It Couldnt Happen Here Could It - Road to the Middle Class

YOU’D THINK that when you have a centralized Nataional Curriculum, like the British do, that you’d at least guarantee that the flaky and the positive-self-esteem fluff would be kept to a low roar. But that is not the case. British think tank Civitas reports that the National Curriculum is a cess-pool of left-wing fashion.

The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

And that includes physics. Here’s a cri-de-coeur from a physics teacher, Wellington Grey. He writes about how he got out of the private sector because he wanted to teach. Physics. For a few years he was happy. But then something changed.

My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with… something else

Whereas students used to learn about theory and equations now “pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power.” In fact, global warming has just about taken over the curriculum.

On top of everything, the questions asked in the government’s GSCE test weren’t covered in the government’s syllabus specification.

My pupils complained that the exam did not test the material they were given to study, and they are largely correct. The information tested was not in the specification given to the teachers, nor in the approved resources suggested by the AQA board.

But really, when the whole point of high-school physics is to learn the correct line on global warming, who needs a syllabus? Who needs to sit in class?

Just pump out the politically-correct answer, kid, and you’ll do OK.

And don’t think it couldn’t happen here.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

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Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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