Small change
Thanks to those who contributed amusingly to my post on the subject of the plane trip back to the UK - now I have two further thoughts as I arrive back in DC. First the immigration officer asks me my job title (North America Editor) and mutters, "sounds expensive," when I tell him. Not so, of course: UK broadcasters are paid small change in comparison to our US friends. I probably earn less than 's driver, which actually I think is a good thing. Keeps us honest, as didn’t say.
But here is a more serious cultural divide issue: I read in the English paper on the way home that a new compulsory curriculum is to be introduced for all British preschoolers - yes compulsory even for private schools. Introduce that here in the US and it would send all Americans into the arms of Ron Paul - but even left-wing Democrats would be worried about the idea of the government mandating an entire curriculum surely?
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Modesty. 'Tis the thing that defines Britishness.
I think it is dreadful that successive Governments have sought to politicise child development and education, especially when they seem to make up their ideas neither based on child development nor on educational knowledge.
I would like to see an end to the National Curriculum. I home educate my child and thank goodness am able to circumvent the National Curriculum.
A compulsory curriculum is not necessarily all bad - it is what it includes that may cause the greater disturbance. It could be beneficial if linked to a vision that is inclusive etc.
Compulsory does not even necessarily mean inflexible. It is extremism in any form that is of concern as I see it. The devil as always lies in the details.
I'm British and live in New York. I always thought that when we have kids, we'd move back for them to have an English education, but if this ridiculous proposal happens I'll be avoiding the UK until they're of school age. How dare the government mandate what happens to toddlers!
Compulsory curriculum for pre-schoolers? Yes, Justin, that's something that would bother this American. I believe parents rather than the government should have the say in that. As to the Democrats, I know they'd LOVE to be able to impose a certain curriculum on pre-schoolers, if they could find a way to perpetually stay in power.
"Even left-wing Democrats would be worried about the idea of the government mandating an entire curriculum"?
_Even_? The big statewide and nationwide curriculum mandates are _conservative Republican_ projects. The whole "standards" movement, imposing set curriculums and lists of facts on schools and teachers instead of letting them use their professional skills to figure out how best to teach and prepare kids in particular situations, is a conservative Republican creation. Massachusetts, which conservatives love to attack, has much more decentralized curriculums than, say, Texas. It's the Republicans in the Florida legislature that banned history teachers from teaching their students that history is based on the interpretation of incomplete and contradictory facts.
Left-wing Democrats might want to subsidize universal pre-school, but I doubt they'd want to plan the curriculum on Capitol Hill.
Of course, US conservatives seem happy to leave private schools out of it -- presumably so they can escape when the NCLB punishes the schools that need the most help by taking away their funding and their students for not meeting impossible, incomplete, and illogical requirements.
Last week we had the PIRLS report which showed a potentially disastrous drop in reading standards over the past 10 years. Key to these findings was the drop in children's enjoyment of reading. Coincidentally, it is almost 10 years since the government introduced its over prescriptive literacy and numeracy strategies.
Within the last few months large scale research carried out by the Primary Review has revealed primary school children's negative attitude towards the structured curriculum, specifically the literacy and numeracy strategies.
Rates of childhood depression are at an all time high and a recent UNICEF report puts us bottom of the developed world in terms of childhood wellbeing.
Despite the evidence stacking up against its policies, the government seems to have an incessant need to control how our children are brought up and what they learn.
I am glad Mr. Webb thinks so highly of Americans to say we would not support such idiocy as cumpulsory curriculum for preschoolers. Yet when you look at how the federal government is taking pride in ruining every other level of education with a one-size-fits all scheme, I must say I disagree.
Perhaps the most outstanding horror in Congress' Gallery of the Grotesque (Education Edition) is the No Child Left Behind Act, which any educational expert not in the pay of the Bush administration will tell you is not even ill-advised, it's actually impossible to comply with. My local school district in Lincoln, Nebraska has found many ways to artfully dodge the most heinous bits of the law, including student-initiated, teacher-cheered walk outs of tests. And yet our congressmen on both sides take pride in having passed this excrement. In the last election, both Kerry and Bush took credit for it. That alone was more than enough reason to drive me toward peripheral parties.
Now they're at it again with higher education. A bill recently passed in the House will give the government broad powers of the accreditation of colleges and universities as well as assessing student learning and meddling with tuition costs--all without giving the schools more money to handle the new costs the bill will incur. It's currently being reconciled with the Senate's version (which is much less onerous). While every higher education expert agrees these measures are bad ideas, our congressmen and women can go back to their districts for campaign season and say they "fixed" higher education. I can only assume they are using the word in the sense of "to neuter" or "castrate."
Given this history of politicians meddling to the detriment of our educational systems at all levels, it is only a matter of time until they try to impose this same sort of standardized assessment nonsense on preschool.
I think that you have really hit upon one of the major differences between American education and that in many other countries. Your readers have previously commented on the degree of self confidence of students in the US vs that of British children. I think that this is in great part due to the emphasis on individuality that entered the American educational system in the 1970's (and, in my opinion, is currently being eroded again).
