Dumbing down education 'for the kids'

There's this post-practicum sharing session in NIE today for the lit people, and a Lit coordinator from a certain school was there to share with us her school's wonderful literature programme. I can't remember much about it, but it seems like just drama drama drama to me. She boasts about her school's musical production, scripted, composed, choreographed all by the teachers themselves. Drama classes. Drama festivals. Pilot project of introducing Media studies.

What irritates me to no end is that efforts like these are branded as being groundbreaking and innovative, a supposed improvement from the traditional chalk-and-talk classes. These people always insists that teachers today cannot connect with kids using traditional teaching methods, and will go on to rattle about how good the kids are with technology now (playing games, using MSN, blogging et cetera).

So what will kids get out of it all? They have a lot of fun playing, maybe they will end up liking drama, but ultimately how far can they take this learning into the exams? To learn requires discipline and patience, and a huge love for reading. We can't always think that kids today are all hyperactive and cannot stand reading, and therefore we need to rework the curriculum to make them learn other things instead. Any kid in any generation will be playful and hyperactive, so why the concession to students today? Why should we lower our academic expectations of them just because they use the computer more now? Why the war against reading, independent learning, and scholarship?

We should only use these things to spark and sustain their interest in things, but we should always emphasise that there is a place for book reading and learning, thinking and writing. No one will bother making things easy for them as they move along the paper chase route, and we have a responsibility to help them learn in different ways, not just those they are comfortable with.