John Connell: The Blog

Doug Belshaw points to a superb His­tory resource: timelines.tv — British his­tory only but it serves up an inter­est­ing tem­plate for oth­ers to fol­low.

Tech­no­rati Tags: doug belshaw, timelines.tv, his­tory, bbc

Apple, it seems, plans to sell you your own home movies over iTunes for just $1.99 (prob­a­bly 99p in the UK):

“As soon as you record that pre­cious footage of your daughter’s first steps, you’ll be able to buy it right back from iTunes and down­load it directly to your com­puter and video iPod.….…the videos will be pre­sented unedited and in their orig­i­nal form, save for a small Apple logo in the lower right-hand cor­ner of the image to pro­tect the company’s copy­righted mate­ri­als from Inter­net piracy”

Who says so? The Onion, of course!

I believe them.

Tech­no­rati Tags: apple, itunes, the onion, home movies

I pur­chased a Scots­man news­pa­per yes­ter­day because the lead story on the front page cov­ered the awful death of Irene Hogg, head­teacher of Glendin­ning Ter­race Pri­mary School in Galashiels, here in the Scot­tish Bor­ders. Irene, it seems, took her own life shortly after hear­ing a ver­bal report from HMIE fol­low­ing their recent inspec­tion of the school. Whether the two events are related is not for me to spec­u­late on — oth­ers will deter­mine if there is a link, or none. I do not envy them their task.

Her Majesty’s Inspec­tors have a tough job, I believe. For all the esteem they seem to be held in by so many in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion, they are basi­cally foot-soldiers slog­ging their way from one school inspec­tion to another, address­ing the same pre-ordained set of issues in every school they visit, observ­ing teach­ers and head­teach­ers at their daily work with young­sters, analysing attain­ment fig­ures, test­ing a broad range of stake­holder opin­ion on the school, and, finally, draw­ing up a detailed report that sets out their assess­ment of the work­ings of the school and its staff in quite minute detail, as well as a set of rec­om­men­da­tions for improvement.

Given the impor­tance that is con­ferred on the pub­lished HMI report, it is only nat­ural that teach­ers and head­teach­ers take the whole process of inspec­tion and report­ing so seri­ously. And not only school staff — local author­i­ties, under­stand­ably, set much store by the per­ceived qual­ity of edu­ca­tion within their juris­dic­tion that can be affected so much, neg­a­tively or pos­i­tively, by the gen­eral tenor of reports pub­lished over time about their schools.

And it is accepted, of course, given the sys­tem of school­ing that we cur­rently have, that the qual­ity of edu­ca­tion in a school should be sub­ject to pro­fes­sional and con­sid­ered assess­ment on a reg­u­lar basis. The lives of many chil­dren can be affected by a badly-run school or a poorly-performing teacher within a school. The qual­ity of school­ing received by the child in a school is, rightly, the real focus of HMI inspections.

I think, gen­er­ally, that this process works rea­son­ably well, for most schools, most of the time, even if it can be a tough process for school staff to go through. But I believe too that the process, if it is likely to founder at all, is more likely to do so in rela­tion to the man­age­ment of small rural schools across the coun­try than for any other kind of school.

Why might that be the case?

If I think about all the var­i­ous jobs I have had in edu­ca­tion and beyond over the 28 years since I started work­ing for a liv­ing — class teacher, head­teacher of a small rural pri­mary school, depute-headteacher of a large urban pri­mary school, head­teacher of another large school, local gov­ern­ment offi­cial, pol­icy ana­lyst for the Scot­tish Exec­u­tive, project man­ager and Direc­tor of a large-scale national ICT project, and edu­ca­tion busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ager in the pri­vate sec­tor — all the really tough jobs were those that took me into the class­room either as teacher or as head­teacher. Every job I have done has been reward­ing in dif­fer­ent ways, but the most reward­ing (in terms of job sat­is­fac­tion if not in mon­e­tary terms) were those that put me in front of chil­dren to help them learn. But they were also the toughest.

