Shock horror - children find school boring!

According to amazing research carried out at the behest of the Scottish Executive, many kids find school boring. It is an outrage that our fine young people should ever have to endure bouts of education ennui and the blame for this dreadful state of affairs lies squarely with puritanical pedagogues posing as professional educators.

Under the European Commission for Human Rights, every schoolchild is entitled to fun-filled lessons, but human rights watchdog Amnesty International has proof that Scottish street children are still being told to open books, read the relevant chapter, then do the questions. Worse, anecdotal evidence — from pupils who wished to remain anonymous for fear of victimisation — suggests some students are sat in serried rows and taught in a didactic manner. This discredited teaching methodology, whereby the learner is expected to passively absorb knowledge handed down by the master, may have been good enough for Socrates, Plato and Archimedes, but is simply unacceptable to the sophisticated youth of today. It is too much to expect Generation X-Box to have the patience, nay tolerance, to listen to some idiot with a degree drone on about events that happened hundreds of years ago and ergo have no relevance to their mobile-phone-centred lifestyles.

There is a communication disconnect between teachers and students; teachers still speak as if pronunciation matters, with many staff haughtily failing to even attempt to perfect the nasal whine so beloved of teenagers. The average age of teachers is 47, but this is no excuse for not moving with the times.

It is high time that the teaching profession realise it is part of the entertainment industry. Pioneering classroom comic geniuses who taught me in the 1970s were ridiculed and denied promotion for being “characters”. Who could forget Coco the Chemistry Clown, in whose eyes health and safety rules in the lab were for wimps, mere impediments to learning, thus he allowed us the academic freedom to flick globules of mercury across the benches to each other? Thanks to ludicrous rules regarding life and limb, today’s chemistry teachers find themselves in a legal straitjacket as they struggle to amuse their adolescent audiences.

Local authorities must endeavour to employ teachers who can put "fun" into funky lessons. Running a teacher recruitment campaign at the Fringe Festival would be a start. Truly, what funster would accept a pithy Perrier Award when a supply teaching gig at Wester Hailes is on offer? To be serious, the call for kids to have more say on what and how they are taught is an acceptance that discipline in the classroom has broken down. It is a quick-fix dose of educational methadone. Society should be the arbiter of what is taught and teachers should decide how they teach it. Youngsters don’t have the maturity to fathom what is important and what is frivolous.

Or am I boring you?

20 October 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/columnists.cfm?id=1216612004

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