The Brutal Bigotry of Low Expectations

Bagehot has a properly righteous post lambasting teachers who complain that it’s too difficult to teach their charges to read and write and count properly.

A week later, a BBC Radio 4 phone-in programme, Any Answers, featured a pair of state school teachers, both with 30 years of experience, again pouring scorn on the dangerously “academic” bent of the English baccalaureate, and Mr Gove’s related desire to see a more rigorous syllabus in history, involving such things as learning a framework of important dates and events to give children a sense of the essential chronology of British and world history.

Such history is never going to be relevant to many pupils, one of the teachers said. What do you mean by relevant, asked the radio presenter. Well, they are from the Gameboy and computer game generations, they have short attention spans, she replied. You cannot just tell them things, you have to change the format every seven minutes or so—a discussion, then a bit of role play, and so on.