When the Old Becomes Startlingly New

At Last, Some Sense in Education

Every so often a piece is published which is like a ray of common-sense amidst a dark night of foolishness.  And so it came to pass on October 31st, 2014.  The Sutton Trust published some research conducted by Professor Robert Coe of Durham University and colleagues. The website blurb on the Sutton Trust reads as follows:

The Sutton Trust was founded in 1997 by Sir Peter Lampl to improve social mobility through education.  As well as being a think-tank, the Sutton Trust is a ‘do-tank,’ having funded over 200 programmes, commissioned over 140 research studies and influenced Government education policy by pushing social mobility to the top of the political agenda.

The title of the research is, What Makes Great Teaching? Review of the Underpinning Research.   The Sutton Trust, a co-sponsor of the work, provided an executive summary of what has become evident to the researchers:

This report reviews over 200 pieces of research to identify the elements of teaching with the strongest evidence of improving attainment. It finds some common practices can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research. Specific practices which are supported by good evidence of their effectiveness are also examined and six key factors that contribute to great teaching are identified. The report also analyses different methods of evaluating teaching including: using ‘value-added’ results from student test scores; observing classroom teaching; and getting students to rate the quality of their teaching.

To improve pupil attainment there are two key factors which must be at work:

• teachers’ content knowledge, including their ability to understand how students think about a subject and identify common misconceptions
• quality of instruction, which includes using strategies like effective questioning and the use of assessment

So, right away we know we are not talking about rocket science.  But with all the mumbo-jumbo and superstitious pettifoggery swirling around education and pedagogy these days, such obvious–even trite–conclusions resemble the explosion of a nuclear device in a very dark night.  So, let’s restate this: in order to teach effectively, teachers must have a good knowledge of their subject–where “good” means a comprehensive understanding.  Secondly, they need to have a good knowledge of how their students think about the subject and what their misunderstandings are likely to be.

Secondly, high quality instruction involves effective questioning (the good, ages-old, time-tested Socratic method) and assessments.

In addition, there are some “nice-to-haves” if pupils are going to attain.  These amount to techniques which increase the student’s engagement with the subject and the teacher.  They are listed as:

• challenging students to identify the reason why an activity is taking place in the lesson
• asking a large number of questions and checking the responses of all students
• spacing-out study or practice on a given topic, with gaps in between for forgetting
• making students take tests or generate answers, even before they have been taught the material

It takes one or more years to teach an aspiring teacher how to teach.  May we humbly suggest that these additional, supplementary techniques could be taught in a couple of months to any with a modicum of aptitude.  Once again, not rocket science.

But the Coe Report does something else.  It identifies pedagogical practice which is worthless, if not harmful.  Lo and behold–what is listed represents the Holy Grail of modern perfidious pedagogy.

• using praise lavishly
• allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves
• grouping students by ability
• presenting information to students based on their “preferred learning style”

The teaching of teachers in our modern world has become little more than quackery and witchcraft.  The quackery involves an tortuous emphasis upon what is false.  The witchcraft involves successive incantations of atheistic secularist mumbo-jumbo–a veritable witches’ cauldron of Marxist ideology, post-modernism, evolutionism, and pragmatism.  We are not at all surprised by the unintended outcomes in today’s secularist government schools.

The Guardian carried the following summary of the research:

Schools need to put more effort into evaluating what makes effective teaching, and ensure that discredited practices are rooted out from classrooms, according to a new study published by the Sutton Trust and Durham University.

The study suggests that some schools and teachers continue using methods that cause little or no improvement in student progress, and instead rely on anecdotal evidence to back fashionable techniques such as “discovery learning,” where pupils are meant to uncover key ideas for themselves, or “learning styles,” which claims children can be divided into those who learn best through sight, sound or movement.  Instead, more traditional styles that reward effort, use class time efficiently and insist on clear rules to manage pupil behaviour, are more likely to succeed, according to the report – touching on a raw nerve within the British teaching profession, which has seen vigorous debates between “progressive” and “traditional” best practice. . . .

The evidence collected by [Professor] Coe also rejects the use of streaming or setting, where pupils are grouped by ability within classes or year-groups. It remains popular in many schools despite being supported by little evidence that it improves achievement. Ability groups can result in teachers “going too fast with the high-ability groups and too slow with the low,” according to the research, and so cancels the advantages of tailoring lessons to the different sets of pupils.

