Silencing The Bell

I had been meaning to write something about this place since the little piece that reached the news about 'the school without a playground', which was just another of those mind-boggling examples of how the school system fails to treat pupils like human beings (though Mirinda informed me most vehemently yesterday that you definitely don't call it 'playtime' any more once you get to secondary school, so why is it still called a 'playground'?). So then Dunk just sent me a link to The Fraud Academy with an article about city academies in general, and some comments about Thomas Deacon specifically, and how the pupils will not have breaks between lessons:
"What will the children do in their breaks? Simple. There won't be any. The head, Alan McMurdo, says they can drink water while they learn. Actually, what he said was, "[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience." That's the way these people talk."
I am now a bit concerned that I am not able to ensure that my children are adequately hydrated without access to a qualified teacher to ensure they are doing it properly and at regular enough intervals. Maybe I can just spend the next week finding more and more ridiculous examples of 'school speak'.

Browsing some more on the subject of Outcome-Based Education I came across an article by an australian Professor Roy Killen entitled "Outcome-Based Education: Principles and Possibilities." What I found as I was reading was what I often find, that the words became meaningless and bore no relation that I could find to my understanding of the process of learning. For example:
"The selection of specific outcomes must be done in such a way that the essential conceptual and thematic integrity of particular learning areas is not lost."
It is a perfect example for yesterday's quotation of how education is made to appear so complex that ordinary people cannot help their children learn. It is one of the most common comments that people make to home educating parents; how do they think they can possibly do the job of a trained teacher, who knows all those complex things about how to teach stuff properly. It is all part of a 'mythologising' process that surrounds the school system, an attempt to separate off learning from the rest of life, which is a totally artificial divide. Please pop over to the article on Illich for his thoughts on 'de-mythologising'.
Further down the same article (I did somehow manage to read quite a lot of the gobbledygook) I found reference to someone called Spady, obviously an advocate of OBE, who proposes this list of 'life roles' that should be the outcome of education: "learner and thinker, listener and communicator, implementer and performer, problem finder and solver, planner and designer, creator and producer, teacher and mentor, supporter and contributor, team member and partner, leader and organiser." And it seemed immediately obvious to me that surely small children already do most of these roles, that they do not need to go to school to learn to create, or to plan, or to communicate or to problem-solve.

Today I found myself tidying my unused desk in the living room, purely because Mirinda had been rooting in it and the lid was open and stuff was falling out. And I found an old note book with this interesting quote:
"All over the world school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognised as the institution which specialises in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane and frequently almost impossible task."
It may or may not be from the book "Outcomes Based Education - the State's attack on our children's values" by Luksik and Hoffecker , because the name and publishing details of this book are on the following page. On searching the subject online the quote does begin to make some sense. The theory appears to be that you decide what it is you want your pupils to be able to do when they have finished and design the curriculum and teaching accordingly.
I found a very interesting article: What's wrong with Outcome-based Education?
I guess as so often I am just left bemused by these theories, that seem to gain such ground with educationalists but as always see the student merely as the object of the system, not a human being with opinions and aspirations of their own.

p.s. The purpose of this blog is to enable me to collect the random wanderings of my brain in the hope of making some sense of them and working towards some coherence of ideas.