InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
The London Times reports that British education secretary Michael Gove has issued a new curriculum and education plan. It is even better than adding two more years to a stupid curriculum and a stupider education plan whose inability to work becomes plainer with each new generation of graduates striving harder to overcome the inadequacy of their education.
Gove expects that by age 5 children can spell simple words like bank, chips, panda, pocket and thunder.
By age 6, they know compound words like farmyard, laptop and playground. They can write short stories with a beginning, middle and end, and a point to it unlike the Postmodernist speeches of our politicians to give them a kind twist. Kids will know that words ending in ‘nk’ should be pronounced ‘ngk’, like bang-k and ping-k. Kids will be familiar with fairy tales and recite many poems by heart—from memory with the proper intonation. What for it will be asked and why is this relevant to a country that hasn’t a canon of classics like the British? The answer is so they will be as smart as Enrile who still memorizes a poem every morning and who makes sense when he talks.
By age 7, kids will know the difference between words that sound the same like bare and bear, hubad at oso. Apostrophes like can’t and haven’t and words ending in ‘ge’ with the sound ‘j’ like bridge, charge, judge and huge, not hoooge.
By age 9, words ending the sound "shun," like confession, injection and musician and not conpeesyohn, injeectsyohn and myusisyaaan. To make plurals, they will stick apostrophes at the end of words ending in s, like girls' apostrophe and not girl's apostrophe s. Gove aims to abolish the current way grocers spell apples with an apostrophe s; e.g., "apple's for sale."
By 9, kids will spell 91 words correctly, like accident, particular, sew as a dress as opposed to sue as in court.
They should know the difference between standard English and colloquialisms like "we were" and "we was" so they can laugh at people mis-educated under the old system. I love it. The road to improvement is paved with ridicule. Government only moves when you laugh at it hard. And the harder you laugh, the faster it moves.
By 11 kids should be able to tell stationery, what you write on, from stationary when you don't move like government; between disinterested, having no interest, and uninterested, having no interest, hmmmmm. They should be able to spell 236 words like ancient, atmosphere, bruise, hindrance, solemn, twelfth, tomorrow, villain and zoology. And use the semi-colon, colon, dash, bullet points and hyphen correctly. The idea is to create a new race that can speak and write a civilized language correctly so that it is beyond the reach of media and politics that dumb down.
Gove wants the same education that produced John Stuart Mill, who read Herodotus in the ancient Greek at age 3; Gladstone who wrote it at that age along with scores of other British empire builders like William Pitt the Younger who argued with his father William Pitt the Elder in Latin, French, and ancient Greek. My cousin bobby studied German law without knowing German and his professors taught German law without knowing English; so they settled on ancient Greek as the medium of instruction for him.
Gove wants kids to master the 3 Rs: reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic before going into high school. By 11, they should have mastered the subjunctive like French kids. He wants children to sneer at Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey.
Gove's curriculum has been adopted successfully in Alberta, Canada, Massachusetts, USA, and Singapore. Poland has done the same thing. The reason is that you cannot have a thought without a word nor think sensibly without grammar.
The only subject that does not need words and grammar is pornography, and the only skill that can dispense with them is lap-dancing at which the new K-12 educational system aims to make our children proficient, which contains all of this to be taught in three languages even as the Philippines is hosting a conference on dying languages starting with English and, for that matter, formal Tagalog.
Gove said exams will no longer be dumbed down and will be strictly graded. A computer program will remove pity from grading.
Tests show that most people, adults and kids, have an inflated sense of how much they know and how well they think. It is time to bring them down to the reality that they know little if anything and cannot comprehend much more.
Education reform in the Philippines aims to produce yet more GROs, boy toys and tricycle drivers because, one, sex tourism is more fun in the Philippines; two, tricycles are green and more years need to be added because it is statutory rape to fondle an 11-year-old kid and a tricycle driver must be older and stronger to carry two fat tourists. If you want your kids to have a future get them out of here fast.
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