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Daisy's article in the 'American Educator' pertinent to both the American and UK education systems and with reference to her book, 'The Seven Myths of Education'.
In 2007, I trained as a teacher and started teaching English in a secondary school in Southeast London that enrolls stu- dents between the ages of 11 and 18. One of the first things that struck me when I was teaching was that my pupils seemed to know so little. Even the bright and hard-working pupils seemed to me to have big gaps in their knowledge.
Before I became a teacher, I’d read newspaper articles about pupils lacking knowledge, but I had always assumed these reports had been exaggerated by the media. I wondered if my experiences were unusual, but the experiences of colleagues at other schools seemed similar to mine. Pupils who didn’t know where milk came from, who didn’t know the name of the British prime minister, who could barely name any foreign countries, and who had no idea of when important world-changing technologies had been invented.
Daisy Christodoulou talks to spiked about taking on the educational establishment.
13 JUNE 2014
Yes, I was a bit worried about how people would respond to it’, says Daisy Christodoulou, a one-time University Challenge winner, UK secondary-school teacher, and now a researcher at ARK schools. The ‘it’ in question is Christodoulou’s book, Seven Myths About Education, and she was right to be concerned. Not because it’s a bad book. On the contrary, it’s pithy, witty, and, at points, even inspiring. No, the potential problem for Seven Myths is that it is perfectly at odds with the educational orthodoxy in the UK and the US.
