 The national curriculum is so boring that children are becoming alienated and disruptive at school, Michael Moore, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said yesterday. He also said, teachers had been turned into robots obliged to teach lessons irrelevant to pupils' lives.
The Government was so concerned about meeting its examination targets that ministers were oblivious to the damage caused to children by an overly prescriptive curriculum and national tests at the ages of 7, 11 and 14. Mr Moore told the association's annual conference that government-sponsored research had shown a decline in children's enjoyment of school in recent years. This was true for virtually all subjects among pupils aged 11 to 14 in secondary schools. He said: "I believe that too many children and young people are turned off learning because they are fed up with what they see as a boring curriculum diet that has little choice and less relevance to their lives. No wonder they start to misbehave." He spoke as delegates said that "parental paranoia" over testing was putting pupils as young as four under unreasonable pressure from the moment they started school. Some, particularly boys, reacted violently to being forced into formal education too soon because of the need for schools to do well in tests at seven. They called for a review of the curriculum in the early years of primary school so that learning was based more on play than structured lessons. Phil Baker, a middle school teacher, said: "We are creating the wrong sorts of learning environment for a lot of our youngsters. We have created a system for them to fail." (Agencies) | 英國教師及講師協會主席邁克爾·穆爾4月16日指出，英國的課程設置太過枯燥，以至于學生對學校產生了疏離厭惡的情緒。他還說，教師們已經成了被迫教授與學生們的生活毫不相關課程的機器人。 政府一味要求學生達到預計的考試目標，以至于官員們都忽略了過多的規定課程及為7歲、11歲和14歲孩子設置的全國性考試給孩子們造成的負擔和不良影響。 穆爾在協會的年度會議上指出，由政 府負責進行的調查顯示，近年來學生對于學校的興趣普遍下降了。這一現象在11至14歲的中學生中尤其普遍，他們對各門學科都興趣索然。 他說：“我相信絕大多數兒童和青少年都不愛學習，因為他們的生活被枯燥煩悶的課程塞得滿滿的，他們只有很小的選擇余地，學習和生活關系也不大。所以這些孩子們在學校表現不好也不足為奇。” 同時與會代表還談到，目前為了迎合考試，家長中逐漸出現"偏執"心理，這使得四歲的孩子也不得不從進入學校那天起就面臨著過重的壓力。尤其是一些男孩子，由于7歲時要參加全國考試，學校會加重課業負擔，男孩更容易因此而對學校產生較大的抵觸情緒。代表們呼吁修改全國的小學課程，使學習更多地建立在玩的基礎上，而不是結構性課程上。 皮爾·貝爾是一位中學教師，他說：“我們現在正在建立一種對于我們的年輕人來說是完全錯誤的教育環境。我們所建立的這一體系將使他們面臨失敗。” （中國日報網站譯） |
Updated: 2003-04-18 01:00
