I tried to resist but I couldn't. The newspapers have been full-ish of news about proposals for the new primary curriculum.

Out go History, Geography and RE and in come 6 subject areas to promote "an understanding" of several subjects all rolled into one.

Along with learning English, the children will look at foreign languages; in Maths the children will learn about logic, problem solving, using and applying the skills they have learnt, but learning times tables will be out.

The kids might look at climate change, different cultures, celebrations as part of learning about their environment.

But worst of all,IT is going to be viewed as the fourth R, as in reading, riting and 'rithmatic. It will have as much time devoted to it as these other basic and fundamental subjects.

The rationale behind this is that the kids know how to do it so they may as well be encouraged.

Well hang on a minute guys, I have never seen a Powerpoint presentation that was worth it's weight in confetti.
Usually the points that were being highlighted were quite obvious to anybody with three functioning braincells, but I do have to admit that all the Powerpoint presentations I have seen have been prepared and presented by people in education, that's quite a caveat.

Read through anything on a blog and notice the vast numbers of typos, OK so that's not important on Boggartblog and the like, but the people who are doing these things, unlike Ian and I, generally have proper jobs, yet they can't type or proof read.

Also there are loads of people out there who are computer literate, who didn't have computers at school, yet they have learned to use technology after leaving school or formal education.

The people who invented the damn things didn't get taught how to use them at school for heaven's sake!

And what about the understanding?
How do you show that someone understands, after all there is still a large section of the populace that think Gordon Brown is competant. That means they think he was right to spend loads and loads of money he hadn't got on improvements to services that didn't materialise.
And that the answer when you have run out of money and can't afford to pay back what you owe is to borrow more money and spend that as well.

I remember coming across a lyric someone had written down, the song was about taking one's chance to change a relationship, so it was pretty fighting talk, "Now's the time for honesty, my victory is your defeat,"
One verse begins, "Time has come when you could say, this is the one and seize the day...", however the would be scribe had written "sees the day.."a completely different meaning which obviously the scribe was happy with, despite the fact that it didn't fit in with the words around it.

Isn't it about time the educationalists and their chuffing advisers got their heads around the idea that before you can understand anything you need to have a good basis of sound knowledge, preferably learnt at Primary school, so that come the time when brains are beginning to develop a more inquiring attitude the knowledge is there to help them find the answers to their questions.

BTW anybody notice the bunch of students on University Challenge last night, Cambridge and Warwick they were from, and one lot was a bunch of mathematicians, they didn't know what 3.142 was! Although it was probably the way the question phrased, two words of more than one syllable in there, that probably threw them.

The new children's dictionary and The End Of Imagination