Basil Venitis declares Eton is the best school on Earth, a paradigm for all schools to follow. Eton, is a British private lyceum for boys. All students board. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI. Eton has a very long list of distinguished alumni, including twenty former prime ministers. Traditionally, Eton is the chief nurse of England's statesmen and the most famous school in the world. No other school can claim to have sent forth such a brigade of distinguished figures to make their mark on the world. Etonians include myself, incoming Premier David Cameron of UK, and my very good friend Mayor Boris Johnson of London.
Education, Education, Education was Whigs' number one priority. They promised that standards would rise in every school; that teachers would be given the support they needed to maintain discipline; and that every child would be given the tools to succeed. Over the last 13 years, those promises have been broken.
Venitis asserts that a real public school is not defined by who owns it, but by universal access and accountability to the public for results. It matters little whether public schools are run by a school board, a group of parents, a teachers union, a company, or a church. Once public money flows to private schools, they are no longer really private. The government's hooks will be firmly set to brainwash and dumb down the kids, in the name of public accountability. Vouchers open the door to government control of private schools. Private schools are already regulated by every State, but they are not as regulated as public achools. If the voucher plan is ever embraced in a big way, we can expect elaborate criteria for determining which schools may accept vouchers.
Public schools dumb down the curriculum, in teaching pseudoesteem over knowledge, in challenging Graecoroman notions of truth and virtue, and in convincing children that their parents are not to be trusted. It is an insidious bargain that encourages young people to stop thinking for themselves in exchange for living in a statist world in which they will never be held accountable and will never be expected to care for themselves.
Classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education — and they're right to, as test results confirm again and again.
Venitis asserts the public school monopoly has to be ended, and genuine competition has to be restored. The National Education Association'
Education, like any other service, is best provided by the free market, achieving greater quality and efficiency with more diversity of choice. Public schools should be managed locally to achieve greater accountability and parental involvement. Recognizing that the education of children is inextricably linked to moral values, venitists would return authority to parents to determine the education of their children, without interference from kleptocrats. In particular, parents should have responsibility for all funds expended for their children's education. Government should stay out of education.
The gap between rich and poor pupils is widening; standards are falling; violence and disruption in schools are rife; and we are sliding down the international league tables for education. To make matters worse, parents are rendered powerless to choose a better option for their children; under Whigs, school choice is a myth. We can't go on like this.
So Tories will:
* Restore discipline and order to the classroom . We will give teachers the tools and powers they need to keep order in the classroom. We will abolish the legal requirement of 24 hours' notice for detentions; reform the exclusion process; and give headteachers the power to ban, search for, and confiscate any items they think may cause violence or disruption.
* Raise the status of the teaching profession. Move to a high quality system of teacher recruitment and training by raising entry requirements, expanding Teach First and incentivising top maths and science graduates.
* Raise standards. We will take urgent action to reverse the decline in standards. We will reform the National Curriculum, remove political interference from GCSEs and A-levels, and allow state schools to do the same high quality exams as private schools. We will replace Key Stage 1 Sats with a simple reading test, reform Key Stage 2 Sats, and make Ofsted report on schools' setting policies and reading schemes.
* Create a new generation of independently run state schools. We will make it much easier for educational charities, groups of parents and teachers, cooperatives and others to start new Academies (independent, non-selective state schools). We will move to a national per pupil funding system, so that new schools get paid if they attract pupils, with extra funding for the poorest pupils (a pupil premium).
A Tory government will give every child the kind of education that is currently available only to the well-off: safe classrooms, talented and specialist teachers, access to the best curriculum and exams, and smaller schools with smaller classes and teachers who know the children's names.
Homeschool is a legal option in many places, for parents to provide their children with a learning environment as an alternative to school. Parents cite numerous reasons as motivations to homeschool, including better academic test results, poor school environment, improved character development, and objections to what is taught in school.
There is nothing wrong with laying out suggestions for what the average child should know by a certain grade. But most kids aren't the average child, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative isl not just suggestions. All kids are different. They grow, mature, and learn at different rates, and develop different talents and interests. In light of that obvious reality, to build an education system that treats all kids as if they are the same is insanity.
Simplistic rhetoric of national-standards advocates notwithstanding, research simply does not demonstrate that national standards lead to superior educational outcomes. And, no, adopting the Common Core standards is not voluntary. With states risking billions of federal dollars if they don't adopt them, the standards are for all intents and purposes federal standards, and their adoption mandatory.
One of the greatest gifts we can give to succeeding generations is the ability to think for themselves, and that means challenging the government monopoly of thought in education directly. It will be a struggle. All it takes is a trip to the ruins of the Berlin Wall to remind us that governments never give up power voluntarily. It is up to us to reassert our rights and recover our responsibilities.
Venitis points out that half of one's knowledge is outdated within four years! Thinking should be the top priority of education. The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child, to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child's conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after.
Unschool refers to a range of educational practices on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a school. Unschool differs from school principally in that standard curricula and of school, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
Basil Venitis, twitter.com/
Increasingly, states and school districts are using technology or online learning to improve the delivery and efficiency of elementary and secondary education. As many as one million children in USA are participating in some form of online learning. Today, 27 states offer statewide virtual schools that allow students to take classes online, and 24 states and the District of Columbia allow students to attend a virtual school full time.
Online learning can be more than lectures. Another element involves presenting information in an interactive form, which can be used to find out what a student knows and doesn't know. Teachers have very few tools to gauge just how many students are grasping a concept in real time and reshape the curriculum to meet their needs.
Few people have a clear picture of what online education really looks like, which is one reason so many people are reluctant to consider what it has to offer. Learning online won't turn your country into a nation of home-schooled nerds, sitting in their basements, keyboards clacking. And it doesn't mean handing your kids over to robots for the day. Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls.
Online education gives students in dysfunctional urban districts the chance to enroll in high-quality classes or language instruction without an expensive move to a suburban district or a private school. Cities benefit, too, as families uncomfortable with the quality of urban public schools can continue to live near their downtown offices while enrolling their children in Web-based programs, reducing white flight and suburban sprawl.
But though the families of students enrolled in online programs rave about them, cultural resistance has been slow to fade. And winning hearts and minds isn't the only hurdle to widespread adoption: Virtual education remains essentially illegal in many states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Seat-time requirements, which mandate that students' butts be in classroom chairs, often within the sightline of a qualified teacher, for a certain number of hours, are a major barrier.
The only way online education companies can respond to concerns about quality and age-appropriateness is if they are given the chance to experiment and win over students and parents. Government policies need to be tweaked, and companies need investment to grow. But for online education to really take off, we need to let the chalkboard in the little red schoolhouse go, and learn to love the glow of a child's face lit by a laptop screen.
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