Tuesday 16 November 2010

A spot of deja vu

I was going to write an entry about it but this article says it so much better than I could.(Not only do I get tetchy when I'm not well, I lose the power to set out a reasoned argument.)
More and more children ....... are being diagnosed with some sort of educational special needs. ..... Sweet Sophie won’t sit still? Must be attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Badly behaved? Could be conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder  -  syndromes I thought were made up until I read about them in the newspapers.

This is exactly what I’ve come to expect from an education system still crippled by trendy but utterly hopeless teaching methods.  Let’s take the dated dogma first, which boils down to a wrongheaded, one-size-fits-all belief that all children are equal and that, from the brightest to those with serious disadvantages, they should be educated together. As a consequence, many brilliant specialist [centres] have been forced to close down.
Rewind to 1983 and the Education Act that stemmed from the Warnock Report. It led to my switch from Remedial teaching to IT (which then suffered the same fate as 'special needs' and became 'cross-curricular' with in-class support rather than a separate subject).