UK comprehensive school St. John's has apparently decided to abdicate most of its responsibilities and put the pressure for teaching students completely on the parents:
All 12-year-olds at a comprehensive will be told today that homework is being scrapped because teachers have better things to do than mark it.
Dr Patrick Hazlewood, the head teacher of St John's in Marlborough, Wilts, who has already scrapped subject teaching, will not put it quite like that, of course. He will tell them that, to make their schooling more "relevant to life in the 21st century", they are to be given responsibility for "managing their own learning".
Parents, who were told on Monday, are confused because, according to school policy, "regular homework is an essential element of learning and contributes to the development of sound study habits". They are also asked to say if they think their child has been given too little.
St John's sees itself as at the forefront of radical educational change and Dr Hazlewood is testing a futuristic project devised by the Royal Society for the Arts which rejects the notion that a teacher's job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils.
The project aims instead to encourage pupils to "love learning for its own sake" and the project is intended to replace the "information-led, subject-driven" national curriculum with one based on "competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information".
The point of schooling, the RSA says, is to acquire competence not subject knowledge. It believes that exams only impede pupils' progress.
Hoo boy. It's hard to imagine a more complete stew of inane "educational" theories. I'd say it's amusing to contemplate how St. John's will teach students to "manage information" when they're retreating from an "information-led" curriculum, but I imagine the parents of kids there don't think it's very funny. And it's absolutely horrifying to realize that a group of "educators" consider themselves radical, futuristic, and ground-breaking because they've trashed "the notion that a teacher's job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils."
I'm sure the kids are thrilled, though. No subjects, no homework, and they get to grade each others' work! All in the interest of giving students "responsibility" for their own learning, and in forcing parents to teach their children.
Captain Ed has the right response:
...what St. John's proposes is to switch places with the parents. St. John's said that teaching the national curriculum "grinds teachers into the ground," but what good are the schools if they don't teach any specific subjects? They want to teach values and how to get along with others in the sandbox while parents have to force their children to follow a curriculum in the hope that they won't give up like their teachers did.
I have a better idea for the parents of St. John's pupils. Pull them out of the school entirely and home-school them. The administration of St. John's proposes to transform itself into a day-care center for adolescents instead of an educational facility, a pointless exercise except for indoctrination. Parents will find it no more difficult to school their children directly and honestly, and this way they don't have to expose their kids to St. John's surrender ethics.
Update: Uh-oh, now the American students are getting ideas. And silly ideas, at that. How big of wanker do you have to be to bitch about summer homework for a presumably-voluntary honors pre-calculus class? Presumably, this kid knew that the fall class required summer homework when he signed up for it.
And do you even deserve to take the class when three "complex" assignments over the summer push you to the point of litigation?
The teacher gave Larson and his classmates three complex math assignments to do over the summer. Larson said it just wasn't right to get such difficult work over the summer. 'I had no energy at the end of the day to actually do it during my week. I only had one day off each week when I actually came home, and I could not do it then because I was catching up on sleep or just enjoying myself because that's what I should be able to do during the summer,' Larson said.
Excuse me, I just rolled my eyes so hard that I lost a contact lens.
Posted by kswygert at January 21, 2005 09:36 AM