I wrote a week ago about the sad decline of British education as a result of the Qualification and Curriculum Association’s evisceration of rigor and identity from the national curriculum. It seems like whenever I criticize the Brits I invariably encounter glimmers of hope over the next two weeks. For example, I ripped on London Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone for nearly an hour - the next day Boris Johnson declared his candidacy. Not only is Boris an energetic and genuine representative in government - a rare thing - he’s the only Conservative who can beat Livingstone. As I said, a glimmer of hope for one of the world’s greatest cities.

Three bits of hope surfaced after putting that article on the site. Emily Henderson, young staffer or intern [Oh no, another intern, Andy!] at The New Criterion’s ArmaVirumque blog detailed with frankness and accuracy the decline of British youth culture. She lamented just a day after my post the results of a recent survey:

The British youth are now more likely to abuse drink and drugs, have underage sex, join gangs, and get into fights than other European kids their age, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Henderson gives an excellent crash-course on the state of British youth culture for the non-Anglo. She adds that:

The government seems to be on a never-ending blind run from the causes of the problem. The creation of the welfare state has allowed yobbish individuals (people who spend their lives doing very little) to lie back and let the government give them a house, unemployment benefits, and child benefits. It’s now more profitable to be a single unemployed mother than to be married and have a job. In short, it has allowed for responsibility for an individual to be taken off of his shoulders and placed onto the State. If I crash whilst manically driving my illegal motorbike down the road, the NHS (National Health Service) will take care of me.

Sage analysis, that. A government that removes legitimate, positive national identity from its schooling in lieu of pushing a synthetic guilt-culture, a government that rewards the delinquent in roundabout ways - and does it all with a smile - is in need of deliverance.

Though I enjoyed Henderson’s take on the British youth - especially because it aligned well with my own experience - others didn’t. Something about no good deed going unpunished, I’d like to think. She admits in the follow-up that not all British youth are hollow charvers, though I question the sense of anyone who thought her analysis applied to every Briton under 18. If criticism like Henderson’s is present, there’s hope. [… though I think we’re about to see an explosion in “British guilt” over the next generation.]

Then Baroness Greenfield, director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, made my week. How? She called instruction based on student “learning styles” - the categorization of a student as a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner [”Vak”] - utter nonsense. The Baroness said:

“Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity that exists in the brain. It is when the senses are activated together - the sound of a voice is synchronisation with the movement of a person’s lips - that brain cells fire more strongly than when stimuli are received apart.

The rationale for employing Vak learning styles appears to be weak. After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that Vak, or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits.”

If she keeps insisting on the use of common sense and data, the Baroness may find herself losing support in the education community. Check out the instructive array of comments [25-30] on this issue at Joanne Jacobs’ site. Commenter Dierdre Mundy relays the following:

I have found that different learning styles come in to play with memorizing Latin endings…

The visual learners do fine looking at flashcards and occasionally copying things out….

The audio learners NEED to chant and do their flashcards out loud….

And the kinetic learners like to walk while they memorize….

I wish I had the time and strength to debunk that one today. At least Baroness Greenfield’s statement was widely publicized. It should renew - at least temporarily - some debate over an unsound, ineffective practice that is taken as fact in education. Of course, every Dierdre Mundy in the world has some worthless anecdote that backs up The Grand Theory of Learning Modalities and Inter-Neurological Optimized Pedagogy. It’s going to be a long, hard battle to take on all of them, but again - there’s hope.

And, if you don’t think this education-rabies isn’t a problem and isn’t widely accepted by seemingly-serious scholars, check out RightWingProf’s article about encountering a pseudoscientific study on exactly this topic. It’s a problem that the scholar [Ph.D., nonetheless] spent time on such a weakly-reasoned, poorly-constructed study; it’s a bigger problem that almost everyone bought it without thinking twice [or once?].

The third glimmer of hope came by way of The Grauniad, oddly enough. Someone - and let’s hope it’s actually a large group of someones - had the backbone to let the UK know that not every kid in school is gifted or talented:

Ministers are overestimating the number of exceptionally bright pupils in Britain’s schools, the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children will be told this week.

What?!? Not every child is a budding genius?

Research shows that teachers charged with picking out the top pupils feel that far too many are labelled as ‘gifted and talented’ and that the government was wrong to recommend that 10 per cent were picked out in each school, a total of 800,000 across the country. Instead, between 2 and 5 per cent of children should be classed as ‘gifted learners’, cutting hundreds of thousands of pupils already placed in the top group.

The effects of identifying such a large percentage of the student population as gifted and talented are numerous - you can make your own list by asking the usual: “Who? How? How much?” The teachers seem to have a handle on the impracticality of the 10% push. There’s hope.

A few Britons have stuck their stiff heels in the dirt as the sled darts down the hill. I suppose if the younger generation can reflect on itself, an education researcher is willing to call a spade a spade and teachers admit that the average student is, by definition, average, it’s not quite as bad as I thought.

Related articles:

• The Sad State of British Education
• British Secondary School / GCSE Physics is in Trouble
• Beating the Dickens Out of Britain’s Students