And the tough­est of the lot? I was head­teacher of a tiny coun­try pri­mary school in the old Grampian Region many years ago. I was a teach­ing head­teacher — like Irene — and I taught for four days a week while, at the same time, run­ning the school like every other head­teacher in every other school in Scot­land. Even when your school roll num­bers less than thirty kids, the cur­ricu­lum is the same size, the expec­ta­tion of par­ents and the local author­ity are the same, the com­plex­ity of the rules and pro­ce­dures you have to fol­low are the same, the demands of cre­at­ing a vibrant learn­ing envi­ron­ment are the same, and the need to ensure the con­tin­ued pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment of the teach­ing com­ple­ment is the same — and you have to do all of that whilst also teach­ing your own class for part of the week.

Of the two head­teacher roles that I had the priv­i­lege of doing — head of the small rural school, and head of a school with around 450 pupils and a large teach­ing com­ple­ment — run­ning the small school was by far the harder job! Very few in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion either recog­nise or acknowl­edge this basic truth. Why? Because very few that are in posi­tions of author­ity in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion ever expe­ri­enced the nature of that role at first hand — most have held senior posi­tions in large pri­mary schools or in sec­ondary schools — and most believe that job com­plex­ity for a head­teacher is sim­ply a func­tion of size and scale. It is not.

Even expe­ri­enced pro­fes­sion­als in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion will speak blithely of a “2-teacher” school, or a “4-teacher school”, for­get­ting that even the small­est schools in the coun­try can have many other pro­fes­sion­als com­ing in and out of the school every week to deliver var­i­ous dis­crete ele­ments of the cur­ricu­lum. As head­teacher of a large school, I had a senior team of 5 or 6 good pro­fes­sion­als to work with (depute head, assis­tant head — in the days before that post was abol­ished — and three or four senior teach­ers). I was able to share the load quite con­sid­er­ably across this team, and I did. The head of a sec­ondary school in Scot­land usu­ally has a senior team of twenty or more to work with. As a teach­ing head­teacher, in that small coun­try school in beau­ti­ful Aberdeen­shire, I had to carry out what was prob­a­bly the loneli­est man­age­ment role of my whole var­ied career. I was sus­tained in that role by the qual­ity of the teach­ers I had work­ing with me, by the kind­ness and sup­port I received from some local author­ity staff (in Aberdeen­shire, of course, there were usu­ally some senior staff who had been able to begin their man­age­ment careers in small schools — not a com­mon occur­rence in most parts of the coun­try), and by the infor­mal sup­port struc­ture of the many other heads of small schools around me.

The sim­ple fact is that when I moved away from that small school to become, first the depute head of a large pri­mary school in Edin­burgh, and then on to be head of another large school in West Loth­ian a cou­ple of years later, I moved to eas­ier jobs that paid bet­ter salaries. Of course, none of this can be sim­ply about salary, but it should at the very least be about recog­nis­ing, and acknowl­edg­ing, the innate com­plex­ity of the teach­ing headteacher’s role, and about ensur­ing that teach­ing heads are able to enjoy rich and effec­tive sup­port struc­tures, both for­mal and infor­mal. Every head­teacher I have ever met under­stands the impor­tance of being able to share prob­lems with other head­teach­ers on a reg­u­lar basis — that is even more cru­cial when you are in the lonely posi­tion of a teach­ing head­teacher with no imme­di­ate senior staff in the school to call on for support.

And, given the topol­ogy of Scot­land, with large rural hin­ter­lands in so many parts of the coun­try, there are many hun­dreds of teaching-headteachers out there who, per­haps, deserve bet­ter recog­ni­tion than they cur­rently get from a sys­tem that tends to be led by peo­ple who have no expe­ri­ence what­so­ever of the com­plex­ity and the crit­i­cal­ity of the role that every one of those teach­ing head­teach­ers play every day of every week . It is per­haps about time that we offered that recog­ni­tion and that acknowl­edge­ment.

Tech­no­rati Tags: hmie, teach­ing head­teacher, school man­age­ment, com­plex­ity

Bril­liant news on the Black­board patent non­sense, although by no means finalised as yet. Michael Feld­stein has been a true hero through­out this sorry tale!

Tech­no­rati Tags: black­board, mle, patent, Michael Feld­stein

“Inde­pen­dence is my hap­pi­ness, and I view things as they are, with­out regard to place or per­son; my coun­try is the world, and my reli­gion is to do good.”

Thomas Paine: “The Rights of Man”

“Nobody on the centre-left should be in any doubt that if the Nation­al­ists ever came close to achiev­ing what they want, the win­ners will be few and the losers will be many.”

