Two plus one is many!
Two articles from the Guardian and a promise:
The first article is about the importance of intellectuals standing up to authority and making the hidden facts of power known - "Yes, the world is better without Saddam - but it is not better with the military occupation of Iraq, with the rise of Islamist fundamentalism provoked by this very occupation."
The second is about how religion is bad. Bad!
The promise: for my teaching course I am now undertaking a piece of research based within my institution, the famed City of Wolverhampton College. It, or so I am currently planning, will involve questioning whether teacher autonomy has been reduced by the centralisation of educational control into government hands and the effects of this on the institution and the students - the institution taking on a 'commercial model' and referring to students as 'customers', and the students being ever more tightly constrained within instrumental courses which are designed for the transmission of content into the children's sad little heads.
If all this is pulled off I expect it might be interesting for the purposes of this weblog. So I will inform you of my progresses!
posted by News is Good at 6:13 PM
2 Comments:
If only I were in a similar position, being able to do the research of the kind you'll be undertaking at Wolverhapton. It's very much something on my mind, as you know, how 'the University' justifies itself (or not!) by means of the internal values of the subjects it represents. Alas, I am in no such position, and will not be for quite a while, so I shall be watching your progress with a keen eye, and perhaps a monacle.
In my most recent learning journal, I write "Students seem to often be little more than the sum of their outcomes, which is absolutely the wrong way to do anything."
I think that the problem with education lies with our view of learning - something we can force into people's heads as long as the knowledge is extremely structured and tested for often. This is called 'the transmission model', teacher as a radio, learner as another, trick is to keep the kids focussing on the right wavelength.
Therefore, a rigid top-down structure from government to classroom to every single possible learning interaction is imposed.
No. The learners themselves must be what start each action, and the government must heed them. Or at least that is what I say.
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