Education Minister on “a mission that sometimes floats free of the evidence”

Unfortunately, when it comes to the old education reform palava, the UK and NZ seem often to be living parallel lives.

There’s fierce opposition at the moment to UK Education Minister, Mr Gove’s curriculum tinkerings, but as The Guardian pointed out “Like many politicians, Mr Gove prefers the disaster narrative” and will forge ahead no matter what the actual evidence or need.

Or as The Guardian editorial so eloquently put it “Mr Gove is a man with a mission that sometimes floats free of the evidence.”

I think he and Hekia would get on famously!

Anyhoo, I found this satirical blog post about Gove’s changes to the UK curriculum, and thought it was worth sharing.  It is on one hand completely hilarious, and on the other hand … <sigh>.

Among the changes being introduced are a requirement for more interminably monotonous tones to be used by teachers in design and technology lessons, as well as subjects such as history and geography to include a lot more soul-destroyingly dull lessons full of irrelevant facts that young children will learn to hate by heart.

According to a Whitehall source:

The introduction of pointless tedium into the national curriculum will prepare state education children much better for the kind of monotonous work such as shelf-stacking and burger flipping which probably awaits them when they leave school.

Boredom and monotony will become the standard in our schools – and this combined with spiritless, fed-up teachers will ensure all schools will be falling over themselves to become academies or free schools just to escape the mind-numbingly tedious national curriculum we’ve introduced.

Key skills such as whinging and carping in many subjects have been brought forward in a child’s school career, so primary-age pupils will be given a lot more annoyingly dull tasks for them to complain about from a much younger age.

Read the rest of this blog post here.

Thank goodness NZ still has its great, flexible curriculum.  So, maybe we are no so parallel after all.

At least for now.