Education

In just about 43 hours time I will be teaching my first class of Secondary Religious education pupils. It'll be a year 10 class and it'll be Mohammed, the first of a series of lessons on Islam. And as I've been observing and planning in the lead up to this I have found myself thinking that how we are being encouraged to think about learning is at odds with the system we are being called on to operate and perpetuate. I just found an article which expresses it well.

getting more learning out of our present schooling system was "like trying to get the Pony Express to beat the telegraph by breeding faster ponies." An analogy like this alerts us to the ancient nature of the mass schooling and its growing obsolescence due to slowness to adapt. Perhaps tinkering with the system is like getting the stagecoach to go faster by strapping roller skates on the hooves of the horses, when what is needed is a new kind of transport altogether, such as a railroad.

It turns out, I suspect, that I am an educational heretic.

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