Wendy Alexan­der: “Change is what we do”

Paine’s rep­u­ta­tion as a pam­phle­teer is under no threat from the cur­rent leader of the Labour Party in Scot­land. Wendy Alexander’s pam­phlet was pub­lished to coin­cide with the Scot­tish Labour con­fer­ence in Aviemore this week­end. I would pre­dict, hav­ing worked my way through its painful prose, that it will have pre­cisely no effect what­so­ever on the elec­toral prospects of the Labour Party in Scot­land, and it will have even less effect on the over­all polit­i­cal dynamic in Scot­land at the present time.

The prob­lems are many, and the solu­tion, it seems, is to play ostrich and to stick our necks deep down in holes in the sand, hop­ing that the good times will return anew when the Scot­tish peo­ple even­tu­ally recog­nise the SNP gov­ern­ment for the bunch of char­la­tans that it so obvi­ously is. Not much of a policy.

As some­one who has been a life­long sup­porter and mem­ber of the Labour Party, the cur­rent slough into which the party pan­jan­drums have cast them­selves and the party as a whole is painful indeed. I am no fan of the clam­jam­frie of zeno­phobes, naïfs and the occa­sional polit­i­cal sophis­ti­cate that is the SNP, but every Labour Party mem­ber I have spo­ken to in recent months, and that includes many cur­rent activists, are clear that Alex Salmond is doing a very good job indeed. The main oppo­si­tion, on the other hand, is most decidely not doing a good job.

One rea­son for this, I believe, is that the heads-in-the-sand atti­tude has lum­bered the party in Par­lia­ment with var­i­ous left­over dregs from pre­cisely the same group of peo­ple who put the Scot­tish Labour Party where it is in the first place, in the dol­drums, and the SNP in gov­ern­ment. A shift from Jack McConnell to Wendy Alexan­der was no shift at all, merely a change of wall­pa­per from one dated design to another. Despite the pamphlet’s title, change is most cer­tainly not what these peo­ple do. All they really do is what­ever bid­ding comes their way from the ‘gifted politi­cian of the centre-left’ cur­rently grac­ing 10 Down­ing Street.

One for­mer Labour min­is­ter, Henry McLeish, dares to express what we all know is a widely held view within the wider Scot­tish Labour move­ment — namely that we should at least con­tem­plate the option of inde­pen­dence for Scot­land — and he is imme­di­ately stamped upon from on high by Sam Gal­braith, the for­mer Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion who man­aged to achieve pre­cisely noth­ing for Scot­tish edu­ca­tion whilst in office. These peo­ple for­get that ‘home rule’ has been an hon­ourable and abid­ing strand within Scot­tish Labour think­ing since the days of the ILP.

The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with Scot­tish Labour is that, while this inter­change­able group of adolescent-like in-fighters were vying with each other for so many years, both before the foun­da­tion of the Par­lia­ment in 1999, and in Gov­ern­ment until the last elec­tion, no one both­ered to nur­ture the next gen­er­a­tion of Labour politi­cians to take on the chal­lenge of the SNP and the chal­lenge of a world that this group is sim­ply unable to com­pre­hend. Their only hope in the medium term — and it could hap­pen — is that one or two of the more eccen­tric nation­al­ist MSPs within the SNP will find a way out from under the lid that Salmond and Stur­geon are sit­ting so tightly on at the moment and cause embar­rass­ment to the party of gov­ern­ment. Again, not a pos­i­tive pol­icy for change, I would sug­gest, for Scot­tish Labour.

And the pam­phlet itself is a mas­sive dis­ap­point­ment as an agenda for change. How can a state­ment of pol­icy for the Scot­tish Labour Party have noth­ing to say about poverty, about trade unions, about work­ers’ rights, about unem­ploy­ment (and under-employment)?

I found my way to the sec­tion on edu­ca­tion with at least some hope, think­ing that this was a sub­ject that might be kept away from the petty party pol­i­tics that dom­i­nate the rest of the doc­u­ment. But I was dis­ap­pointed, of course.

Alexan­der, it seems, sim­ply has no con­cep­tion of what edu­ca­tion in the 21^st Cen­tury ought to look like. Her pol­icy for pri­mary edu­ca­tion, for instance, can be summed up as ‘mak­ing sure that pri­mary pupils are prop­erly pre­pared for sec­ondary schooling’.