Instead, the best research suggests that teachers with a command of their subject, allied with high-quality instruction techniques such as effective questioning and assessment, are the most likely to impart the best learning to their pupils.

The Return of New Math

Common Core’s Newer Math

A return to mathematical ignorance

By David G. Bonagura Jr.

January 17, 2014 12:00 PM

National Review Online  

[“Common Core” represents an attempt by the powers-that-be to standardise (and thereby control) schooling in the United States.  We have seen all of this before.  Certainly in New Zealand where the State holds a virtual monopoly on education.  The outcome, if Common Core is successful is therefore predictable: a burgeoning ignorance of the general population.  David G. Bonagura Jr. illustrates how this will eventuate, using maths as a case study. Ed.]


The following sentences from the New York Times could have been written today in homage to the Common Core Standards Initiative, the recently adopted national standards for the teaching of mathematics and English-language arts in grades K–12.

“Instead of this old method, the educators would stress from the earliest grades the new concept of the unity of mathematics and an understanding of its structure, using techniques that have been developed since the turn of the century. . . . The new concepts must be taught in high school to prepare the students for the type of mathematics that they will find when they reach college.”

But the century in question here is the 20th, not the 21st. This article, written in 1961, is not about today’s Common Core, but about New Math, the program that was supposed to transform mathematics education by emphasizing concepts and theories rather than traditional computation. Instead, after a few short years of propagating ignorance of all things mathematical, New Math became the butt of jokes nationwide (the Peanuts comic strip took aim more than once) before it was unceremoniously abandoned.

Flash forward 50 years, and Common Core is today making the same promises: “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”

But what makes us think Common Core will live up to its hype? And how is it substantially different from New Math, as well as subsequent math programs such as Sequential Math, Math A/B, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards? These have all failed America’s children — even though each program promised to transform them into young Einsteins and Aristotles.

The problem with Common Core is not that it provides standards, but that, despite its claims, there is a particular pedagogy that accompanies the standards. And this pedagogy is flawed, for, just as in New Math, from the youngest ages Common Core buries students in concepts at the expense of content.

Take, for example, my first-grade son’s Common Core math lesson in basic subtraction. Six- and seven-year-olds do not yet possess the ability to think abstractly; their mathematics instruction, therefore, must employ concrete methodologies, explanations, and examples. But rather than, say, count on a number line or use objects, Common Core’s standards mandate teaching first-graders to “decompose” two-digit numbers in an effort to emphasize the concept of place value. Thus 13 – 4 is warped into 13 – 3 = 10 – 1 = 9.

Decomposition is a useful skill for older children, but my first-grade son has no clue what it is about or how to do it. He can, however, memorize the answer to 13 – 4 – but Common Core does not advocate that tried-and-true technique​.

Common Core’s elevation of concept over computation continues in its place-value method for multiplying two-digit numbers, which is taught in fourth grade. Rather than multiply each digit of the number from right to left, Common Core requires students to multiply each place value so that they have to add four numbers, rather than two, as the final step in finding the product.

Common Core’s most distinctive feature is its insistence that “mathematically proficient students” express understanding of the underlying concepts behind math problems through verbal and written expression. No longer is it sufficient to solve a word problem or algebraic equation and “show your work”; now the work is to be explained by way of written sentences.

I have seen this “writing imperative” first-hand in my sons’ first- and third-grade Common Core math classes. There is certainly space in their respective books for traditional computation, but the books devote enormous space to word problems that have to be answered verbally as well as numerically, some in sections called Write Math. The reason, we are told, is that the Common Core–driven state assessments will contain large numbers of word problems and spaces for students to explain their answers verbally. This prescription immediately dooms grammar-school students who have reading difficulties or are not fluent in English: The mathematical numbers that they could have grasped are now locked into sentences they cannot understand.

The most egregious manifestation of the “writing imperative” is the Four Corners and a Diamond graphic organizer that my sons’ school has implemented to help prepare for the writing portion of the state assessments. The “fourth corner” requires students to explain the problem and solution in multiple sentences. How all this writing helps them with math is yet to be demonstrated.

Hence Common Core looks terribly similar to the failed New Math program, which also emphasized “the why rather than the how, the fundamental concepts that unify the various specialties, from arithmetic to the calculus and beyond, rather than the mechanical manipulations and rule memorizations.” Common Core may not completely eschew the “how,” and it may not be obsessed with binary sets and matrices as New Math was, but it is likely to lose the “how” — the content — in its efforts to move the “why” — the concepts — into the foreground.

The problem is not that students, including those in the primary grades, should not be presented the basic concepts of mathematics — they should be. But there is a difference between learning basic concepts and expressing the intricacies of true mathematical proofs that Common Core desires. Mathematical concepts require a high aptitude for abstract thinking — a skill not possessed by young children and never attained by many. What will happen to students who already struggle with math when they not only are forced to explain what they do not understand, but are presented new material in abstract conceptual formats?

All students must learn to perform the basic mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in order to function well in society. Knowing why these operations work as they do is a great benefit, but it is not essential. And in mathematics, concepts are often grasped long after students have mastered content — not before.

In trying to learn both the “why” and the “how” in order to prepare for the state assessments, students will not fully grasp either: They will not receive the instructional time needed to learn how to do the operations because teachers will be forced to devote their precious few classroom minutes to explaining concepts, as the assessments require. The “how” of the basic operations, which need to be memorized and practiced over and over, will be insufficiently learned, since Common Core orders teachers to serve two masters.

The result is simple arithmetic: Instead of developing college- and career-ready students, we will have another generation of students who cannot even make change from a $5 bill, all courtesy of the latest set of bureaucrat-promoted standards that promise to save American education.

By giving concept priority over content, Common Core has failed to learn the history lesson from New Math. Students instructed according to Common Core standards will ultimately know neither the “why” nor the “how,” and we will eventually consign these standards to the ever-expanding dustbin of failed educational initiatives, until the next messianic program is unveiled.

And, of course, this doomed educational experiment, like its predecessors, has a high cost: our children’s ability to do math.

— David G. Bonagura Jr. is a teacher and writer in New York. He has written about education for Crisis, The Catholic Thing, The University Bookman, and the Wall Street Journal.

Pitiable Johnny

He Can’t Read, Write, or Do Maths

For years we have been told by the education establishment that the New Zealand government education system was one of the best in the world, and that pupils were getting a first class education, highly ranked in the OECD tables.  We have always taken such claims with a big grain of salt.  Now we hear that New Zealand kids are ranking well down the scale in maths–one of the subjects in which we were supposed to be doing really well.

This from the NZ Herald:

Education Minister Hekia Parata is considering a return to basic arithmetic for primary school children in an attempt to lift New Zealand’s faltering performance in maths.  New Zealand 9-year-olds finished last-equal in maths among peers in developed countries, in a survey published in December. Almost half could not add 218 and 191 in a test.  Officials analysing the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test found there were “significant proportions” of Year 5 children who could not add or subtract simple numbers.

The problem persisted into high school, where “there are still students who have difficulty with the very basics such as knowledge about whole numbers and decimals”.

Now why might this be?  Because government schools and teachers have had it drummed into them that memory work for pupils is destructive.  What it the result?

The findings are supported by a local study which found most older children at an Auckland primary school were unable to do basic arithmetic.  Year 5 students at Fairburn School in Otahuhu took more than seven seconds on average to answer each single-digit multiplication question from their times tables – such as 8×4 – and 12 seconds to answer each division question.  Year 6 students, on the verge of intermediate school, took about six seconds on average for every multiplication question and 10 seconds for division.

There is an argument that teachers are not to blame.  They have been forbidden to teach properly.

The former educational psychologist, 82, said the teachers were not to blame for the poor initial results as they succeeded as soon as they were given the right teaching methods.  “Teachers are scared off because they hate to be seen doing anything which smacks of rote learning … That tends to put them off any sort of memorisation at all.”

He said current maths ideology promoted understanding ahead of memorisation but children could not understand maths concepts if they had no knowledge to work with. “We’ve got to get the stuff into the kids’ heads.”

The oh-so-stupid modern methods want pupils to understand mathematical concepts, but in a vacuum.  There is no numeric mental framework with which to understand more abstract concepts. 

An academic from Auckland University weighs in.  We can expect to get the good oil from a fully qualified mathematics lecturer.  Peter Hughes

. . . who played a prominent part in introducing the changes criticised by Dr Rainey, said it was true that many students reached high school without numeracy skills and Dr Rainey’s system would help them to learn their basic facts.  .  .  . 
He dismissed worries that New Zealand children could no longer do long multiplication or division as irrelevant, as history had moved on.  “Would anyone really believe that being able to work out 45,438.5 x 65 is important? In the real world, calculators and computers are doing this rote work, leaving people, hopefully, to think, rather that spend time on tedious labour.”

All of which begs a question, Think with what?  When there are no mathematical facts, no data in the mind thinking will be inevitably vacuous.  Imagine an argument being made that auto-mechanics no longer had to be taught how the internal combustion engine was designed and functioned, since computers now did most the diagnostic work on cars.  Mechanics can now spend time thinking.  But about what?  If they have not learnt in the first place how cars are designed and how they function in the first place, what have they go to think with. 

Or what would be think of an argument that because modern airliners are flown substantially by computers, pilots don’t need to know all the details about aeronautics and how planes actually work.  They can sit on the flight deck and think, rather than doing “tedious labour”. 

Yet this is precisely the kind of inanity being inflicted upon our pupils in government runs schools.  

Educators and Education

Modern Imposters and Gargoyles

What the the role and calling of a teacher?  One Trent Kays deigns to give us ordinary mortals the answer.  Trent describes himself as a “writer, teacher, provocateur, activist, consultant, and rhetoric & writing studies PhD student” so we know we are waist deep in the good oil here.  

For some reason Trent’s answer to the question on the role and calling of a teacher has appeared in the NZ Herald.  Why?  No idea.  Maybe the paper thought that his opinions on the matter were of significance.  There is probably some warrant to this notion.  His own promotional page at the University of Minnesota website claims, “He often writes about society, technology, culture, and higher education issues, and he is in the process of founding a new venture dedicated to practical and progressive ideas for changing education.”

Great stuff.  So what progressive pedagogical revolution is about to descend upon us?  Same old, same old.  The same tired old cliches that progressive and post-modern liberals have been prattling on about since Michel Foucault first said, “Well, I’ll be darned!”

Here is Trent in full cliched flight:

Every semester, I enter my classroom with almost zero knowledge of my students’ interests. So as a rhetoric and writing teacher, I ask them to employ that which is most beneficial to them in their lives: discourse.  I want to know what they think, why they think it, and how they see themselves in the elegant mess we call the world. Indeed, it becomes partly my charge to help students understand how their perspectives are relevant to my course.

Discourse.  The most beneficial thing in the lives of students.  Discourse.  What on earth is that?   It’s just the opinions and ideas you happen to have about the world.  So the role of the teacher is to create an environment where people are liberated to express freely what they really think.  Trent again:

The worst thing a teacher can do is tell students what and how to think. According to Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, this type of teaching borders on intellectual violence upon another, and where teaching is meant to be a liberating affair, it becomes one of systemic oppression.  In many circumstances, I tell my students the classroom is a space for learning. It is a space to explore and discover ideas without fear of being dismissed or lambasted.

Great. Diversity.  Freedom.  So we can reasonably expect that some poor student in Trent Kays’s class might feel emboldened to say, “I think that Osama bin Laden was the greatest revolutionary hero of our generation.”  Some of the students would hiss (at least inside), but Trent would be at his encouraging best.  “Great.  Thanks for sharing.  What makes you say that?  Good.  Good.  What you think is important.  Go on–tell us more.”  This is a high class, state-of-the-art, post-modern teacher at work.  

You can imagine how the students feel affirmed and encouraged.  This is the essence of true education, according to our high flying expert:

I tell them their perspectives, life experiences and ideas are equally important to mine and the subject material at hand.  After hearing this, many sit astonished at the idea their opinions are actually going to be heard. Unfortunately, I hear from students all too often that their opinions, perspectives and ideas are secondary to their teachers’ or even not valued. I find this preposterous. Education is about enlightenment and not the subjugation of one idea for another.

Whoops.  Problem!  Old Trent has slipped into a bit of old fashioned Marxian stereotypical pablum.  Folks like Jacques Derrida have been complaining for ages that if a teacher puts his ideas and beliefs upon a student it is hegemonic–it is a tyranny of one mind over another.  It is subjugation. It is exploitation.  But that is only just your opinion, Trent.  Great that you can express your ideas and perspectives.  Good on you.  But it’s preposterous to think that your (teacher) idea is more important than mine, right.  Your Marxist opinions about teaching are themselves a form of subjugation and exploitation because you are trying to impose them upon your students, and upon us (via your article).

But this is nonsense from another perspective as well.  What would happen in Trent’s classroom do you think if a poor student were to have the temerity to opine that homosexuals were perversely immoral?   One imagines that pretty quickly Trent’s classroom would become a place of “systemic oppression” on the unfortunate holder of such an outrageous opinion.

Trent would then be directly contradicting his own professed position.  For he goes on to tell us most definitely that

There is no objective truth because objectivity does not exist; there are only degrees of subjectivity. An opinion without evidence can be truth as much as fact with evidence can be a falsehood.  Facts are socially constructed, and they only exist because humans are willing to define and name them. This act of naming almost always positions one thing as the opposite to another. The bizarre form of dialectic at work here doesn’t negate the issue that humans construct, name and set these things in opposition.

Once again Trent thinks he has escaped the Cretan paradox.  He has not.  Is the assertion, “There is no objective truth” objectively true, or not?  Clearly Trent acts and speaks as though he believes it to be objectively and universally true–he even attempts to offer a rationale for it.  But alas he fails.  He is hoist on his own petard.

Or, again,

But to say that a student isn’t entitled to their opinion is to devalue the student. It is to suggest that the teacher’s way is the right way, and the student is less than the teacher. These are hardly correct.

Trent is oh-so-politely saying that the opinion that “the teacher’s way is the right way, and the student is less than the teacher” is wrong!  That’s precisely what he is also arguing that a superior and enlightened teacher cannot and must not do.  Trent clearly believes his “opinions” are objectively true and must be systemically and violently imposed upon his students.  Ah, yes, as Orwell pointed out, “all the animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

We acknowledge that Trent’s views are wildly popular in most modern education circles–which is to say that most pedagogy now resembles a grotesque post-modern, Marxist gargoyle.  It is, so internally contradictory that it will end not with a bang, but a whimper. 

>The End of Education, Part #4

>The Gradual Descent into Meaninglessness

There is another destructive and devastating trend in state schools: psychobabble has entered pedagogy and is taking over. Children, we are told by state educators, need to be affirmed.

Years ago we attended a “prize” giving at a small primary school. It lasted quite a long time. Why? Everyone was awarded a prize. There was a prize for the biggest smile; for the neatest hair; for helpfulness to the teacher; for kindness–you get the picture. The rationale was that it was vital to the well-being and development of the child that no-one was left out, everyone be affirmed. Disappointment was banished from the school.

Again, you ask why? Clearly this is not reality impinging upon the classroom. Once again, state schools see themselves as preparing children to be model citizens in our Western secular democratic societies which are, as we have seen, pluralistic and multi-cultural. Since nothing can be excluded, philosophically or religiously, everything must be accepted.

These days a few political leaders in the West (Angela Merkel and David Cameron) have been bold enough to declare that multi-culturalism is a tragic failure, a mad experiment that has not worked. Its ramifications do not work in state schools either.

Meaningful learning cannot get far if “A is not non-A” is ignored. Modern education must affirm both “A” and “non-A”, since to speak of “non-A” is implicitly discriminatory and negative. Pupils that http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1903386594&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrembrace both “A” and “non-A” must be told they are wrong, incorrect if they are to be educated. But that does not accord with the “affirmation narrative”.

In recent decades it has become common to regard children as fragile, emotionally vulnerable things who cannot be expected to cope with real intellectual challenge. It was in this vein that in April 2007 UK teachers were instructed by (Education Secretary) Alan Johnson that they should routinely praise their pupils. According to guidelines, teachers ought to reward children five times as often as they punish them for disrupting lessons. . . . Increasingly the therapeutic objective of making children feel good about themselves is seen as the primary objective of schooling.
Frank Furedi, in Robert Whelan, ed., The Corruption of the Curriculum, p. 8f

The New Zealand curriculum has swallowed this psychobabble hook, line and sinker.

Learning is inseparable from it social and cultural context. Students learn best when they feel accepted, when they enjoy positive relationships with their fellow students and teachers, and when they are able to be active, visible members of the learning community. Effective teachers foster positive relationships within environments that are caring, inclusive, non-discriminatory and cohesive.
“Effective Pedagogy”, The New Zealand Curriculum, p.34.

