Michael Gove's chief achievement at Education was to insult the teaching profession by suggesting that teaching would be better done by university graduates without teacher training than by trained teachers.
He also seemed to be trying to write the History and English syllabuses himself, and went in for silly grandstanding gestures, such as sending a copy of the King James Bible to every school. He may have got one or two things right, largely by chance, but, overall, it is not surprising that he had to be demoted to Government Chief Whip.
I have always considered Dominic Cummings an absurd person. After all, he is a History graduate from Oxford who complained that there were too many Oxbridge Arts Graduates in the Senior Civil Service. As Richard Littlejohn would say, you couldn't make it up.
Cars controlled by computers means cars controlled by computer programs. Having worked as a computer programmer, I know how many bugs there are in most programs. There is an old joke about a computer programmer who is driving his car to Gatwick Airport to take a holiday flight to Majorca. He hears on the radio news that a computerised air traffic control system has just been switched on. He immediately turns around and goes home.
To be fair to the regulators,there seems,anecdotally, to be some evidence emerging that safety tests were faked, in the sense that cladding materials submitted for tests were not the same as those actually used. It also seems to be the case that at least some of the people involved in the supply and installation of the cladding knew that they were using this material inappropriately.
Dominion and Smartmatic are rival and unrelated companies. Neither uses software supplied by the other.
So, the pandemic has hit betting shops hard. Perhaps there is a God after all.
There is plenty of evidence that the syllabuses for Biology, Chemistry, and Physics have been reduced since the National Curriculum was introduced. I have seen textbooks for G.C.S.E. Combined Science in which the physics chapters completely omit the topics of Magnetism and Lens Optics. About 20 years ago, I found myself in a pub in Reading talking to one of the Chemistry Teachers at Wellington College. He told me that it only took him half of every term to teach National Curriculum Chemistry, and he could then use the rest of the term to teach real Chemistry. You say that Geology is taught as part of physical geography. This may well be the case, but unfortunately the National Curriculum mandated the Earth Sciences topics of Geology and Weather/Climate to be taught as part of the Chemistry component of Science , thus taking up time needed for teaching Chemistry.
There is no "pearl-clutching" going on. Teachers have written letters to newspapers and even taken early retirement in protest about what they were expected to teach. If you look at G.C.S.E. Science textbooks you will see the Earth Sciences topics stuck in the Chemistry section to this day.
I don't entirely disagree with you on the depth versus breadth issue, but obviously when three subjects are being crammed into a two-subject time allocation on the timetable you don't get the breadth either.( I have been researching changes in the school science curriculum for a magazine article I am trying to write.)I have seen a textbook for G.C.S.E Combined Science in which the Physics chapters entirely omitted the topics of magnetism and lens optics. Clearly this is not acceptable .As to the philosophical question as to whether arbitrary boundaries between subjects should be respected, I think that a failure to respect the existence of discrete subjects leads to a downgrading by stealth of the qualifications of teachers. You get Biology being taught by Physics graduates who do not know any Biology, and Physics being taught by Biology graduates who do not Know any Physics.
I would Like to endorse itdoesntaddup's remarks about the need for rigorous science education. For most of the past 30 years, the standard of intellectual rigour in the science curriculum taught in most English state secondary schools has been the lowest in the industrialised world.
When Kenneth Baker's National Curriculum was phased into secondary schools in the 1990s, most schools were forced to replace separate courses in Biology,Chemistry, Physics, with Double Award Combined Science, in which core elements of three sciences were crammed into a two subject slot on the timetable. To make things worse, the Earth Sciences topics of Weather and Geology were arbitrarily assigned to the Chemistry component, thus reducing the time available for teaching Chemistry.
In the mid-2000s there was a further stage of idiocy, the introduction of "topic-based" science education, whereby students would be taught some application of science and then be taught the principles on which it was based. For example , a class would be taught about genetically-modified food crops, then taught the principles of genetics.
In recent years these mistakes in the curriculum have been corrected to some extent,but things still aren't as good as they were in 1990.
There is not the slightest reason to believe that the election was rigged. The leader of the senate Republican caucus Mitch McConnell has said that the election was fair, as have Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, and the former Republican Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger. I doubt if you could find a single Republican Senator who sincerely believes that the election was rigged. As for the rest of your comments, most of them belong to the genre of dystopian science fiction.
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