Filling The Pail

Greg Ashman
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." – As W. B. Yeats never said
Created 22 Nov 2020
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  • Rise of the technoprogs
    08 Apr 2022 • 4 2
    To be fair, the unholy alliance has been around for some time — a penchant for glow sticks, smoke machines and Ferry Corsten, coupled with some good old-fashioned educational progressivism. It’s just ...
  • Struggle and the rote memorisation of facts
    07 Apr 2022 • 15 5
    Humans are unique among species in our ability to learn from each other. Many animals can mimic, but we have taken learning from others to the level of a superpower. We have developed complex systems ...
  • Australia's secret new curriculum
    03 Apr 2022 • 6 2
    According to The Australian, maths teachers have given ‘top marks’ to a new version of the Australian Curriculum that has finally been passed by a council of Australian ministers. If you are one of th...
  • What was your teacher education like?
    31 Mar 2022 • 2 0
    I have created a very short survey to collect teachers’ experiences of teacher education. It contains nine multiple choice questions and an optional tenth free-response question. I reckon you can easi...
  • New South Wales government publishes attack on Cognitive Load Theory
    29 Mar 2022 • 14 1
    In January, I wrote a post about a paper written by Dr. Peter Ellerton in which he attacked cognitive load theory. The paper was published in a journal I had previously been unaware of called Thinking...
  • Can schools be improved?
    26 Mar 2022 • 6 7
    On Wednesday, at The Age Schools Summit, Professor Becky Allen, a UK Academic, gave a depressing talk about the difficulty of improving schools. I summarised Allen’s arguments briefly in this post but...
  • Stuart Robert is right
    25 Mar 2022 • 9 1
    On Wednesday, at The Age Schools Summit, Australian federal education minister, Stuart Robert, acknowledged that there is a serious issue with disruptive behaviour in Australian classrooms. He said he...
  • Fireworks at The Age Schools Summit
    23 Mar 2022 • 6 0
    It is the question on every conference-goers mind: Will the sessions delivery fireworks, as speakers trade sharp observations and opinions, or a bowl of warm soapy water as they all platitudinously ag...
  • Hunter Biden's laptop
    20 Mar 2022 • 13 12
    In October 2020, I tweeted a link to an article by Glenn Greenwald in which he claimed a story he had wanted to write for the The Intercept was spiked by the editors. The article dealt with the tale o...
  • Dud teachers and red herrings
    18 Mar 2022 • 7 3
    I was at the conference yesterday where Australian federal education minister, Stuart Robert, made comments to the effect that independent schools do not tolerate dud teachers and, instead, these teac...
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