Why Are We Taught to Memorise and Not Learn?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Roald Dahl does not use fronted adverbials for time and coordinating conjunctions, he deliberately makes his work simple and frenetic, the stream of consciousness of a curious child , the turbocharged imagination of youth in prose it can easily understand.

To Tories, Art Is Not Proper. Grammar is Proper.

Of course, this handily explains the move towards metrics obsession in the UK, but this is a long term phenomenon that predates Michael Gove. Our education system was advocated for and partially financed by industrialists, who saw that teaching the necessary mathematical and numerical skills to perform middle management tasks could be funded by the taxpayer. This is in the bones of our education system, the set structure. Metrics obsession isn’t just a class thing, it’s factory floor thinking. Everything must be quantified in terms of output, you are performing mock standardised tests every 6 weeks from the age of 8.

A political but fair look at the mass-production standardisation of English-language education in British schools. In an effort to make work measurable and objectively assessable, it argues, we’re stripping the joy out of the art of writing.

Having seen the kinds of things our children are assessed on at school, it’s a reasonable hypothesis.

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