School proposals: Spin, castles in the air and manipulative rewritings of reality

This is a discussion post. The post is an expression of the writer’s own position.

“Freedom and immersion – a quality program for the primary school” is the nice and totally misleading title of the SVM government’s new and largest primary school agreement with the primary school conciliation circle since the SRSF primary school reform in 2013. In the SVM quality program for the primary school, quality is in short supply. On the other hand, there is plenty of school political spin, air castles and manipulative rewritings of primary school reality.

In the new SVM quality programme, the primary school must be set free, “so that the obviously most important thing comes into focus – the core substance of the school’s subjects, the pupils’ learning, education and well-being”. The purpose clause of the Folkeskole Act is misused politically as an introduction to the new bad folkeskole agreement.

The purpose clause of the primary school states, among other things, that the primary school, in collaboration with the parents, must “give pupils knowledge and skills that prepare them for further education and make them want to learn more, make them familiar with Danish culture and history and give them an understanding of other countries and cultures”.

Among the initiatives in the SVM government’s quality program (page 6), under the misleading heading “Freedom under responsibility”, is the abolition of the minimum number of hours in history. This absurd cancel culture proposal should be included as an important part of the SVM initiative “Service inspection of the quality inspection with the public schools”…

The primary school reconciliation parties will familiarize students with Danish culture and history and give them an understanding of other countries and cultures by abolishing the cultural subject history and changing it to a compulsory subject such as traffic education and health and sex education.

That is a redo.

For the public school reconciliation parties, ignorance, not knowledge, is strength, just like in Orwell’s infamous “Ministry of Truth”. The SVM quality programme, the SRSF reform school 2.0, cannot distinguish between cultural subjects, education, ignorance, professional immersion and digital indifference.

By throwing the history subject into the public school’s large landfill, you also drop the valuable history canon with 29 points that span several thousand years and which focus on events both in Denmark and abroad. The canon list for history in primary schools, prepared by the Ministry of Education, begins with the Ertebølle culture and ends with the terrorist attack on the USA on 11 September 2001.

The list can be used to give students a chronological overview of the story’s development and an understanding of how the story fits together. Fine teaching materials and themed pages with historical knowledge have been prepared for the history canon. In a time with the biggest major political challenges since the Second World War, you can abolish the history subject in primary schools; but that does not put an end to the story. It continues with the Danes as passive spectators…

Neither the students’ professional development nor well-being has been strengthened in the SRSF reform school.

On the contrary.

Conflicts and violence have become part of everyday school life in several places. PISA results are historically low! 43,000 young people between the ages of 15-24 do not have an education, in employment or in the process of an education…

Together with inclusion, the SVM government has again put these unresolved challenges in the school policy pickle. In Aarhus Municipality, school leaders are announcing cuts to school budgets of DKK 112 million. DKK due to increasing costs for special education.

In the SVM quality program, air castles replace quality. According to the SVM government, one of the “solutions” to the primary school’s academic challenges is one book per year. student for less than 100 kroner per year…

2024-03-24 11:57:59
#School #proposals #Spin #castles #air #manipulative #rewritings #reality

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