Prisoners of the Blob: Why most education experts are wrong about nearly everything

by Toby Young

When Michael Gove characterised opponents of educational reform as The Blob, the term was dismissed as the construct of right-wing newspapers and panic-mongers. The bad news for parents, as Toby Young shows in this pamphlet, is that The Blob is real and it’s coming to get your children. The Blob comprises teaching unions, local authority officials, academic experts and university education departments – in short, almost everyone who will be in a position to shape your child’s education. Creatures of The Blob are united by their adherence to certain mantras: education should be child-centred, not teacher-led; problem-solving and critical thinking are more important than subject knowledge; rote-learning and regurgitating facts are bad, whereas discovery learning is good. These doctrines can be summed up under the heading of ‘progressive education’. Research has shown them to be not only ineffective but harmful, and they have damaged the life-chances of millions of children. ‘Progressives’ claim to be egalitarians, but the effect of their policies is to increase social inequality. Children from poor homes and ethnic minority backgrounds will not be able to compete with middle-class children for the best jobs if they don’t know anything worth knowing. Attempts by governments of different political persuasions to raise educational standards have been frustrated by the total dominance of the education sector by progressives. One former minister compared education reform to trying to disperse a fog with a hand grenade: after the flash and the bang, the fog creeps back. ‘If we want all children to grow to their full stature, not just those lucky enough to attend traditional schools, we need to reject the progressive snake oil being peddled by prisoners of The Blob.’

53 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

Toby Daniel Moorsom Young (born 1963) is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his failed five-year attempt to make it in the U.S. as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine, as well as The Sound of No Hands Clapping, a follow-up about his failure to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter. His obnoxious wit has earned him almost as many enemies as admirers and the title of "England's heterosexual Truman Capote". As the son of a baron, he is entitled to use the title the Honourable, but declines to style himself as such.

Reviews

[Mark Aston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Persuasive, but problematic.

A powerful rhetorical argument for a return to a classical liberal education. However, to lump together progressivist approaches across all age groups is perhaps not fair or realistic. The type of approach to education advocated here perhaps gives teachers a license to ignore students at the expense of content/knowledge. Elements of progressivism remain valuable and the advances in pedagogy of the last 200 years cannot simply be tossed away with the ills of a deprofessionalised education system.

[Mayowa Adebiyi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this short book a while back. Its written against all leftist ideas that dumbs down the rigorous nature of an effective education system - memorisation, exams and such hard things children don't like but which are good for them, are here defended.