HOW DIVERSE IS THAT?
How confusing that on one hand, education minister Michael Gove professes to value educational diversity and innovation, and on the other hand his department seems to be determined to stifle those pedagogies that best embody it. Only two years ago he was talking about 'enabling choice and diversity', with the suggestion that his free schools would be free from the constraints of the statutory national curriculum.
Speaking to the London Evening Standard about Montessori and Steiner schools in 2009, he said, 'They are educational movements that explicitly want to do things differently. They engage the passions of teachers and parents. They tend to have the results in the end, both in character and ability, that parents would want to see in their children ... If we are about enabling choice and diversity, it is only right to allow both movements to become essentially state-funded schools.'
So why now are we seeing a proposal that Montessori and Steiner school qualifications, which are equivalent of a minimum Level 4 and 5 diploma respectively, will be seen as invalid once the new Level 3 diploma for the Children and Young People's Workforce comes into play?
Both pedagogies, which are highly valued for their humanistic approach elsewhere in the world, have already been compromised by the rigidity of the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. They now face a further fight to protect their teacher training.
The most dangerous thing that any government can do is to stifle educational diversity and innovation. Supportive rhetoric doesn't mean anything, Mr Gove, unless you back it up with grassroots reality.
Wendy Ellyatt, The Unique Child Network
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VICTIMS OF TELEVISION
The news story on under-fives' use of the internet (10 March) adds to recent findings on children's increasing addiction to and disturbed behaviour resulting from computer-game usage. It throws a very long shadow over the feature by Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Smith extolling the virtues of television for young children ('TV times', 17 February). This uncritically assumes televisual technology to be an societal 'given', effectively making us into victims, rather than creators, of modern culture. Commercialised culture harms young children in many widely acknowledged ways, but do we 'by-stand' and feebly accept it? Of course not! Young children need mature adults to take full responsibility for the cultures of experience to which their young are exposed. The incursion of televisual technologies into people's lives is now being robustly challenged from many sources, and parents are increasingly making principled, informed decisions not to expose their children to what are inhuman, body-less and soul-less technologies, when children's prime task is learning how to be human in real (not artificial or technologised) human relationships.
The article spuriously invokes 'scientific research' in a narrowly mechanistic way - for example, that 'watching a screen ... involves complex cognitive processes' - as if invoking impressive-sounding neuroscience in this way somehow legitimises what is, in terms of developmental appropriateness, a highly problematic experience for a young child.
The article also assumes that technologically and programmatically controlled human learning is preferable to 'real-world situations'. Young children certainly need protecting from sensory overload; but to move from this sensible proposition to making an argument for technologically controlled artificial sensory experiences for children is surely the non-sequitur to end all non-sequiturs!
If we impose televisual technologies on young children whose brains and bodies are still in the throes of rapid development; if the kinds of arguments proposed in this article are taken seriously, then we are headed for a crisis in the human condition, the gravity of which it is impossible to over-estimate.
Dr Richard House, Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University
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