Remember when a student who needed to repeat a grade in school would be ‘held back’, rather than promoted with the rest of his cohort? Apparently there’s a new term for that: ‘Expert’.
In Grantham, the parents of the entire kindergarten class were recently informed via email that two of the children in the class had been
selected to be the ‘Kindergarten experts’ next year and repeat Kindergarten. Please congratulate [name] and [name] on their new roles. We are sorry we could not keep more children.
A third child was also selected, but his parents declined the ‘honor’.
There’s so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to begin. How about with a linguistic distortion that would make the authors of Newspeak blush with envy? Congratulations indeed, on becoming a kindergarten expert by failing to master the kindergarten curriculum!
But wait — don’t education experts now say that kindergarten is supposed to be ‘play-based’? How do you fail a grade where you’re supposed to spend your time playing? What does failure even mean in this context?
And think about the kids who are being — well, not promoted exactly, because it’s only these two kids who are being promoted to the role of ‘expert’ — but sent on to first grade. No congratulations for them. Just condolences on not being special enough to be retained as experts. What lessons should they be taking away from this?
But the really scary part is: Why would the school designate these kids as ‘experts’, and announce it to the parents of the entire class, asking for the kids to be congratulated? Do they really think that this designation is cause for celebration? That would be delusional.
Or do they know that it’s not, but expect that the parents (and the students themselves) will be too clueless to notice the complete disconnect between words and meanings? That would be both cynical and condescending. It would also undermine the ability of parents to trust what they’re being told about how their children are being educated.
Considering that these are the people who have been entrusted with the education of future generations, which of those would be worse?