“At the pri­mary school stage, par­ents want to know whether their child is guar­an­teed a firm grasp of the basics of read­ing, writ­ing, arith­metic, and oral com­mu­ni­ca­tion before they go to sec­ondary school. Lack of these basic skills is a prime cause of the dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems that blight too many of our schools. Scot­tish Labour must seek out ways to guar­an­tee that all chil­dren leave pri­mary edu­ca­tion fully equipped for sec­ondary school.”

Where does she get this tripe from? The sad fact is that the SNP have no more idea than Wendy does about what a rel­e­vant edu­ca­tion for today’s young peo­ple might look like, so she has missed a chance to offer some gen­uinely rad­i­cal think­ing on a core area of gov­ern­ment policy.

“Chil­dren learn dif­fer­ently and many will have a time in their school careers where they strug­gle with a sub­ject or a con­cept. It is a time when they could do with extra sup­port to main­tain their enthu­si­asm and con­fi­dence. If we want all pupils to leave pri­mary school ready for sec­ondary edu­ca­tion, we need to be will­ing to put our resources into much more indi­vid­ual atten­tion for those who need it. This would take the pres­sure off the class­room teacher and other pupils who may be suf­fer­ing when their class­mates are dis­af­fected or dis­en­gaged. Get­ting it right for every child through their own ways of learn­ing and dis­cov­er­ing their inter­ests and strengths should increas­ingly be part of the school expe­ri­ence from the pri­mary years.”

All I can do when I read this kind of mean­ing­less guff is to shake my head in dis­be­lief at the chasm between this par­tic­u­lar politician’s view of edu­ca­tion in Scot­land and the real­ity that will be faced by every child cur­rently in Scot­tish schools as they leave over the next few years to enter employ­ment or to con­tinue their edu­ca­tion in other ways. This ver­biage does not even begin to meet their needs.

I’ll leave the last word to Thomas Paine:

“A thing mod­er­ately good is not so good as it ought to be. Mod­er­a­tion in tem­per is always a virtue; but mod­er­a­tion in prin­ci­ple is always a vice.”

“Change is what we do” does not even man­age ‘mod­er­ately good’.

Tech­no­rati Tags: scot­tish labour, wendy alexan­der, thomas paine, snp, inde­pen­dence, pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion

Just Look at the Eyes.…

Apolo­gies to Judy, Jenny and Tess for tak­ing so long to get around to the Pas­sion Quilt meme — I always intended doing it, and I always knew where I would find the pho­to­graph I wanted to dis­play — I just wasn’t sure of the mes­sage I wanted to provide.

The pho­to­graph is meant to rep­re­sent a whole Flickr site full of amaz­ing and won­der­ful pho­tographs from the Chil­dren At Risk Foun­da­tion (CARF), which works with street chil­dren in Brazil. Every pho­to­graph on the site opens up a dif­fer­ent emo­tion, a dif­fer­ent hope, a dif­fer­ent dream, a dif­fer­ent mem­ory for each of the chil­dren and young peo­ple in the frame. I like the one above because it shows what I take to be a quiet and con­fi­dent dif­fi­dence, but flick through the pho­tographs and you will see every emo­tion and every hope, dream and mem­ory that it’s pos­si­ble to see on a child’s face.

For me, edu­ca­tion is, more than any­thing else, about help­ing chil­dren to under­stand their fears, to hold on to their aspi­ra­tions and dreams, and to find the means within them, through learn­ing how to learn, to make their way in the world. That may seem eas­ier to do in some set­tings than in oth­ers, but every child, no mat­ter where they find them­selves as they grow up, deserves the chance to do the best they can. Teach­ers have the awe­some respon­si­bil­ity to nur­ture the pos­i­tives in a child’s life with­out adding to the neg­a­tives, which we do every time we do any­thing that adds to the fears and anx­i­eties they already bring with them to school.

And for me, it is the eyes of the chil­dren that I see mostly when I look through these pho­tographs, and I know that some­thing of the same range of feel­ings and fears and future desires can be seen in the eyes of any class­room full of chil­dren any­where in the world — they are sim­ply, per­haps, more obvi­ous in the harsh set­tings in which the CARF pho­tos are taken.

So, just look at the eyes!

For the thoughts of this par­tic­u­lar young girl, click the photo and read her words.

