Are you sure she's not a clone?

@CrispyMystery Lets see where the kids are in twenty years time shall we?

How dare you!

And when they are, they end up with Evergreen State College, riots, and plummeting enrollment.

But they’re So wISe and beautiful and they have sO mUcH to teach us......

I wish they would ask the children what it is they actually want. Because I imagine if they did they would find that it's the teacher at the front of the classroom telling them what they need to know. I absolutely hated 'student-led learning' group-work, brainstorming etc etc.

@@transamination I agree with you that teaching from the front is more effective, but I think if the children were asked, a lot of them would say they wanted group work because it allows lazy pupils to get away without working. It also makes it much harder for the teacher to maintain control over the class. Asking the pupils what they want undermines discipline, authority and structure; two things that we badly need to reintroduce into our education.

So glad they smashed their GCSE results!

What's the book?

@@saffigrey5887 Battle Hymn of The Tiger Tachers, and The Power of Culture is the second book

Before 1997. Before the labour party got elected.

I can tell you we had 5 decades of normal schooling going backward from the late nineties. Back in the days when Indoctrinators didn't mess with kids' heads. Schools were far from perfect, but they weren't cesspools of bent ideology. What is truly incredible is how short a time it's taken to reinvent this wheel.

School was crap in those days though.

School was crap back then. I only enjoyed and learned something at a school which would look like her worst nightmare.

I guess her methods are good for schools in crappy neighborhoods though. Never been in one, we had no crappy neighborhoods as such when I was a kid. But my university looked like something she would probably approve of and I was mildly said very unhappy there.

I'm sure you are better than that. You have a doctorate. Why would you want to be drilled in the 'Michaela Way' - trust me, there is no room for individuality in her system.

I thought that too

It sounds like my American 1980s primary school, to a degree. We had a few good teachers that made classes fun. It wasn’t a whole class participation situation but our history teacher (who was also a drama geek) loved to bring costumes and props and on incorporate them into the lectures so we could get more context. He had 3 yardsticks taped together with a fly swat on the end. If a student fell asleep or wasn’t paying attention he would smack them on the head. He was a rare treat, through. I went to a public school filled with schoolmarms that taught my parents. They had 20-30 paddles lining the walls (former students brought them new paddles, some obviously from kink shops) and some boys were beaten daily. It reached a point where they started giving the teachers a reason to beat them. We would hear someone say duck, and do it because we knew a student was getting ready to hurl their desk across the classroom and at the teachers head. I was paddled in front of the class for missing three questions on a math test. One of my teachers, who made it very clear that she didn’t like me because of one of my older brothers had written & preformed a Monty Python-esque play about her screwing all the Baptist preachers in our county while using roach clips as nipple clamps, gave my friend a pack of gum and told her to offer me a piece on the playground. I was paddled for chewing gum, etc. In the early years (kindergarten - 2nd) some rather insane shaming tactics were used. One teacher would make you pull your pants down in front of the class so she could attach a cows tail. It had sharp wires on the end that scratched & cut the skin. She poked it through your pants and you had to walk at the end of the line all day. Another taped my mouth shut with duct tape and made me sit on her desk in front of the class for 4 hours. I wasn’t allowed to eat lunch. I was 10 min late coming in from recess because my friend and I were throughly submersed in giving a dead bumblebee a proper burial in the sand box. By the time I reached high school the Satanic Panic had reached an even harsher early 90s persecutory phase against teens, and I watched 5 of my friends (including my first love) be demonized as Satanists and expelled because they listened to punk and metal and sometimes wore black concert tee’s. All were making A’s & B’s, and were moderate Christians or borderline agnostics at that time. Not afterward. There was a rightful and needed backlash to conservative education that quickly swung too far in the other direction. I’ve found a lot research on alternative schools to be refreshing, but it’s not something most parents can afford or have access to. I don’t remember half of what I learned. I have not used most of what I learned in elementary or high school. In the U.S it is a test factory and some teachers are recommending medication for perfectly normal child behavior, to keep students in their seats. I don’t agree with giving every child a trophy, denying awards for achievements because it may hurt feelings, etc. I do think children learn in different ways and don’t see the harm in having options. It’s not wise to implement trend after trend and rouge parenting or ideological philosophies into general education, though. *Edited because I can’t see. Flipping allergies

