Items to Share: 13 October

Education Focus

• Is Michael Gove Lying to Us All? To be fairer to Gove and Wilshaw and their apparatchiks, try to implement any kind of top-down "vision" through more than two layers of bureaucracy, and the filtering leaves you with mere husks of meaningless but measurable bullshit. It's not confined to education, nor is it the product of active bad faith. Let's stop ranting and acknowledge that it is a real problem which requires hard work to resolve.

• What Sir Ken Got Wrong A real riposte (or "push-back" in the current argot) against some of the seductive vague nostrums of TED's favourite educational guru.

• American education's use of "value added measures" is statistically bankrupt It's not just the US, of course. Mr Galton’s philosophy department | Webs of Substance ...and a similar point.

• Of White Boards and PowerPoints: The Chronicle of Higher Education A similar point to mine here.

• England's young people near bottom of global league table for basic skills | theguardian.com  'England is the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the youngest adults, according to the first skills survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.' It's not as if we haven't been trying. At some point all our efforts seem to have become counter-productive...

• If students can't play, can they learn to philosophize?  No wonder kids in the UK are miserable.

• Educational Jargon Generator sciencegeek.net Amaze your colleagues with finely crafted phrases of educational nonsense!

Other Business

• How We Depend On Our Descendants andrewsullivan.com

• Microsoft Word considered harmful boingboing.net  

• 'The Guardian' Opposes Zombie Rules - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'One of the saddest things about the sorry state of grammatical knowledge in the English-speaking world is that so many people are cowed by zombie rules. They worry that they don’t speak or write correctly, when in truth they mostly use their language perfectly well, and they are intimidated by what they imagine is a coherent and authoritative body of grammatical principles, when in truth a huge proportion of what is commonly believed about the grammar of English is bunk.'