Read about CARF in the Flickr pro­file, and look at their mis­sion for change. Geof­frey J Smith, CARF’s founder, is a fel­low of Ashoka: “Ashoka envi­sions a world where Every­one is a Change­maker: a world that responds quickly and effec­tively to social chal­lenges, and where each indi­vid­ual has the free­dom, con­fi­dence and soci­etal sup­port to address any social prob­lem and drive change.”

Can I pass the baton, if it is not already too late, to:
Don Led­ing­ham
Ruby Ren­nie
Theo Kuechel
Mar­tin Weller
Jackie Cameron

Sorry folks!

Here are the rules:

1. Think about what you are pas­sion­ate about teach­ing your stu­dents.
2. Post a pic­ture from a source like Flick­rCC or Flickr Cre­ative Com­mons or make/take your own that cap­tures what YOU are most pas­sion­ate about for kids to learn about…and give your pic­ture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Pas­sion Quilt” and link back to Miguel Guhlin’s orig­i­nal blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your pro­fes­sional learn­ing net­work or blogroll or whom you fol­low on Twitter/Pownce.

Tech­no­rati Tags: pas­sion quilt, meme

Ever won­dered why the Net seems to slow down dur­ing the evening? Could be some­thing to do with the fact that, “…10% of seri­ous peer-to-peer file sharers.….hog around 75% of the internet’s band­width, mak­ing it per­form sig­nif­i­cantly worse for the rest of us…” and because, “.…ISPs typ­i­cally use ‘traf­fic shap­ing’ between about 5pm and 11pm, which basi­cally slugs the net for everyone…”

Jack Schofield points to a paper by Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Net­work Research Cen­tre) enti­tled: Flow Rate Fair­ness: Dis­man­tling a Reli­gion, and pro­duced for the Inter­net Engi­neer­ing Task Force (IETF).

The paper’s abstract tells us how riv­et­ting a read it is.….….

“Resource allo­ca­tion and account­abil­ity have been major unre­solved prob­lems with the Inter­net ever since its incep­tion. The rea­son we never resolve these issues is a bro­ken idea of what the prob­lem is. The applied research and stan­dards com­mu­ni­ties are using com­pletely unre­al­is­tic and imprac­ti­cal fair­ness cri­te­ria. The result­ing mech­a­nisms don’t even allo­cate the right thing and they don’t allo­cate it between the right enti­ties. We explain as bluntly as we can that think­ing about fair­ness mech­a­nisms like TCP in terms of shar­ing out flow rates has no intel­lec­tual her­itage from any con­cept of fair­ness in phi­los­o­phy or social sci­ence, or indeed real life. Com­par­ing flow rates should never again be used for claims of fair­ness in pro­duc­tion net­works. Instead, we should judge fair­ness mech­a­nisms on how they share out the ‘cost’ of each user’s actions on others.”

.…but this is impor­tant stuff for all Net users!

Jack got the ref­er­ence from a ZDNet post: Fix­ing the unfair­ness of TCP con­ges­tion con­trol. Almost as inter­est­ing as Bob Briscoe’s paper itself are the dozens of com­ments on the ZDNet post!

Tech­no­rati Tags: bob briscoe, ietf, tcp con­ges­tion con­trol, zdnet, BT Net­work Research Centre

How won­der­ful to see two great edu­ca­tion­ists that I have worked with both named in Edutopia’s ‘Global Six’ for 2008 (the out­ward face of the George Lucas Edu­ca­tional Foun­da­tion).

First, Lau­rie O’Donnell, Direc­tor of Learn­ing and Tech­nol­ogy at Learn­ing and Teach­ing Scot­land, has been named for lead­ing, “…a project that many in the United States might con­sider a mis­sion impos­si­ble…” — in other words, Glow. I regard Lau­rie as a per­sonal friend and as a great col­league who has stuck with Glow right from its roots when we started up the Scot­tish Schools Dig­i­tal Net­work project back in 2001. When you con­sider all the other leading-edge work that LTS is doing right now — in edu­ca­tional gam­ing, in social tech­nolo­gies, online com­mu­ni­ties, vir­tual advi­sory ser­vice, and so on — the Global Six Award is more than deserved.

