“Chris who ?”

With all the crap on television I often find myself resorting to the ‘History Channel’ for some interesting viewing.

This is no hardship as I have always loved delving into the past, and even as a youngster my imagination was stirred with tales of great battles, conquests and discoveries, so I read with disbelief a news story that … ’only one student in a class of twenty trainee teachers knew about Christopher Columbus’s landing in America’.

Now I might just about accept that a bunch of British students could not identify Vasco da Gamma or Ferdinand Magellan and would probably not know much about Lewis and Clark; but surely they must have been taught at school that … ‘In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue’.

Well it seems not to be the case, for once again ‘trendy teaching’   means that many schools are scrapping academic disciplines such as English, geography and history in favour of lessons which aim to cover several subjects at once.

I don’t know about you, but when I was at school one subject at a time was quite enough, and although I would not claim to be an expert on modern education, and I do hope that I’m wrong, but it all sounds like a good way for a child to end up knowing very little about anything; which seems to be born out by another report last week that the pass mark for some subjects in school examinations …

…    is now just 30% !