THE DUMBENING

Retired prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple, in an article about the Islamic recruitment of converts within British prisons, observes:"

... a life without boundaries is a life of torment, it is without form, a void."

Maybe public education has something to do with this lack of boundaries – kids do spend the best part of their formative years at school:

And there is a connection between all that and the miserable failure of Britain’s schools; illiteracy here is beyond belief, disruptive behaviour is normal, exams and degrees have been debased and ministers have just had to concede that social mobility — once the pride of British society — has declined in the past 30 years and has actually fallen since Labour came to power. The education secretary has come up with the contemptible sort of gimmick that passes for a political initiative these days; she has promised (at a cost of £27m) to give every baby a book bag, containing volumes like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, to encourage parents to read with their children.

Okay, so education in England's messed up? We don't have problems like that here in Australia. Well, take education in Labor governed Western Australia as an example:

In a far off time, in the confederacy of Oz, teaching and learning coexisted in an artistically symbiotic relationship. Then the experts came along. No, not experts in educational theory, but experts in the art of Isms – scientific rationalism, reductionism, Fordism, Taylorism, sophism, postmodernism and above all, obscurantism.They took their Isms and applied them to the art of education, and lo and behold, outcomes-based education was born. The Ismistic parents cooed and gloated over their cleverly conceived offspring. In fact, the Ismites within one state of the confederacy hailed this birth as a watershed in education, a paradigm shift, and the dawning of a brave new era. “Let us devise a Curriculum Framework” they shouted with glee. The teachers, however, hung their heads in despondency, knowing that a dark beast of mammoth proportions and with great deceptive power had been created.

And so, Outcomes Based Education was born. The Dumbening – there is no such thing as essential knowledge – has begun.