CONGRATULATIONS ARE IN order for the vociferous members of Britain’s teaching unions. We all know they’re against Michael Gove, the current education minister. Perhaps not everyone knows they’re also against facts and the learning of them.
The Guardian, that Camp Bastion of Progressive Education, reports one teacher at the NUT’s annual conference as objecting ‘to the lists of facts he said the new national curriculum required children to learn by heart. Pupils need a “concept of what evidence is and how to interpret history”, he said’. I’m sure this specimen is not atypical in believing that ’facts’ are inessential to education and the memorising of them is positively wicked.
That’s odd, because you would normally assume that failing to learn any facts is the same as being ignorant, and the purpose of education is to eradicate ignorance. But there’s the core of modern progressive education for you: ignorance is knowledge. And quite how you can interpret anything from evidence when evidence is fact-free I don’t know. Perhaps that’s a skill teachers learn at training college.
With teachers like that and the attitudes they display (as well as the way curricula have been programmed) I know exactly who to blame when I am confronted with students who know nothing about the nineteenth century, for example. If they have heard of Mary Seacole (because she was half black and therefore politically correct before her time) they certainly have no recall of the Crimean War. Nor of the Napoleonic Wars and their figures – Nelson, Napoleon, Wellington, etc. Recently I mentioned the importance of 1815 to one of my seminar groups. Only one student had a vague idea this was something to do with a battle rather than a railway station. I think even a first-year student of English Literature should know about Waterloo. In the eyes of the modern educational establishment that probably makes me terribly old-fashioned.
Clearly evidence is fine as long as it doesn’t involve facts, because they’d get in the way of a pupil being able to interpret a subject. And that is the case, isn’t it? For progressive education is ultimately not about education in the sense most of us know it, but about indoctrination and social engineering. Remove knowledge and the ability to reason and you can implant anything in the minds of young people.
Hence in Geography they are taught about global warming and the undesirability of nuclear power. In History the evils of the slave trade and the racist fiction of ‘Black History’ feature as much as the Industrial Revolution, as does, for some reason, the Civil Rights struggle in America. Pupils will be exposed to the horrors of the World Wars but not the great evils of the communist regimes. Hitler will feature as the archetypal dictator (because he was right wing) and Stalin will be let off or ignored (because he was left wing).
So let’s congratulate the PE establishment for having succeeded so far. They’ve had a pretty clear run over the last forty years or so. Gove’s plans are flushing out the whining offspring of the soixante-huitards of the educational establishment, with their hysterical demands for civil disobedience and their intellectual nullity. Congratulations, comrades. The more you scream for revolution and the desire to deprive children of knowledge the more you reveal yourselves for what you really are.
