superfine mist and its relationship to people mainly killed by drug cartels…You feel it on your skin.”

In Invisible Learning, odours extracted from deserted school sports halls, cloakrooms, assembly halls and chemistry labs are similarly used in a series of humidifiers that create a superfine nauseous mist for visitors to walk through and become more intimately aware of the learning victims of formal educational institutions and teacher cartels.

Just as the Hayward exhibition prompts one to ask: ‘But is it Art?‘, so Invisible Learning forces us to question the current provision of formal schooling: `But is it Education?’

And while one-off entry to the Hayward Exhibition costs just £8, a season pass to the entire Invisible Learning experience costs up to £9,000 a year.

Meanwhile, to read an invisible article about Invisible Art, click on the invisible link below:

http:// www.                               .html

Photo credits: Flickr Commons: Pareeerica, Jeremy Gordon, Steve Berry, Stuart Pillbrow, Emily Bean, Naraoekim0801, gish700, Calm Drew, Shaylor, True British Metal.

Oh, Lordy Lord *

Yesterday I attended a seminar at the House of Lords, somewhere I’d never been before. In terms of the nation’s heritage, it’s grand and impressive inside, if somewhat reminiscent of a public school. It’s well worth a visit, especially as it gives one some important clues as to why politicians seem so stuck in the past rather than looking towards the future.

In many ways, the session I attended was little better. It was entitled ‘A New Vision for Design Education: is design learning at school fit for purpose?’, and organised by the ‘Associate Parliamentary Design & Innovation Group‘, whoever they are. It was a gathering of the great and the good in the field, all very eloquently expressing the purpose and benefits of design education. Here’s the question I asked the panel:

“All the values and aspirations expressed here today were initially identified and developed in the 1970s. It didn’t succeed then in scaling itself up and being embedded in the curriculum, so how and why should it now, particularly in the context of the current political ideology in which Schools Minister Nick Gibbs recently welcomed the decrease in the time that pupils studied subjects such as Art and Design, Design and Technology and Drama as ‘an encouraging trend’?”

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/education/timetable-boost-for-traditional-class-subjects-7678723.html

Sadly no-one really responded to this challenge, although one of the panel did say something about it being important not to be pessimistic, which I regret to say I still am. No-one really said anything that had not been said already during the past 35 years. It was all largely about preparing students for life in the last quarter of the 20th Century rather than the first quarter of the 21st Century, and as a means of recruiting new designers for the old profession. The potential impact on design education of the rapid shift towards on-line learning, and how the industry itself will need to respond to the changing circumstances of a population being able to design and make things for themselves at a local level using CAD and 3D printers, was not mentioned.  And I didn’t notice anyone in the audience with an iPad, and neither was I aware of anyone providing a live commentary via Twitter.

On the positive side it was good to hear everyone essentially in agreement about the importance of design education, and an emerging consensus that a lot of the problem was that the message was not being co-ordinated and driven by a single body, though there were no suggestions as to who this might be, let alone any volunteers. Strangely no-one mentioned the fact that design education provides an almost perfect fit with the wider specification for what are currently referred to as 21st Century Skills.

However I did learn one thing I didn’t know before. Apparently no current member of parliament has the faintest idea what design is all about (OK, well we have all already guessed that). Except for one, who owns a 15% stake in his family wallpaper and fabric design business. Any idea as to who it might be? No? OK, here’s a clue:

http://www.osborneandlittle.com/

* Lordy Lord – as in the expression used to “express frustration, exasperation, worry, or tiredness”. Pretty much sums up my response really.

 

Image credit: Oliver Quinlan

Living in the past?

Well, little did I suspect that last week’s ‘A brief history of dates‘ would be the post that would generate the most number of views – some three hundred – since ‘Thunderbirds are Gove’. All I ever wanted to do was to point out that history involves a great deal more than memorising dates, and that some students found writing academic essays inappropriate to their needs and abilities.

