Sunday, September 02, 2007

Colorado school bans tag

The Puritan instinct or fear of litigation? Probably both. A sad limitation on the exercise and experience of children, however. Maybe the adults who enforced this ban were the ones who were easily caught as kids. I myself was so hopeless at all games that nobody bothered catching me!

A Colorado Springs elementary school is banning the game of tag on its playground -- after some children complained that they'd been chased or harassed against their will. Assistant Principal Cindy Fesgen of the Discovery Canyon Campus school said running games will be allowed, as long as students don't chase each other. Fesgen said two parents complained to her about the ban, but most parents and children didn't object

Two elementary schools in the nearby Falcon School District did away with tag and similar games in 2005 in favor of alternatives with less physical contact. Officials at Evans and Meridian Ranch elementaries say that encouraged more students to play games, and helped reduce playground squabbles.

Colorado Springs schools are not alone. Schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., Spokane, Wash., and Attleboro, Mass., have banned tag at recess. A suburban Charleston, S.C., school not only banned tagged, but outlawed all unsupervised contact sports.

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Private schools in Britain show up government schools

The schools system in England is at risk of drifting into "educational apartheid" with different examination systems for pupils in state and independent schools, according to a leading head teacher. Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, was responding to renewed calls from private school head teachers for the GCSE to be ditched in favour of more rigorous examinations, such as the IGCSE (International GCSE). Her comments were made as it emerged that fee-paying school pupils passed nearly six out of ten of their GCSE exams this summer with a grade A or A*, nearly three times the national average of 19.5 per cent. GCSE results for independent schools revealed that 92.9 per cent of pupils achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including maths and English, compared with just 63.3 per cent nationally.

Martin Stephen, head of St Paul's, the top-performing boys' private school in The Times GCSE league tables, said the gulf between the two suggested that the GCSE was no longer fit for purpose. "The GCSE is seriously flawed. It is trying to be all things to all people, but it is failing. Getting five good [A* to C] GCSEs has effectively become the equivalent of passing a school leaving certificate, yet the system is not doing this job very well because 50 per cent of pupils fail to get these grades," he said.

Ms Langham, who is head of Wakefield Girls' School, one of the top 50 girls' schools in the UK, argued against more private schools adopting the IGCSE, saying that it would create further divisions between state and independent schools. She said: "The IGCSE is not the answer. Independent schools should be part of a credible, national examination system and it should be the same as the system in state schools. Otherwise, you get educational apartheid and I don't agree with that. If there are concerns about too many pupils getting A grades at GCSE, we should all work together as teachers in the private and state systems to find a joint solution. "Students in private and state schools are both going out into the same world when they leave school and they deserve the same education."

Ms Langham's comments followed claims by examination boards that standards were falling in private schools. Results for private schools, compiled by the Independent Schools Council, published today, show that 57.4 per cent of GCSE exam entries were graded A or A* this year, with 26.8 per cent of entries awarded an A* grade, up from 26.5 per cent last year. The national A* average was just 6.4 per cent. In 231 independent schools, every pupil achieved five or more A* to C grades. In a further 159 schools, 95 per cent or more achieved this standard.

Source





Addle-headed literature curricula in Australia

By Imre Salusinszky

Last month's Australian Literature in Education Roundtable, organised by the Australia Council for the Arts, came up with many suggestions for raising the profile of our national literature, past and present, within the education system. And on the eve of the roundtable, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop took one great leap for mankind by announcing the Howard Government would endow a new chair in Australian literature at whichever university put forward the best proposal. At a stroke Bishop increased the number of such chairs by 50 per cent.

But while the state of Oz lit received a decent airing, there was much said at the roundtable that applied to the teaching in our schools of literature generally. As university specialists have ceased to be included on the state boards of studies, which shape curriculums and reading lists, two related developments have occurred. First, the cart seems to have overtaken the horse, with assessment and outcomes assuming precedence over content. Second, curriculums have come to be couched in a formidable bureaucratic jargon, an edu-babble that is inaccessible to mere mortals including, I suspect, most teachers. Here is a passage from the introduction to senior English in the South Australian curriculum:

"Through the study of English, children and students learn that language transmits cultural perspectives, including gender, ethnicity and class; and who or what is or is not important as they think, imagine, challenge, remember, create and narrate.

