Dispatches tonight …
March 6th, 2006 by Sarah
The New Fundamentalists – anyone else see this?
And found on the discussion forum afterwards, just putting it here for my own interest really – an article from the Guardian on ACE curriculum/schools.
March 6th, 2006 at 20:52
Decided not to, although have found others in the current series excellent. Just couldn’t face anything else depressing tonight, wimp that I am.
March 6th, 2006 at 21:01
I’m not sure which is the more depressing, the subject matter itself or the nature of the reporting … as someone who identifies with that ‘end’ of Christianity (for want of a better word) and holds relatively strong beliefs in pretty much all the areas the documentary chose to touch on, I found it very uncomfortable viewing
March 7th, 2006 at 8:11
Lots of our local HE group are ACE people – i have to say that reading that does not endear me to it at all, though i felt the journalist had perhaps made up his mind against it from the beginning. But i would never use that in my home even though the idea of “something to work through” is sometimes appealing.
And i simply cannot see the value in a learning environment that solitary; it makes a mockery of childhood really.
March 7th, 2006 at 9:07
I have to say, in ACE’s defense, that used as a home ed curriculum I could see it working, *if* you use it as one tool rather than letting it use you in its prescriptive manner. Take the way Sue F’s sons have used it as a good example.
But ACE in a school was one of the reasons we chose home ed, it was just diabolical for so many reasons! Yet having said that I have so many nice memories of it myself! I quite liked the monotony of it, you could do the work completely mindlessly!! Not what I’d call education
March 7th, 2006 at 9:37
Grin, it might have appealed to me as a child. In my 3rd year i made myself endless tests where sentences had blanks in them, photocopied them and did one a day for the week before the exam. I got 94% in my geography exam that year!
Our local people do say “we use it as a tool” actually… lol.
March 7th, 2006 at 10:46
The expression for the channel 4 article is FUD. While there might be some truth behind what was written, it’s couched in terms to paint evangelical Christians as weird extremists, while at the same time suggesting homosexual practice and sex outside of marriage are something that all right-thinking people support.
Having no direct personal experience of the schools cited in the article, I can’t truly say how they’re run, but the ridiculousness of the examples cited suggests the article is factually incorrect.
Nuts.
March 7th, 2006 at 15:51
I agree… We watched and I was very unimpressed. I thought the reporting was very poor and the fact that he tried to add in the fact that he used to go to a CofE church when he was a child to somehow make his views justified was pathetic. Made me cross that such one sided opinions can get onto TV. But I think most people would have seen it for what it was…not much!
March 7th, 2006 at 17:08
Sounds like the article has confused ‘evangelical’ with ‘fundamentalist’, and they’re not the same. I’m the former, but not the latter. As for ACE – yes, what Sarah said above. We use it flexibly as a means to an end. We don’t do the cubicles and flags and stuff (ugh) and the boys have questioned just about everything in it at some point so it certainly hasn’t stopped them from querying what they’re reading! There’s some good stuff in it, and for kids who like workbooks and seeing progress, it’s not bad… the European side is slowly de-Americanising the maths and English, which is all to the good, and I do like the way kids can choose their own speed of progress. I wouldn’t use it for anyone under the age of about 11 or 12, unless it happened to be a child who really, really liked workbooks and structure, and I certainly don’t consider it all – or even most – of the home ed process. And while I think most of the ACE schools sound a bit dire, some children love them. The article helped me see that for, say, a child with ADHD the focussed concentration and lack of group activities could be really helpful.
March 7th, 2006 at 17:14
Yes, sorry, it’s probably not terribly helpful of me to put the two articles in the same blog post. One was referring to a television documentary and the other was only related because I found it while browsing forums related to the documentary!
The link comes because the TV programme focussed on schools in the North East sponsored by the Vardy group, which seemed to be run by and teaching fundamental Christian beliefs, hence a whole ‘faith schools’ sideline thing was going on.
March 7th, 2006 at 22:05
Missed the TV programme, unfortunately, but as Toni says I could already tell from the Radio Times blurb that fairly ordinary beliefs of the mainstream Christian faith were being presented as ‘shock,horror, people actually believe this!’.
As for ACE, I know one family that use it and I have therefore seen a little of it (they lent me a video about it) and I certainly wouldn’t want to use it – it’s not my style of educational provision at all, and anyway I don’t believe in 6-day creationism. The article doesn’t make it sound particularly attractive either.
March 8th, 2006 at 18:45
Can’t say I know much about the curriculum, and didn’t see the programme – so maybe I shouldn’t comment BUT it does sicken me a tad that people can be given my taxes to run a school that teaches kids that my lifestyle is wrong. What the state funds should not be allied to any religion IMO.
Meanwhile I don’t see a penny for the education of my kids…
March 8th, 2006 at 21:20
Didn’t see the programme, so won’t comment on that; though the words of the article from the Guardian came out as fair, the tone behind it was fairly clear. Having been to a school where ACE was used and then ditched, it is interesting to learn that plenty of people still use it and that there are kids in the land who enjoy it. Obviously can’t comment on its suitablity for Home Ed either, but I strongly doubt Heidi or I would want to use it were we to go that route. There must be other, similarly-styled workbooks to use, alongside the good old Bible.
March 8th, 2006 at 23:21
Yowser! If I thought The Kings School was anything like that, there’s no way I’d be planning on sending my kids there. It took a few years of discussion before I felt Private Christian Education was the way to go- but it would take longer than a lifetime to persuade me that a school like would be a good choice. Of course, I’ve got no idea what those schools are really like when there aren’t cameras and journalists there, but they sound pretty grim to me, and quite at odds with my spiritual leanings (even though I’m one of those ‘fundamentalists!’