The egregious Michael Gove is not content with his creeping privatisation scheme for England's schools; he also want to dictate what teachers should teach by swingeing changes to the national curriculum. (I've always had doubts about having a national curriculum in the first place, but that's another issue.) His latest wheeze is to say that teachers must include imperial measurements in maths lessons. There is an valid argument in favour of some mention of miles because we still use this measurement (also mph etc.) and ditto pints because milk and beer (and probably some other things) are sometimes, but not invariably, sold in pints. I suspect, too, that many of us – particularly oldies – weigh ourselves in stones and pounds rather than kilos and blanch at a waist measurement in centimetres. But surely the stones and inches will gradually die out.
However, apart from the fact that you cannot just keep adding more things to be taught in an already crammed timetable, I wonder how many of this generation of teachers have any familiarity with imperial measurements and their relationship to metric measurements.
I think this is a daft idea.
Well Labour’s “patriotism” didn’t last very long, did it? 🇬🇧
