"If you tell people not to think about elephants, they will think about elephants. And, in US schools, Jesus is the elephant." Last Friday, the TES published my longest US feature yet: "The Godless Delusion". The piece muses on the fact … Read More
The 'lack of wanting to be clever' problem is something anyone working in classrooms will encounter. One of the things I learned to ask disaffected students was: what would you have to sacrifice if you suddenly did really well, academically speaking? This is … Read More
I am an avid notebooker. Last week I re-read my 2009 notebook and found this. Back then I didn't blog, so I thought I'd share this week. Seems even more relevant after Gove's speech yesterday. At the focus group tonight … Read More
Yesterday I explained why inaccurate use of the term "educational inequality" makes me uneasy. But then I started thinking about a gross educational inequality that is hardly ever mentioned, and it made me madder and madder. Here is the school building … Read More
The phrase 'educational inequality' has crept quietly into England's edu-policy lexicon and displaced the previously much-used phrase 'educational disadvantage' - but we need to be careful. There is a crucial difference between the two and I'm concerned that the first is … Read More
In a recent email chain with the ever-thoughtful Harry Fletcher-Wood he asked me to write something short, building on a comment I'd made on Twitter, about why I believed in education. First I pointed him to David Foster Wallace's speech about education, … Read More
I am a big fan of useful and practical. But I was reminded today of Simon Blackburn's fabulous defence of university philosophy departments written in the Times Higher Ed magazine in 2009. He's completely and utterly right in all that … Read More
One of the things guaranteed to annoy me is when people assume that poor children all have low aspirations, and that 'choice' is something only preserved for the 'middle and upper class' children. Life just isn't that simple. Reviewing more works … Read More
In 1873, the first ever Kindergarten opened in St. Louis, Missouri. It was going to solve all the problems of poverty. Sound familiar? Leader of local schools, William Torrey Harris, had decided that the best way to civilise 'slum children' and … Read More
When people point to the greater number of students now getting 'top grades' in their exams and then they say this shows how Britain has 'dumbed-down' I am urged to remind them of the statistics on literacy. For example, the … Read More