It is so enlightening to read all these “new” ideas in The TES . Like the report from Finland that music is an important ingredient of a child’s education and that crash academic learning at 5 is counterproductive. And who would have thought that teaching children to think was helpful in their learning career as proposed by Mark Edwards. We are also discovering, or should I say re-discovering that over-testing is harmful, diet is important, the teacher-pupil relationship is an active ingredient, and excessive workload reduces teachers competency, to name but a few. All these examples gave me a vague sense of dj vu about it, until I read about the current debate over phonics, and it hit me. Of course. This is the 60s, all over again.

Since there doesn’t seem to be any way of stopping these people re-stating the obvious, is there any chance at all that someone could perhaps record all these “re-discoveries” in something like a 21st century Educational Domesday Book, and if we are ever, God forbid, tempted to re-invent the whole caboose all over again in 50 years time, we could refer back to our How-to-Teach D. Book and save ourselves a lot of time and money. Somebody once said, “If you don’t learn from history, you’ll repeat it” and that’s an historical fact.

Mike Todd, Main street, Askham Bryan, Yorknbsp;nbsp;nbsp;