I don’t know how you fix the horrific mess, and I’m still not sure which version of someone else’s ideological, educational hell is worse. One of the biggest problems we see in the U.S is recess & physical education being drastically cut back or out entirely. Children in younger grades are not given an opportunity to burn off the energy they are exploding with. They have a harder time sitting in their seats, and then medication is recommended to deal with the perceived problem. This is more of a problem for boys, who are in a system that is largely stacked against them. All research shows getting time to go out and run around & play like little mad people helps children and teachers focus. Some people I enjoy listening to that have spent years researching alternative education, like Dr. Peter Gray, also object to children being given too many universal awards. He discusses studies involving 2 groups of children being asked to draw a picture for a incoming guest speaker. One group was told they would receive award certificates if they drew a picture. The other was not. All the kids enjoyed drawing with markers prior to the experiment but they found the ones that received a certificate drew worse pictures (quick, get it over with, get the certificate with a gold star) and lost interest in drawing for fun afterward. The other group that received no awards drew better pictures and continued drawing for fun. Edu systems run on excessive awards for nothing. There is nothing wrong with recognizing honest achievements that required hard work but there is an out of control reward system, implemented in the name of “self esteem” that does more harm than good. Again, that is prime evidence of parents being allowed to overrun schools with their favorite parenting guru’s trends. It started when I was in school (actually before but started getting out of control in the late 80s) but was primarily focused on the younger students/millennial generation. This is odd because it was based on horrible research, with questionable methodology, that said generation X had lower self esteem than other generations. In the U.S this was partially based on a study where Gen X kids were put in a room with their mother and one puzzle. The mom told the child she needed to leave the room a few times. At one point she brought a guy in, introduced him, and left her child alone with the man for a few minutes. Gen X kids kept playing with their puzzle and were fine. The study was repeated with millennials who were put in a room overflowing with many different toys. They lost their minds and screamed uncontrollably every time their mom left the room. Millennials had stranger danger hammered into their heads at a higher rate than Gen X (and the younger half of Gen X was hammered with the misguided mantra too but not to the same extent) and hyper/helicopter parenting was becoming the norm. None of this seemed to factor into the study on “attachment”. Millennials were said to display healthy attachment and high self esteem. Gen X was said to have low self esteem and unhealthy attachment, therefore all focus on self esteem needed to be on millennials. It made no sense whatsoever but was held over educators heads and used to make demands to focus on self esteem over education. Things have progressively gotten worse since and we see more and more calls to get rid of everything because feelings. There are and will always be some truly horrible teachers out there who are malicious and should not be doing the job. Parents should have been a little more involved when I was in school but I cannot put the blame on them alone. Most of us never told our parents what was happening because we assumed they went through the same things with the same teachers. Not so. They were fresh and good once. We got them years after they lost their minds and should have retired. At the same time, parents have become insane when it comes to believing that their child can never do anything wrong. *The demonization of community colleges and trades that occurred when I was a tween was appalling, as was the push to prevent teens from having jobs/learning the value of $ because they needed to spend all their time focusing on getting into a 4 year college. This is not what happened, and it’s not something every family can afford to do. Kids ended up with more time to goof off and people in the community went from seeing teens that would help them (I’m in a rural area) cut and bale hay, mow their yards (and not always for money. sometimes they simply wanted to help elders who needed it) quickly disappear after Gen X. It isn’t a coincidence that the same one demonizing learning trades were largely responsible for the bloated university administration machine we see today (in several countries) and an obscene increase in tuition.

Wonderful, but did I hear her say “inside of”?

@@pollysshore2539 Thanks for the reminder of the bad old days. People should definitely not be nostalgic for the way it used to be. My school wasn't as intense as yours, but I do remember teachers roughing up the kids who were from broken homes and misbehaving at school. They got trouble no matter where they were. My French teacher spanked little kids in the 80s. Some teachers were great but I had a bad one, I found it very hard to get a good grade in that class. I hardly remember what we learned at all. We needed to do hands on things! Not copy notes off the black board. The desks with connected chairs caused horrible pain in my shoulders. GOD it was crap.

Kick their a$$ like they did us in the 80's?

Thanks Joe

Many seminars are taught in small group tables these days. I myself prefer the horseshoe

You mean physically....not politically? :D

@@bodspafc they need to move the Overton camera

When do you think he will learn that horizontal stripes .. ahh .. well, they can ... er ... AREN'T flattering? KOut

No, I’m not prepared to allow religion the trick of claiming that every virtue and anything beneficial to society came from religion. No it didn’t.

Well said. This is a superb format. I have told many friends and colleagues about it.

OMG...That doesnt surprise me. Anyone can see shes either naive or a BS merchant. that almost everyone in the comments is deifying her shows that this audience is not nearly as quality as one would think.

In what ways was it terrible? I'm interested understand the reality of it.

Well her school had top GCSE results so the problem is probably you.

@@pyranomics7229 what's the expulsion rate like? The school she worked at previously had a very high success rate becuase they got rid of every "problem kid"

what utter nonsense

Agreed. Of course they are connected. That is not to say - as they said earlier in the show - that good structure and discipline at school doesnt help a lot. But the home environment has a huge impact.

He is on our radar - watch this space!