Getting education wrong, and right.

Attention to the school curriculum in the UK has produced recommendations for changing the system. Change is good, but it appears that the proposals may eliminate important aspects of formal education and fail to provide life skills as well as fail to give factual knowledge.

Two articles from the Economist outline the problems:

In praise of facts, The British government’s latest crack at reforming schools is yet another step towards contentless learning

and

Please, sir, what’s history?, A missed chance to make hard choices about what children should learn

It is unfortunate that the attempt to improve education has failed to retain the benefits of the industrial approach, has failed to reflect the emotional as well as the cognitive aptitudes and has failed to learn from the proven methods of educators like Pestalozzi – the “founder of modern education” and Steiner who seeded Waldorf schools.

Also relevant is How to build a better education system – lessons from around the world