Here it is, the moment we've all been waiting for....educational reform at last. Among the draft proposals is this one : kids should leave primary school ''familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication".

Jesus wept, words fail me......goodbye to reality altogether, then.

This is why a very high proportion of school, college and 'uni' leavers can hardly write a paragraph without it being littered with grammatical errors and basic spelling mistakes

And then trot out the tired old 'I'm dyslexic' though.....

Bumwad of an excuse

Have to say I agree with the most part of your comment but to say dyslexia is a bumwad excuse is wrong. I am dyslexic but can put together a well constructed paragraph and report, just that somedays its more harder than others and forget stupid words and phrases I want to use. I know this is the case and managed to get through uni with it but sometime took me longer than mates to do essays etc.

I know people suffer from this in different ways and strengths, ie like jackie stewart who can hardly write his own name sometimes, but I do believe that people jump on the bandwagon with out being fully tested on the matter by academic facilities.

Aye, but not only that, Talbot,... it looks as though wikipedia might eventually be given equal status with reliable, checkable sources. And even worse, twittering and mindless texting be given official approval and be put over as 'normal'.

When you look at a child at birth and then watch what it becomes after going through the education system, it's depressing enough as it is, never mind this new development.

anyone who just takes anything they read no matter what the source with out further investigating it is a bit of an idiot in my book.

condemnation without investigation is the hight of ignorance

Yes, that's true, Compo, but you would think differently if your teachers had expressly taught you that wikipedia was the way to gather information.

You soon realise that if you go past GCSE education the stuff teachers tell you is just the simplified version of what happens (ie in biology chemistry etc) and should be taken with a pinch of salt, I know some people dont go higher than GCSE but for them to just use any old tosh from the internet as their opinion obviously they are beyond reasoning with. Go further than college in education then your are actively pushed to challange peoples views on certain subjects and how things occur in the world.

In many subjects at uni physics, biology and chemistry there is generally no write / wrong answer (if you can prove otherwise) just a persons opinion that can be proven and is accepted at that moment in time.

Well, I think there's a bit of a difference between being taught a simplified version and being 'taught wikipedia'. One you can build on, the other throws you off the track competely and could lead you to think all 'facts' have equal status
If you think it's OK to teach on these lines up to GCSE, on the grounds that you find out the truth at Uni, then you're denying access to truth to an awful lot of non-uni people. Significantly, that might be just what the Government intends. How long before university courses are toned-down also?

thats not what I said at all and agree that any form of education taught in schools should be and must be peer reviewed which wikipedia clearly isn't. Also when I was at school uni if you used these sources and /or passed them off as your own without referencing them you failed.

I didnt say you find the "truth" out at uni just you learn that its not all black and white, and also think your point about Government intent on people not going to uni is a bit off the mark. As i remember a certain primeminister stating he wanted 70% of people to go to university, which is clearly nonescence and will dilute the teaching further this topic has been raised latley in media and on question time, so i guess you dont watch the tv.

No, I don't watch much TV, it's true, but then I wasn't talking about whether or not the Government want more people to go to Uni. I was talking about the people who won't be formally educated beyond GCSE, who drop out of the system altogether for various reasons, and end up in dead-end jobs, despite often having talent. These are probably also people whom the Govt would prefer not to think very much...God forbid they might start thinking of unionising again......

It looks as though we agree on the points I made in the first place, anyway, except that I wouldn't agree that people are ' beyond reasoning with', just because they accept what teachers tell them. Young children are entitled to trust adults. What needs to happen is that teachers don't tell them about twittering and wikipedia.

I would suspect that children in GCSE education already know more about twitter, wikipedia and facebook than all of the teachers put together. I know that children trust teachers but they trust their parents more surely more reading and proper soucres and knowledge come from home.

But we're talking about primary children...that is the age group the govt is targetting, and that's where the problem lies. They will be encouraged to think that this sort of approach is the right one. Children who fail at school are usually the very ones who don't have books at home or supportive parenting, and even if they have, why should parents have to correct mistakes made at school? Surely that would be a farcical situation?

I think we are arguing the same point here and agree with you about the focus on young children for this way of learning, but lets look at it this way you are correct in the fact that children who fail are "generally" the ones without book and people to guide them in the correct direction, so i am assuming they equally wont have access to a computer if they dont have books. So isnt it a good thing that they are being shown a resource (the internet) that they wouldnt normally have and shown sites like wikipedia to know how to search the topic at hand for them to research later. Usually they will be doing this in the library area of schools that they will have access to the encycolpedia Britannica and other peer reviewed material.

also just to add they said twitter as a form of communication, when you were at primary school didnt you have a pen pal from say france usa etc. Instead of waiting a week for the replied letter to arrive kids can now do this in say 5 seconds. Just a thought like

Well, yes, but it would be better if they were given books
They need to be able to use good quality IT, yes, but I question whether they need it at that age. When the bairn was in primary, whole half days were devoted to teaching IT tasks that could have been taught in 20 minutes if they'd waited until the kids were, say, eleven.

Also, yes, I had a pen friend. (She was called Nicole and lived in Sete )
But writing a letter is a far different proposition from sending a text message. For one thing, you have to stop and think whether a piece of news is worth telling someone about. It looks pretty silly to waste a stamp telling someone you're about to go to Tesco's, which I'm told is about par for the course with twittering. (In other words...communication? What communication...?)

I've never had a penpal.