"They learn how language shapes meaning and reality, what this means for issues of identity and interdependence, and how it is used for a range of purposes in different contexts. Learners need to know how language is constructed and how it is used by different groups in society to shape power relations."


And this, from Western Australia's senior literature curriculum:

"In the literature course students develop skills and understandings of textual production and reception through reading practices that foster the close analysis and interrogation of textual languages and constructions. In addition to expanding their imaginative and intellectual experience, students develop and extend their social, cultural and textual knowledge through a greater comprehension of cultural meaning-making systems.

"Through critical engagement with a range of text types and cultural and historical contexts, students develop their understanding of different approaches to reading texts. This enables them to ask questions about the nature of literary text and how literature is defined by, and functions within Western cultural history.

"Such questions include the reasons why cultural value is assigned to one kind of text and not another; the changing nature of what is valued as literature at different times and in different historical and cultural contexts; and the ways particular social groups are given or denied the power to define what is 'literary' and what is 'not literary'."


It would appear, to put it bluntly, that senior-level courses in English expect students to be able to theorise the process of reading before they have done any. The sorts of inquiries outlined in these documents are perfectly appropriate to the graduate seminar room, but to place them at the beginning of a literary education is like starting arithmetic with advanced calculus.

It seems a particular style of literary theory that enjoyed its historical moment in universities in the 1970s and '80s has returned as farce in the curriculum prescriptions of the Australian states and territories. I am reminded of the way the Finnish system of dexterity training known as Sloyd got taken up in Victorian state schools in the '50s and ended up being plain old woodwork.

There are a couple of significant verbal giveaways in the documents quoted above. One is the use of interrogation, a word that spread through the humanities in the '80s and '90s like privet. When you interrogate a text you are apparently doing something far more important that simply reading or analysing or asking questions about it: you are standing in the middle of the road of ideas, raising your hand as some benighted Western cultural juggernaut rolls towards you, and announcing: "No further!"

The other giveaway is the grammatical slippage evident in "the nature of literary text". It suddenly appears as if literature has become indivisible, like milk. The view implied is that the particularities of author, style and imaginative vision, which arguably distinguish literary texts from each other, are secondary to an ideological impulse that unites and transforms them into an undifferentiated porridge.

The first point to be made about these kinds of curriculum statements is that they are, in all likelihood, harmless. I have little doubt teachers in high schools largely ignore such guff and simply get on with introducing their students to set texts without too much cultural theory clogging the gears.

However, it is the extent to which the texts are chosen to illustrate the frequently tendentious statements in the syllabuses that is a worry. As my friend Peter Holbrook asked in The Australian last month, would there be a glaring lack in a syllabus that simply declared students would be "introduced to some of the most rewarding and influential writing of the 19th and 20th centuries in English"? Such a syllabus would generate a reading list based on notions of quality, or at least canonicity, rather than illustration of appropriate contexts. My fear is that we have become so devoted to interrogation that we are embarrassed by concepts - sorry, constructs - such as genius or greatness.

Senior secondary studies in English enjoy an advantage right now that is unprecedented and may not last: the reading bonanza among younger children being driven by their enchantment with Harry Potter. We will not leverage this advantage by making disenchantment the object of high school literature courses.

What should that object be? Quite simply, literary experience, for its own sake. Until students have undergone at least the beginnings of an inductive survey of poems and stories, they are substantially under-prepared for the deductive assertions of literary theory that await them at university. And only such a survey can form the beginning of an appreciation of specifically literary attributes such as style, structure and influence.

By beefing up the literary content of secondary English courses and elbowing some of the more noisy curriculums out of the way, we would leave students and teachers freer to go wherever a dialogue with the text - which is very different from an interrogation - may lead.

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