Before we start shooting at the new regime, a last crack at the old one. It arises from a summer reading of Ben Oldacre’s ‘Bad Science’.
In this tour de force of excoriation of snake oil merchants he highlights a learning assistance programme called ‘Brain Gym’. An import from the wackier reaches of California, it was allowed to appear on the website for the Young Gifted and Talented Programme supported by the old DSCF.
‘Brain gymnastics’ purport to improve blood supply to the frontal lobes of the brain by a number of improbable contortions of hands and neck. This process, it alleges through a fog of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, stimulates the brain’s seat of rational thinking. Mr Balls in his day accepted to the Commons Science & Technology Committee that ‘Brain Gym’ had “little merit”. Nevertheless, ‘Brain Gym’ was taken up apparently by many hundreds of schools, and reference to it is still to be seen on Ed’s former department’s website, as though permanently endorsed by government.
The fact that it is there demonstrates how, so casually, a thoughtless bureaucracy can impinge on the minds of earnest and credulous people – in this case teachers, all too scientifically illiterate – looking for a quick fix to a believed problem.
The ‘Brain Gym’ example is hard to beat as a study in how easy it is for central bureaucracy to fail to control itself or be controlled against making mischief in promulgating ideas.
Ideas in the hands of bureaucrats who don’t know what they are doing have the potential to be dangerous – as ‘Brain Gym’ could be if it weren’t so daft as (as thankfully a number of sceptics’ contributions to the website attest).
The new mastermind for schools, Mimsy Gove, claims he wants to see an end to his department’s fiddling with the school curriculum and its delivery. Behind his pretensions to localism, however, his essential centralism leaves him firmly in the rank of usual government suspects. We shall see soon no doubt what he’s really made of.
Juvenile
edu-can-do 