Sec­ondly, Clotilde Fon­seca has also been named in the Global Six for 2008. It has been a unique priv­i­lege for me to be able to meet with Clotilde and her col­leagues in the Fun­dación Omar Dengo (FOD) in San José, Costa Rica, on more than one occa­sion in the past year. A high­light of the past year for me was being invited to speak at a con­fer­ence at FOD just a few months ago — I knew I was amongst friends the moment I heard the first men­tion of Paulo Freire, a name that came up more than once dur­ing the two days. Clotilde is a lovely per­son with a fero­cious intel­lect, and the work that FOD does car­ries her influ­ence far beyond the bor­ders of Costa Rica itself, to other parts of the Cen­tral and South Amer­ica, and even as far as Mace­do­nia, where I encoun­tered men­tion of her advi­sory role while work­ing there too.

Well done, Clotilde and Lau­rie! Both of you, I know, will extend the glow (sorry!) of your suc­cess to the bril­liant teams you have around you, but the awards are deserved for your mutual abil­ity to cre­ate those high-performing teams in the first place.

Maybe it’s time that Scot­land and Costa Rica came together in some way to develop the great edu­ca­tional think­ing and devel­op­ment work that is going on in both coun­tries?

Tech­no­rati Tags: lau­rie o’donnell, clotilde fon­seca, costa rica, scot­land, Fun­dación Omar Dengo, learn­ing and teach­ing scot­land, edu­topia, George Lucas Edu­ca­tional Foundation

Nice link from Ewan — Intel have found a way to stretch a wi-fi sig­nal some 60 miles. They have already tested the tech­nol­ogy in India, Panama, Viet­nam, and South Africa. The abi­ity to con­nect sparsely pop­u­lated rural areas with nearby urban areas could have impor­tant impli­ca­tions for parts of the world that would oth­er­wise be dif­fi­cult to bring into the con­nected ‘fold’.

And, at around 6.5mb through­put, the sys­tem is good enough to sup­port video con­fer­enc­ing and telemed­i­cine.

Tech­no­rati Tags: wifi, intel, wire­less, telemed­i­cine

I’ve never been a big fan of home-schooling — too many par­ents play­ing out their own neu­roses and past social and psy­cho­log­i­cal his­to­ries on their kids for my lik­ing (although I guess that could define a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of par­ent­hood gen­er­ally). But one thing that home-schooling par­ents have in their favour is that they are, at least, mak­ing a deci­sion about the edu­ca­tion of their chil­dren and not merely leav­ing it to the default posi­tion offered to them by the state or by the schools ‘mar­ket’. As such, they are think­ing, whether log­i­cally, ide­o­log­i­cally or wholly irra­tionally, about the ben­e­fits and dis­ad­van­tages of any one kind of edu­ca­tion over any other.

Stephen Downes recently stepped into the debate [orig­i­nal com­ment — follow-up video — fur­ther com­ment] by stat­ing that: “…it is a form of child abuse to sub­ject chil­dren to an edu­ca­tion at the hands of a per­son who is man­i­festly unable to pro­vide it.”

Despite the crit­i­cism that Stephen received from some Amer­i­can home-schoolers, his basic state­ment is dif­fi­cult to dis­agree with. If you don’t like, for what­ever rea­son, the kind of edu­ca­tion your child is likely to receive in the local state pri­mary or sec­ondary school, but you then choose to place your child in the hands of some­one who is inca­pable of pro­vid­ing a good edu­ca­tion (and that per­son may well be your­self), it is hard not to see that as a form of abuse.

What, then, to make of the trav­esty of edu­ca­tion to which the poor — home-schooled! — kids in the video below are subjected?

As PZ Myers, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Biol­ogy at Min­nesota, Mor­ris, writes in his blog, Pharyn­gula:

“Aside from the gen­eral pat­tern of lies from the tour guides, two things jumped out at me.….….The really awful ped­a­gogy. Over and over again, the cre­ation­ist says some stock phrase and then pauses, wait­ing for his kids to fill in the miss­ing word. This is sim­ply demand­ing rote learn­ing. Sim­i­larly, he leads the kids in ask­ing a good ques­tion — “how do you know?” — while train­ing them to ignore any answers. Right there on the wall is a descrip­tion of radio­met­ric dat­ing meth­ods, for instance, and they turn their back on it.

This is child abuse. Those kids are get­ting their heads stuffed with ignorance.”

So, in 8 min­utes of video, a per­fect exam­ple of what Stephen was writ­ing about.

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