From the tweets and comments, it seems to have stirred up considerable resentment from a number of seemingly distraught, distressed, enraged and hysterical history teachers. On Twitter I’ve been labelled as ‘fashionably-minded’, accused of suggesting that history shouldn’t involve any factual knowledge at all, of not listening to points I didn’t want to hear, and that I wished to exclude teaching students how to write essay-style blogs (even if they wanted to). It’s also been suggested that I doubtless wouldn’t approve someone’s comment (I’ve approved everybody’s comments without exception). Oh, and apparently it seems I’m a ‘moron’ – a particularly clever and witty ripost for an academic, I thought.

And reading through some of the comments one could be forgiven for thinking that I had suggested that no-one ever needed to know anything ever again as it’s all on the internet, and that children should never be expected to write a coherent passage of text.

I must say I found the reference to the Ed Hirsch Jr., Spring 2000 paper ‘You can always look it up…or Can you?‘ interesting, particularly as it appears to have become the bible of the ‘knowledge recall comes first’ disciples, while at the same time not of course taking into account the significant and substantial way in which the whole nature of the internet has developed over the past twelve years. It also perpetuates the misbelief that so-called ‘progressive’ education involves 24/7 process-based learning for everyone, and that all students are best suited to academic learning.

At one level I agree with the proposition that having access to an ever increasing amount of information does indeed probably require a greater amount of pre-knowledge, and an even more general awareness of how the world works. But my purpose was to question the sort of knowledge we need to now have at our finger-tips, and to suggest that memorising detailed facts, such as certain dates, was perhaps becoming less necessary? And the other matter I questioned was not so much what should be taught and assessed, but how it should be taught and assessed. I can’t accept that what was referred to in one of the comments, as ‘direct instruction’ is the only, or the best way for all students to learn, or that formal essay writing is the most effective way for all students to be assessed. Curiously none of the academics chose to discuss those challenges.

Well, I must say I’ve learnt a lot about academically-inclined history teachers. And I can’t say I exactly envy them all having to force-feed all those extra future reluctant  ‘I never wanted to do this subject’ non-academic Bacc teenagers with loads of dates, battles and kings and queens. It’s a tough job, but I guess someone’s got to do it.

And here’s where you can buy the T-shirt! Image credit: Redmolotov.com 

A brief history of dates

Until the media start to change the way they portray education it’s going to be hard to start to shift the popular belief that learning facts is still what matters the most. Take this item, which appeared recently in the Guardian online:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/quiz/2012/mar/06/history-dates-quiz?CMP=twt_gu

So how well do you know your British History?

I don’t think it matters to the general population whether children know for a fact that Richard III was killed in 1054, 1301 or 1485*, or if the Battle of Trafalgar was in 1799, 1805 or 1815. And anyway if they really want or need to know it, now it only takes a matter of seconds searching on the Internet to find out. What would perhaps be more helpful is to understand more about why these things happened and what the consequences were, alongside knowing roughly what order they happened in. Meanwhile more emphasis on the changes of lives of ordinary people tends to have more relevance and interest for ‘ordinary’ students than the lives of the Kings and Queens, politicians of their day, and the great battles of their age. Reference to the achievements of more women would not go astray either.

The Guardian item was derived from this report in the Daily Mail on the proposed new National Curriculum History. The content of the curriculum, and the essay as the means for assessment, appears to serve one key purpose – to prepare students more effectively for studying history at Oxbridge. To put it another way, around 99.999% of the population are going to be required to follow a course quite inappropriate for their needs in order that that the 00.0001% will be more successful on entry to university.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting history isn’t important. It’s essential we all learn to understand how to find out about the past to understand the present and anticipate the future. Indeed I suggest history should be embedded in all ‘subjects’, from maths to geography and science to d&t. I also have a theory that the best way to approach history is to study it backwards from the present – so that instead of starting with the Romans (or whoever), the curriculum should start with the relevance of today and deal first with how and why things are the way they currently are, and so on back over the decades and centuries.

“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” (Henry Ford, Chicago Tribune, 1916)

* And anyway, as every schoolchild from the early 1980s knows, the most important fact to remember about Richard III is that he was unintentionally killed (in 1485) by Edmund, “Blackadder”, when Edmund thought he is trying to steal his horse.

