Curios of the week #9

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via DALL-E AI

---

The past week on EduTwitter has been like old times. A controversy erupted over SLANT, fueled by some of the personalities involved. Many people took sides. Some performatively declared they were above taking sides. The definition of what true SLANT involved was debated at length. Those willing to condemn the rudeness of their ideological opponents came out in force to excuse or dismiss the rudeness of their ideological fellow travelers. People wrote blog posts.

It was like 2015 all over again. There were even memes:

It illustrates that passions run as high as they ever did. It is the ebbs and flows of how these passions are expressed that shift over time.

And it brings me back to the pendulum theory of education. How many of our past follies are we condemned to repeat? I guess we shall see.

This week’s curios include some unfortunate phrasing, the concept of ‘learning engineering’, some fence removal, a reader submitted bookshelf and much, much more.

Technocratic solution of the week

An open-access paper in the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ) makes a familiar case: Policy makers do not listen to academic researchers and to solve this problem, we need to establish a panel of worthies to offer ‘trustworthy and transparent’ policy advice:

“…while there may be a great deal of policy discussion taking place within government departments, much of the advice and any reservations of staff members can fall on deaf ears—if a minister wants a policy introduced, it will likely be introduced.”

Stepping back a little, this sounds a lot like democracy. Staff members in government departments are not elected. Ministers are elected. So, it seems proper for the minister to be able to enact their policies because it is the minister who can be voted out at the next election if they make a poor decision.

This would be the case even if the advice ministers were receiving from education experts was sound. However, it is not. It was the Scottish government’s pre-occupation with independence that led it to place its education system largely in the hands of experts, to disastrous effect. The voting public are less prone to flights of ideological fancy and more realistic, which is why they are a better boss.