Phonics Again.

We are so wonderfully fortunate, are we not, to have all those experts at the Department of Education? Sensible people working hard to decide upon the correct methods by which the kiddies across the country should be taught?

All infant and primary schools will need to tear up the Government's advice over the past seven years and prepare for a new framework.

It will tell teachers to concentrate for the first few months on getting children to decipher text using structured phonics - the way that letters or groups of letters represent the sounds in words.

That’s one of the problems with having a centralised decision making system. It can (does?) sometimes make the wrong decision. A further problem:

He endorses the "synthetic phonic" method which was rejected by the Department for Education, but kept alive by hundreds of schools which have ignored the Government's advice.

If everyone had been good little boys and girls and done what the Man in Whitehall (who knows best of course) dictated then we wouldn’t actually know that the new system didn’t work.

Clearly the Dept of Eddukashun needs to go and fortunately this is part and parcel of the only sensible reform available of the entire system. Abolish it and the LEAs and give the money directly to parents via vouchers and let a thousand different methods flourish. Yes, of course there will be mistakes, thefts and frauds, but will it really be worse than having an entire 7 year cohort taught (or not taught actually) via a completely useless method as a result of a political faction gaining power at the centre?

Of course, I would go much further. The problem with all such centralisation is the same. The EU deciding that all jams across the continent must be made with an approved list of ingredients, the UN, via the ILO, insisting upon one particular form of workers rights.....we need continued experimentation in such things, need the innovations that only the trial of thousands of alternatives can provide, with markets noting which are the more successul and thus spreading them. 

It isn’t who controls the centre, nor what the centre decides should be controlled or in what manner, it’s the very existence of the centre which presumes to dictate behaviour which is the problem.

(Yes, there are areas where it is necessary, but they are few and far between and they don’t include reading methods, jam or working hours.)