It always struck me that supposed friendships with people you've never met based purely upon written communication was a bit spactarded.

No, it's fun. Also you could visit them if you liked. Always worth having a contact in another country, for travel purposes

Was that when we were twinned with Sete, Grabey?

I never imagined at the time I'd end up living less than half an hour from there.
I still wonder who let whom drop and why (in the twinning that is).

It probably was that, though I'd forgotten all about the twinning.
I suppose it was dropped for the usual Anglo-French reasons...it takes less energy to be hostile than to be cordiale






Or, erm, so I've always found........

Did your hear about the dyslexic muslim terrorist? He shot Willie Rushton.

The latter works better in a tent I find.

Yes, it's always best to canvas support in a tent.....

The tools are now the masters in schools, one time you were grounded in the basic subjects till even the thickest were able to do basic maths. The advent of the calculator was the arrival of a handy tool, but a tool you could 'question' when you thought the 'answer' didn't look quite right because of your basic knowledge ...the education system is regressing, the education value of the average degree today, must be about the same as a late seventies O level.

I have never heard such drivel in my life, I got a degree in 2003 and a masters by 2005 so by your accounts I only have a 70's a'level give your head a wobble. Anyone who says that exams are getting easier are just wrong, I bet you or even me couldnt do a maths a'level now as we arnt used to doing the equations etc in everyday life.

is there anything more patronising than someone dissing anyone getting a degree today by saying it was harder 30 years ago?

yeah from someone who probably doesnt have one. just because I didnt live back in "the good old days" when teachers used the cane my degree means less

Nail on head Mr Compo. It's always the folk who don't have the qualifications who feel they are best placed to judge the quality of them.

If we were to play by Mr Fireball's rules then most of the more vocal folk with regards the validity of qualifications wouldn't be allowed an opinion.


Although I'm sure that Mr Snowy can throw in a good analogy or two. Maybe if they did degrees in that subject...

Also being able to do maths doesnt make you academically clever, I know people who are shocking at maths and still come out of science degrees etc with first class honours degrees, just becasue your generation know instantly what 7 x 8 is doesnt mean that education standards in your day were any better. Also were does this sort of knowledge really get you in life apart from adding up you weekly shopping or getting a job on countdown, I know its good to have basic knowledge to validate a calculator as humans will always be better than machines.

Do you mean that people come out of school NOT knowing instantly what 7x8 is. Dear God, what are we coming to.

Snowy's itching to get the stoooooodent debate started again!

What I'm about to say is is not a reflection on standards because I'm really not in a position to know what goes on in today's schools and colleges.
But it is to do with over reliance. The day you're hitch hiking though Gambutchistan and a guy tells you its 35000 peckels for a Bactrian Stud and your calculator got fooked when the ritual annual horse race through the streets trampled you and your safari jacket into the dirt, its good to be able to divide 35000 by the exchange rate of 645.20 in your head.
OK that's a daft example but you get my gist. Some things you're better off knowing how to do for yourself and simple arithmetic is no exception. Having said that I'm confident most people can add up a bit.
I'm more concerned about atrocious spelling and grammar but I guess that's natural as those are a major part of my job.

Well done on not picking up on a lot of the aforementioned throughout this thread.

Maybe a small minority of teachers tell the pupils to use Wikipedia as a way of gathering information, but I can tell you the majority will not. There is a drive on at the moment to push pupils to select relevant information from the internet to use in their work, and pupils must be able to understand that Wikipedia is seen as unreliable. I certainly wouldn't use it in my class - Spartacus Schools is far, far better for anything historical and serves the same purpose.

I do laugh at people who slag the education system off, the same people who don't have a fucking clue about how schools are ran today and what is going on in the background. Jesus Christ, history teaching 30 years ago consisted of a teacher standing at the class and saying 'here are 10 facts, write them down'. What use is that to anybody? More factual knowledge? So what? Pupils today are taught loads of transferable skills from a young age; how to analyse, evaluate, judge, compare and interpret. These type of skills are the ones that are valued in the real world. The education system is not perfect, far from it, but to say it is regressing is a total crock of shit.

I think the 'now' v 'then' arguments about education are a bit futile. Some things were better then, other things are better now. Also, different people learn in different ways, so it's all difficult to assess.
I do think 'facts' are important, and it's always been the case that you didn't just regurgitate the facts in an exam, but used them to answer specific questions to show you could evaluate and interpret.
As for the Wikipedia thing, Kolley, I took that from a Government proposal. If the Govt say twittering etc is going to be on the syllabus, it will be. Will teachers have any more choice over that than they did with SATS, which the majority of teachers also disagreed with?
SATS were/are a disgrace for reasons which have been given often enough. Compare, say, French teching under SATS with the old methods. My daughter wasn't taught grammar and vocabulary at all in the way I was, she was merely given lists of phrases to learn. The result is she can't have a conversation in French. I can, though I haven't studied the language for 40 years.

Facts are important, undoubtedly. Without them there wouldn't be a need for history teaching. It becomes a problem when pupils are taught strictly factual and narrative information at the expense of the skills and conceptual understanding that history teaching in particular can bring to a child's education. I agree, it is futile to compare them because we're in a different age, different way of thinking and there are good and bad points for both. By the way, just because the government tells us to do something, it doesn't mean we'll do it. I know teachers who will do the exact opposite just to spite them, because we understand that within 5 years it'll be defunct and another initiative put in place. I certainly won't be encouraging my pupils to use Wikipedia or Twitter.