What’s Wrong With the Education System.

A new report on the failure of the education system. Too much education and not enough play. Seriously:

Children are being denied the chance to develop at school through
"imaginative play" because they spend so much time learning to read and
write, according to Government-funded research.

The other stunner they found is that boys and girls play in a diferent way:

The study found that children rated playing "castles"
as their favourite activity. But there were sharp differences between
the way boys played and the roles girls adopted, with early evidence of
sexual stereotyping. Boys liked to take on "action" roles such as
policemen, robbers or super heroes, while girls chose domestic,
"nurturing or maternal" roles.

The boys drew
pictures of fighting and depicted scenes where people’s heads were
chopped off while the girls’ art focused on princesses and "mums and
dads".

Quite shocking I tell you, quite shocking that the patriarchalism of our society should have been learnt so young.

4 responses

  1. John East Avatar
    John East

    I’m also shocked that two generations of social engineering aimed at producing effeminate boys and butch girls has failed so badly. Maybe they will have to resort to chemical methods to ensure the children act in ways the sociologists deem they should.

  2. I showed the article to my wife. Her reaction is that they could have found this out for free if they’d just asked people who work with children of this age years ago, before the government ‘experts’ forced more formal methods on young children.
    My wife is a Norland nurse and has worked with nursery and infant children in independent schools for over 15 years. She used to head a nursery department of a school, but she could not now as the regulations (imposed by the government even on the independent sector) stipulate a qualified teacher. This is despite the fact that she is explicitly trained for children of this age whereas teachers are not. Teachers are apparently required because the curriculum has changed to require more formal teaching – along with all the attendant form-filling (which means my wife wouldn’t want to do the job nowadays anyway).
    Keep the government out of education (and especially the vacuous Ruth Kelly).

  3. John East Avatar
    John East

    HJHJ, We seem to have something in common. My wife worked as a volunteer in a playgroup for 18 years, and finally felt obliged to give up, along with one of her colleagues of 23 years experience, when Nulabour funded junior schools to enter the 3-4 year old market. Life was suddenly made very difficult for the parent funded playgroup that my wife helped to run. It was descended upon by social services and the local education dept., reams of after work form filling and reporting requirements were imposed, and they were stopped helping the children with basic reading and maths. Only play was allowed. It would appear that the educational establishment has more difficulty turning out illiterate 16 year olds when they have been taught to count and given a grounding of phonics between the ages of 3 and 4.
    The final straw was when my wife was told that she couldn’t take the children to the toilet without a second adult present to guard against sexual abuse.
    I’ve never been able to work out if this sorry tale occurred because the state was trying to eliminate private competition, or whether the whole thing was ideologically driven. A bit of both maybe. The education ideologues have at least learned one lesson. Give us your children before the age of four, and we’ll indoctrinate them to our way of thinking. Now where have I heard that before?

  4. Remittance Man Avatar
    Remittance Man

    Just another example of this government demonstrating that it can’t find its collective butt with both hands.
    Didn’t The Great Leader announce he was appointing a “Play Tsar” a couple of years back when a similar report was published? If he did, wtf has this “toy king” been doing at our expense since then?
    Why do I keep getting mental images of angry crowds, burning torches, barricades, corpses swinging from lamp posts?
    RM

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Tim Worstall

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading