While I’m on the subject of ideologues ignoring facts, this thread over at the Website of the obnoxious Local Schools Network is both informative and entertaining, unlike the article that started it.
One of Andrew Old‘s contributions late in the debate says much of what I think about most quack educationalists in two paragraphs:
And now we are back to the usual situation where you are quoting opinion rather than evidence and hoping that if you keep doing it fast enough, and without answering direct questions, you can confuse matters enough for people to think there is some kind of controversy over the evidence, rather than simply between those who believe in empirical research and those who ignore it.
I know that people with pseudo-scientific beliefs do this a lot, but you must know that there are enough people looking at threads like this who know the actual evidence base and will point out that no amount of TES opinion pieces or Eurydice’s casual dismissal of the evidence, can actually change the facts.
The world is full of, and to a large extent run by, people who prefer anecdote and opinion to evidence and analysis. I fear it’s part of the human condition and aligned with whatever characteristic of our species it is that ensures that (for example) accountants grow rich by making simple things (eg sums) look complicated whilst engineers remain poor by making complicated things (eg bridges) seem simple.
But I’ve not much evidence…