When this is applied to particular subjects, heuristic chaos results. Take history. “I think Hitler was not a bad chap,” says one student. “It is good to have structure and order.”  Teacher: “Well said. We must care about Hitler’s memory. We must not discriminate against him. We are all human beings and we must pull together. Excellent point.”

An exaggeration? No. It’s that bad. In both the UK and in New Zealand, the subject of terrorism has recently been thrust to the fore of history curricula. Materials to help teachers cover this topic have been hastily assembled.

This material being promoted presents terrorism as its victims as having, broadly speaking, equal points of view. After all, “new history” is about “value relativism”–all views are equal since history is all a matter of opinion. A pack . . . contains 13 sources. Four of these are about Osama bin Laden, including one source that provides extracts from his own words across a range of topics and another source that transcribes his words about the September 11th attack. These two pro-Bin Laden sources are “balanced” only by a fairly neutral biography of Bin Laden and by a copy of the FBI Wanted Poster for him.

Across the other nine sources two are pro-US, two are anti-US and four are, broadly, neutral. The final source provides 16 quotations from the world press on the third anniversary of 9/11. Eight of these press reports come from the Islamic world and are largely hostile to the West. The other eight are from Europe and Asia. Five of them are critical of the US. The US press is not represented.

What is clear is that these teaching materials include substantial evidence to justify terrorism.
Chris McGovern, The New History Boys, Whelan, op cit., p.63f.

This idiocy is a direct result of the psychobabble of affirmation, affirmation, affirmation. Objectivity means that anything is acceptable to someone. Affirmation means that any views must be accorded respect.

Teaching history has become “New History”. Wonderful. The achievement of “skills” rather than knowledge now drive the subject.

Teach what content you like. It really does not matter. “New History” is not reliant upon any specific content.
Ibid, p.67

It is important to realise that this is not a sudden development. This process of “using” the subject of history (or social studies) as a pretext to build “model citizens” has been gathering steam for over forty years. There can be no turning back now. The West long ago relinquished the one meta-narrative that gives a framework to reverse this drift into irrational meaninglessness. Just how meaningless becomes clear when perspectivalism rears its ugly post-modern head.

The current UK National Curriculum document in the UK requires that history be taught “perspectivally”. Every perspective is equally valid.

. . . children must be taught history through four “diversity” perspectives–“the social, cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity of the societies studied”. In addition, perspectives on “experiences”, on “ideas”, on “beliefs”, and on “attitudes” relating to each of men, women and children must be taught–“the experiences and range of ideas, beliefs and attitudes of men, women and children” in the “periods and societies studied”. This amounts to another 12 perspectives. . . .

Although the National Curriculum document does not always use the word “perspective” there are, in effect, 24 of them. . . . The obsession with “political correctness” in most of these perspectives is clear. Take any landmark personality or event in history and start applying these perspectives to its teaching and we see how the familiar and famous can easily become the unfamiliar and the uninformative. . . .

These perspective act as a kind of filter. It a battle is taught it is as likely to be through a “social” or “gender” perspective–conditions on board HMS Victory or the rule of women in World War II munitions factories–than it is to be about military events at Trafalgar or El Alamein. When children learn about Elizabeth I they are as likely to learn about how she dressed and went about her daily life as they are about what she did. The unfolding narrative of what happened across the Tudor period does not have to be covered.
Ibid., p.71f. Emphasis, ours.

There will be some who argue that this will be a pendulum phenomenon. The irrationality and idiocy of New History will generate its own counter reaction, and things will move back to a meta-narrative of our “unfolding story”. Don’t hold your breath. What story would that be? The West in its headlong rush to deny the Living God has been forced into a relentlessly sceptical position where meaning is what we say it is.

But the relentlessness is not finished yet. Meaning is what “we say it is” has now gone still further. Meaning is now what I say it is. Hence the emergence of constructivism–the latest pedagogical fad, which is the most consistent end-point of scepticism yet seen. Since truth is radically relative and perspectival, it is also individual. Therefore, each pupil needs his or her own personally constructed curriculum. (Incidentally, we believe this is why the teaching profession lusts after having the Internet available in classrooms.  It has little to do with teaching and educating.  Rather, its attraction is that it facilitates students to construct their own “thought-world”.) 

We will address this in the next piece in the series. Meanwhile we reiterate: state schooling appears irretrievably lost. Given the philosophical, religious and cultural forces arrayed against the state education system, it would appear the entire edifice can only go one way–from failure to ever greater failure.