The second issue, and one that I don't think many of your readers appreciate, is the pure size of this country. What people might want in Texas is not relevant to someone from New York. Imagine how you would react if I suggested that the UK adopt the same educational system as Ireland or France just because you are all in the EU. Due to pure size, it makes no sense for the educational system to be nationalized. It would be burdensome and would not serve the needs of the students, which is the whole point of education.
Maybe not. We Americans do seem to have an odd fixation with the standardized test, for better or worse. Is this not a de facto national curriculum, however limited in scope?
Finally however, I have to wonder what preschoolers need a curriculum for. Tying their shoes?
It wont happen here. Can you imagine the fifteen thousand odd school districts here surrendering that sort of clout, unless they are forced to merge because they are broke?
The hue and cry would be heard from Calais, Maine to San Diego, and Point Barrow, Alaska to Key West.
I agree with a previous poster about One Child Left Behind. All of my friends in teaching state you have to be a contortionist to even BEGIN to comply.
If we have a "universal curriculum", who gets anointed to put it together?
As Graham Chapman of Monty Python would have said when he dressed as a British Army officer, "Silly, just silly!"
In response to #6 abd #8: No Child Left Behind is an attempt to make public schools accountable for some basic measurable performance. Year after year we keep dumping money into the public schools, and they keep getting worse and worse. Opponents of NCLB need to suggest an alternative workable accountability system before complaining. Anyway, if states don't like it, they don't have to accept federal monies for education.
I spent a decade working as a public school teacher in New Jersey, where I learned one thing: the quality of the local schools is almost wholly dependent on the education level and attitude of the parents residing there. "Good" schools are schools with "good" students and parents, not "good" teachers. Flooding dysfunctional urban school districts with money does absolutely nothing to improve the quality of schooling or the opportunities of children. At least NCLB provides a measurable standard and a rationale for the distribution of monies: no results, no funds.
it's an interesting divide that while conservatives traditionally are supposed to fight for individual liberty, and freedom from government, they turn a blind eye on this idea when it comes to gay marriage, abortion, or schools.
For individuals, it is the liberals who take the "small government" stand.
There's a dealignment of the parties happening... In my opinion, the US will have a major political shift on our hands soon.
OK, here is a comment from one American, unabashedly Way More Left than the Democratic Party:
Cumpulsory curriculum for preschoolers is certainly ridiculous, and probably damaging. Children are not little monkeys to be trained to perform for the pleasure or vanity of statisticians. Anything that is compulsory must be measured by its evil twin: standardized evaluative testing.
For goodness sake, educate the educators, and then get out of the way and let them do their jobs. If they flounder or fail, then evaluate the teacher, their preparation and training curriculum, and the quality of support available to the teacher at the site. The micromanagement of the classroom by overpaid administrative professionals whose careers are spent creating one size fits all curriculae, and whose generous salaries redirect valuable resources away from the classrooms, has had predictably disasterous results thus far, and should be abanoned entirely, and not expanded to diminish the quality of education of even more vulnerable young persons.
Did I read right, was that a slam at your American Colleague Anderson Cooper? I actually like him, maybe this some kind of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ/CNN rivalry?
In America, a so-called "cumpulsory curriculum" would be dead on arrival.
But Americans like a challenge: The tougher the better. To that end, its suporters would market it differently. Out would go the authoritarian-sounding "Cumpulsory Curriculum", and in would come something cuddly, like "The Toddlers Reaching For the Stars Act!".
I ask you, what polititian seeking re-election would dare oppose that?
In response to comment #12, who said that you had learned that "the quality of the local schools is almost wholly dependent on the education level and attitude of the parents residing there. "Good" schools are schools with "good" students and parents, not "good" teachers":
I agree, but I guess there are different conclusions to draw from that. My biggest problem with NCLB is that schools have to improve in every grade every year, and get no kind of credit for the background of their students: this year's third graders have to be better than last year's until everyone is acceptable. Schools don't get any credit for improving the performance of individual students or cohorts of students: having this year's fifth graders do better than they did two years ago as third graders. Those stats aren't even reported in the newspapers, let alone used to measure performance, but they matter. It makes a school that consistently helps underperforming students improve look worse than a school that doesn't have many underperforming students to begin with for reasons that, as #12 sensibly points out, don't have much to do with the school or the teachers.
I think it's not sensible to take money away from "bad" schools whose students underperform. Many of those "bad" schools may actually be very well put together, and may actually be doing a great job of educating students who don't have the advantage of highly educated parents. I know that there's a risk in taking student background into account -- a risk of abandoning poor students, immigrants, African Americans, or whatever -- but I don't think closing those students' schools to save them is the best plan, especially based on clunky standardized tests. Surely there's another way, a less impersonal way, a more humane way, a more individualized way. NCLB and the whole school accountability movement comes partly from the same people who say private schools are better because they are more independent and more innovative: why, then, make public schools less independent and less able to innovate?
I thought Malaysian authoritarianism was ridiculous, but even we don't have a compulsory curriculum for pre-schoolers! What on earth is wrong with the UK?