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David Starkey on the History National Curriculum
David Starkey claims that "history" for the typical secondary school pupil today means little more than the Tudors, Hitler and Stalin. In its focus on process, he claims, the National Curriculum has no room for the excitement of history, the sweep of narrative or the drama of character. It also offers our children no sense of a map of time. Rootless and directionless, they do not know where they come from or where they may be going. Above all, they have no sense of what has made their own world and their own country. His analysis points to a generation that is handicapped by a lack of knowledge of broad cultural trends and influences, and an education system that increasingly seems to devalue the teaching of knowledge and the imparting of a solid foundation which can be the basis for judgement, interpretation, and the assessment of a body of knowledge.
Edward Steele on Widening Participation in Higher Education (The Guardian 17th October 20020
Evidence of declining standards in Australian higher education jumps out all the time, claims Edward Steele. It's a process he traces back to the 1980s, when educators down under began emulating their British counterparts in refashioning a system to meet the new demands of the middle-class masses who, for the first time, wanted a slice of the action and demanded "academically irrelevant, vocationally oriented courses". "The idea that anybody can and should be part of higher education life is... a nonsense that has corrupted our system," he says acidly. Many universities, he adds, have become "glorified high schools" as a consequence of the wider trends in Australian post-secondary learning. In his view, universities ought to enrol no more than 5% of a country's population - if that - with the rest packed off to lesser tertiary institutions to acquire their lesser skills.
However great the economic bounty might be for Australia, Dr Steele cannot help but feel that something more valuable has been lost, not only for individual students but for the culture at large. Although he doesn't come right out and say it, his sentiments are clearly with the hundreds of Oxford dons who stormed the Sheldonian Theatre six years ago in protest at that university's decision to inaugurate the Said Business School. Dr Steele doesn't much care for business schools on campus, either.
About 17 months ago Dr Steele, then an associate professor at the University of Wollongong, near Sydney, aired his concerns on the subject of grade inflation in an interview with a local newspaper. In the interview, he lamented what he described as his own institution's "soft-marking" procedures. He said that he, too, had been pressured to upgrade the marks and grades of some of his own honours students. And still the letters and emails of support for his various positions just keep tumbling in. Fellow Australian academics, and some from abroad, "largely agree with me," he says. "They know what I'm talking about, even if they don't want to get personally involved."
Grammar and Thought
We use language to compare, describe and plan. Without names for different shades of color, it is possible that we wouldn't notice the differences in them. Language is a vital part of the way we think. In our western culture that prizes abstract, analytical reasoning, we need the skill of abstract,
analytical language. In one experiment with chimps, teaching them a few words improved their ability to reason - only when they learned the words "same" and "different" were they able to perceive those concepts.
The grammar of syntax is the finer shades and nuances that divide complex language from simple name-words. It is adding "s" to cookie to make it more than one, differentiating between "I think" and "I am thinking," and being able to say "might" and "would." Higher levels of reasoning require that the mind be able to understand these differences, and it is necessary for a child who is college-bound. Being able to "describe, compare and categorize with language is what leads to our ability to think in analogy." Elaborated codes allow language to get more specific. Only a language that includes elaborated codes can combine the thoughts, "A woman brought flowers. They
are on the table. She lives next door," into the sentence "The woman who lives next door brought the flowers that are on the table."
Yet complex grammatical syntax is the most likely part of language to be left out. The ability to grasp it seems to be limited to the first 11 years of life, and requires the child to have an adult to model it and give the child a chance to talk themselves. It can't be picked up passively from TV. And children whose mothers fail to use complex grammatical syntax don't pick it up.
The result of less time with parents and more time with TV and same-age peers has been a new generation of students who can't effectively put their thoughts into words, can't understand literature in the classroom, and have trouble with higher level maths. The most noticable problem is that students are losing the ability to write because writing well depends first of all on speaking well - a child can hardly put words on paper that he can't put together in his head. Clear writing demands the ability to organize thought. Charlotte Mason's use of narration is an excellent way to build
this ability.
Leslie Noelani
Dumbing Down the SAT Stanley Kurtz. www.nationalreview.com/contributors/kurtz032502.shtml
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