Why I’m feeling none too exciTED

http://tedchris.posterous.com/behind-todays-ted-ed-launch#comment

On Tuesday, there was an announcement from TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) about the launch of TED-Ed, its latest initiative/mission ‘to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world’. Sounds great, but of course in reality it’s all about hosting short video clips of teachers lecturing students. So yet another case of ‘New technology, Old Learning‘. Though, to be fair, at least the TED videos, unlike most of the blackboard-based Khan Academy ones, involve the production of a good quality visual experience that makes the content more accessible, understandable and memorable. And they do at least ask the audience questions and promote curiosity. Which is great if you are following an intellectually academic pathway, but not so helpful if you are a different type of learner.

Now I’ve no objection to this as such, provided of course TEDEd continue to fund high production values and not rely on free second-rate contributions from Sunday afternoon wannabe video directors – but given the vast, incalculable number of ‘facts’ there are these days that they are going to need to cover, that seems somewhat inevitable.

But what really concerns me is the extraordinary enthusiasm with which this (and the Khan Academy) is being greeted by teachers, as if it’s the best thing since the invention of the ‘chalk and talk’ blackboard approach to education, and somehow heralds the start of the great learning revolution we’ve all been waiting for since, er.. the invention of the blackboard. So when we’re informed that:

- Video does indeed have a powerful role to play in education.
- It allows great lessons to be shared online with vastly bigger audiences.
- It allows teachers to show things that would be hard to show live in every class.
- It also can allow kids to learn at their own pace (hello, replay button).
- The best length for a video to be used in class is under 10 minutes.
- The best videos often use animation or other visualization techniques to deliver better explanations and more compelling narratives.

It’s as if back in the 1980s I had never thought to wheel the TV set and VCR into the classroom and showed my students a short video clip or programme that in somewhat enhanced the content of the lesson. At the time we also curated a video library that students were able to access and watch anytime, anyplace. Or that I had not been producing short ‘bite-sized’ audio-visual ‘slide-shows’ delivered over college networks for a FE publisher back in the mid/late 1990s. So what exactly is new?

But the real danger, as I keep going on about in this blog, is that the the process of learning becomes increasingly seen and understood by the public, and promoted by the politicians and media, as being about getting students to sit and passively watch knowledge-based video clips produced for free by enthusiastic teachers, followed by a series of computer-generated and marked multiple choice questions to supposedly assess ‘ability’. This may be more cost-effective, but isn’t education.

Meanwhile here’s what Tony had to say about TEDEd in a recent email…

‘Learning is not (just) ‘sage on the stage’ knowledge transfer. And even if it was, it is not linear (press play sit back and absorb with no interaction or changes in direction), and it is different when you record it as it stops being a living experience. It’s not even the difference between a live performance or a film of the live performance, or a film inspired by the live performance – you had to be there. It’s humming it on the way home and trying to play it and deriving new stuff from it, and painting to it and dancing to it.  It’s a starting point in an active process of doing and creating something of your own, not just a cerebral card collection of other people’s ideas.

And even if you can ignore this unforgivable misunderstanding of the learning process, the really evil thing about it is that it completely denies the existence of the learner as a participant with any contribution or difference or value or purpose of their own. How arrogant. It is the worst form of educational imperialism performed as monologues when at the very least it should be a structured dialogue, and at best an improvisation.’

Oh, and it’s good to know it’s not just Tony and me. Here’s someone else who has some some doubts:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.in/2012/03/khan-academy-not-good-pedagogy-and-not.html

Mr Gove’s Splendid New Irrational Curriculum

I wish to make a complaint…

That nice Mr Gove delivered his Christmas presents early this year. Not too early of course, otherwise teachers might still have been at work and managed to find the time to unwrap them before the end of term. In case he missed your chimney, here’s a link to a downloadable copy of the Report of the Irrational Curriculum Review.

https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-00135-2011

So far I’ve not had the time, or to be honest the inclination, to read it in detail, so it’s quite possible I may have missed something significant in the small print. However, the item I was mainly interested was about the future status of D&T. And, as anticipated, the news is that D&T has passed on. This subject is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil. D&T is an extinct subject.

