I'm not sure what C.S. Lewis would have made of the rather ridiculously named International Baccalaureate, which is fine for all-rounders but a terror at Diploma level for those who excel in one area but are pretty hopeless in another (like Maths).
One thing I do know about I.B., which my girl is taking, is that it reduces school reports, traditionally the source of magnificent irony and skilful wordplay, to a mélange of meaningless phrases like "reflection", "inquiry", "exploration" and, oh my lord, "care" and – pardon me while I puke – "compassion".
And they say they're trying to encourage children to be creative!
As always, Lewis is a splendid antidote to the tendency towards the abolition of thinking. Here he is, from the essay"Our English Syllabus" , stressing the importance of specialisation while causing us to question educational standardisation by focusing on the personal, "power" element which inevitably underpins it:
"Do not be deceived by talk about the narrowness of the specialist. The opposite of a specialist, as you now see, is a student of some one (sic) else's selection."
One thing I do know about I.B., which my girl is taking, is that it reduces school reports, traditionally the source of magnificent irony and skilful wordplay, to a mélange of meaningless phrases like "reflection", "inquiry", "exploration" and, oh my lord, "care" and – pardon me while I puke – "compassion".
And they say they're trying to encourage children to be creative!
As always, Lewis is a splendid antidote to the tendency towards the abolition of thinking. Here he is, from the essay
"Do not be deceived by talk about the narrowness of the specialist. The opposite of a specialist, as you now see, is a student of some one (sic) else's selection."
4 comments:
What have you got against compassion? I would like to see every child learn it; however, I suspect it can only be taught by example, not as an academic subject.
Absolutely. And how can anyone hope to imbue children with a value when it's devalued by being codified in a prospectus alongside loads of meaningless jargon?
as with everything it's in the execution. Some schools do it better than others. But at least there is a realisation that being a complete person is about more than cramming to get A's in exams.
The cynical part of course, notices in our secondary school that the civic mindedness is done partly for grades and partly because it looks good on CVs to get into good universities. And then perhaps there may be a few students who feel seriously personally motivated about a particular goal or charity.
Does it matter that much? As long as some people are helping others they may get a taste for it and not turn into scrooge's later?
Nothing wrong with putting 'compassion' into the curriculum, but the problem is the current education practice, such as "outcome-based learning" which has been widely publicised at the local universities at the moment. This means when you have "compassion" as one of the objectives of your mission, you have to find ways to demonstrate it whether the students have achieved this goal. Then everything starts to be very phoney or pragmatic...
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