Inclusion isn't what the education system promotes

How can it? It was designed in the Victorian period to produce factory and canon fodder: people who could just about read, do their sums so the better to fit their roles in life and to be able to look after their own affairs. Mass schooling to produce a set of skills. Not designed to be about developing the potential of learners, fostering higher-order thinking. And we now compound it by having targets that reinforce the worst forces in education.

Targets mean that schools are rarely concerned with liberating the potential of each child. Instead, teachers are preoccupied with meeting the criteria on which they are measured - the number of children who pass exams. In that environment, children who can't keep up are at best a distraction from the task in hand, and at worst an irritating handicap that a school or a teacher would rather ignore. Meanwhile, the specialised assistance that might help such children is simply not available on the scale that's needed.

This spoke to me because at university today we had a seminar where in one hour we had to construct arguments for and against the proposition that schools are a 19th century invention and no longer serve the needs of society, or something similar. I was on the for the proposition team. I felt we were never going to win the debate: on the whole, asking a bunch of trainee teachers to support a proposition that looks like doing them out of a future job is like asking the proverbial turkeys to vote for Christmas. It was a shame too, because now a whole load of them will also go away thinking that the education system only needs a bit of tweaking rather than thinking more radically. After all a hastily put together proposition is hardly going to shift vested interest especially as I now can think of all sorts of things and ways to put it and the fact that we really didn't have time to nuance: a lot of the against argument was more about what to do with children, how will people learn etc etc all of which is answerable.

I feel a bit concerned because actually the UK government's proposals about personalised learning are, if they are consistently followed through, going to spell the end of the 19th century school and give us community learning centres, personal learning mentors, entitlement-based education on a pull- rather than a push-model. I'm concerned that all these people in there twenties seem unable to get it despite learning about how learning happens and how it is most likely to take place best, they seem more interested in operating the system. Ho hum; why shouldn't they: after all they were largely the ones who benefitted from it as it is. They probably haven't got the experience to imagine it differently.

As I said to my tutor: at this rate I will have to get into management and policy, otherwise nothing will change...

This charming vision of inclusion isn't working | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited: Filed in: learner-centred, education, learning, personalised_learning, SEN