Well, demoted to a so-called ‘basic’ subject anyway, which means, along with ICT, it has been deemed to be of no academic relevance. Which it never was in the first place. Which is why I think that this is actually good news, in that it will free up the good D&T teachers to extend and develop the subject further, beyond the constraints of its Attainment Targets levels and Programmes of Study. And enable all those woodworkers and metal- bashers to get back to what they do best. I’d much rather children were taught good basic craft skills than bad D&T. Meanwhile it’s also good news that Art&Design has deservedly retained its place as a Foundation subject through to the end of Key Stage 3.

But what makes the Irrational Curriculum Review truly irrational is the focus on old-fashioned academic subjects at a time when other ‘white heat of technology’ countries are busy forging ahead with the development of skills for the 21st Century, about which I shall have more to say next year. To now delay UK curriculum reform further until 2014 just gives our competitors another year to move even further ahead.

Defining what knowledge should be taught from 2014 onwards is quite irrational, given that the amount and nature of knowledge changes by the day. What’s really needed is some form of flexible, responsive approach that enables what you didn’t know today would need to be taught tomorrow to be easily introduced.

If D&T has any sense, which sadly it rarely does, it will hastily re-position itself in the market as a purveyor of 21st century skills, delivered in a ‘basic’ cross-curricular learning space, along with IT, Business Education and Citizenship.

But finally, this Christmas, let’s spare a thought for those less fortunate than ourselves, deemed to search amongst the scraps for a stale curriculum morsel of Food Technology, which currently appears to be completely off the menu. For it was the wise Food Technologists who probably delivered the best that D&T ever provided, achieving a successful mix of traditional cookery skills combined with industrial understanding and practice. They will be sadly missed.

Meanwhile, a Merry Irrational Curriculum to one and all!

A cat amongst the pigeons

Well, it’s been an interesting week. Sources revealed that various academic and subject-based associations are meeting together and conspiring to put together a revised Design & Technology National Curriculum in the unlikely belief that it will remain a statutory subject at the end of the current review. Of course for academics and subject-based associations it matters a lot that D&T retains its status, but the reality is that the future of D&T lies more appropriately in a vocational rather than academic context. Meanwhile we all need to accept  that, for a large proportion of children and teachers, the D&T National Curriculum has over the last twenty years been a complete waste of time for all but a few schools where it has been done well. At a time when some forward-looking, non-academically-led vision is needed, the last thing we need is another patched-up version of the past, and another attempt to make a somewhat 19th century view of engineering compulsory for all. And a further danger is that what is submitted as being suitable for an academic National Curriculum will then end up as ‘non-statutory guidance’ for a vocational experience.

The 1989/90 first D&T National Curriculum was seen by many at the time as being over-ambitious, which of course it was, given that not nearly enough was subsequently invested in the in-service training needed to enable a workforce with largely no previous design experience to deliver it. Instead it was simplified, and by the mid 1990s had ‘settled down’ into something more manageable. But that’s where the development largely stopped. At a time when technology started to race ahead, a limited 1960s approach to 3D product design for mass-manufacture was still being offered – the only real change being the introduction of expensive CAD-CAM equipment that tended to limit rather than extend creative design ideas.

While 1999 was not so very different from 1989, 2011 is a very different world from 2001. Back then mobile phones just made phone calls and the internet was an expensive dial-up affair. There were no mp3 players, no sat-navs or domestic digital video cameras. And flatscreen, widescreen, catch-up TV viewed on hand-held tablets was still a wild aspiration. Few had even dreamt of the possibilities of Facebook, Blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Today’s 21st Century children think, communicate and learn in very different ways to their teachers

Sadly Technology education is now hopelessly out-of-date, and the problem is we don’t have a generation of enlightened twenty and thirty-somethings coming through into the profession who are capable of teaching children about things such as collaborative, agile ways of creatively solving complex problems for an unpredictable future, how to design apps or intelligent sensor-driven products and interfaces made from composite smart materials, or how to design and program an App that interacts with its environment. Technology education now needs a framework that enables it change rapidly, not once every ten to fifteen years.

But what made the week really interesting was the sudden appearance of a short, anonymously published, somewhat disruptive pdf document that got rapidly circulated amongst the academics and subject associations still trying to pretend that D&T still had a place in Mr Gove’s flawed academic vision for the nation. The document was simply a collection of responses to the question ‘Should D&T continue to be a National Curriculum subject?‘ Although the responses varied, the overall conclusion was a resounding No!, and that it would be better if it were left to those teachers who were actually able to deliver it well, leaving the rest to focus on something more worthwhile. With Mr Gove extremely unlikely to admit D&T into the sacred academic ‘essential knowledge’ circle, it was suggested that this might be a good moment to try something completely different.

2D&Tornot2D&T? ( .pdf download)

This, as someone remarked, put the cat amongst the pigeons. The response of some of the academics and subject associations to the document was particularly revealing in their haste and vehemence in dismissing the responses as being of no interest or relevance, seeing it as an attack on the value of the subject, rather than the reality of its delivery. At the same time others are unbelievably still trying to define what is meant by ‘design’, as if this was not extensively explored in the 1960s and 70s.  Though after a number of days an increasing number of academics started to come out of the woodwork, so to speak, and admit that the document did make some very important points that needed to be taken into consideration. All of which simply begs the question – How many academics,  administrators and politicians does it take to make a mess of the next National Curriculum?

Meow!

Every Gove Matters

‘Which Mr Gove am I today?‘

At The Schools Network conference during the last week, Mr Gove’s much less controversial twin brother turned up to give a speech.

You can watch the video here (worth it for the first few minutes), then read the official  transcript here, tantalisingly minus the ‘un-scripted’ remarks.

This time there was no talk from Gove of the great philosophers or elitism, and no bible-bashing. Apart from a rather poorly judged ‘spontaneous idea in the back of the car on his way there, off-the-cuff’ moment which was meant to suggest that, along with all us plebeian teachers, he regularly watched and took a great interest in X-factor and Britain’s Got Talent and even knew the difference between Simon Cowell and Gary Barlow, there was little to aggravate even the most disruptive amongst us. We were promised that, using new technologies, ‘children’s learning would be liberated from the dead hand of the past’ -  though one suspects this largely involves regular attendance at the Kubla Khan Academy.  Mr Gove’s much smarter twin brother even went on to  endorse the conference theme that ‘every child has got talent‘, though cleverly without mentioning the implications of the EBacc and the demise of so-called soft-subjects, or his actual belief that of course academic children have more talent than others.

I suspect the two Goves – or there may be even three or four, or an infinite number – carefully match their speeches just a little bit too closely to the views of the particular audience they are addressing (eg a Russell Group University, the Daily Mail), with the result the audiences they are not speaking to at that moment are enraged by what he says. The problem is that this presents an impression of him as series of confusing and contradictory multiple personalities. It is starting to make All Change Please! wonder if one day he might have to try to explain to us that he “is but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.” (Hamlet Act II, Scene ii )

Which would probably reveal something of the limited extent of his D&T experience when he was at school.

O.M.G! (Oh. My. Gove…!)

King Gove the 1st of England

Well it seems that every state school in England is to receive a new copy of  a special edition of the King James Bible from the government – with a brief foreword by Michael Gove…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/nov/25/michael-gove-king-james-bible?CMP=twt_fd

“In a speech at Cambridge promoting the virtues of a classical education, he [Gove] called for a deeper study of literature – “Austen’s understanding of personal morality, Dickens’ righteous indignation, Hardy’s stern pagan virtue” – scientific reasoning, history and foreign languages.

Gove said that society should be more demanding of teachers and students. “We should recover something of that Victorian earnestness which believed that an audience would be gripped more profoundly by a passionate, hour-long lecture from a gifted thinker which ranged over poetry and politics than by cheap sensation and easy pleasures.”

Not content with dragging schools back to the 1950s, it now seems he is setting his sights even further – back to the 1850s.

Meanwhile in the Daily Mail… well, need I say any more?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2066317/Can-Michael-Gove-save-Britains-schools-education-Tory-leader.html

“Michael God now faces an almighty fight to impose his vision of a high-quality education on our country. Everyone who believes in education must support him.”

The Daily Mail doesn’t quite conclude.

However, this is all really just an opportunity to provide a link to this excellent post:

http://mattpearson.org/2011/11/25/the-myriad-confusions-of-the-godly-mr-gove/