Interesting piece by Katharine Birbalsingh, here, on how teaching has gone wrong in the state sector - overly rigid, formulaic, and based, ultimately, on institutionalised ignorance, so that each class is treated in the same way each time. I'm not sure that she's right in saying that Ofsted is to blame, though. She will never find this nonsense in any Ofsted handbook, although David Bell, in his time as Chief Inspector, did much to distort and abuse the process of inspection for political ends. The real problem is with New Labour's domineering strategies and their cloned generation of school leaders and managers, whose dictatorial style is leading far too many children, as Ms Birbalsingh says, to waste their time copying out "objectives" as if that led to their learning anything.
It's also too simple to think in terms of a simple opposition of knowledge and skills, as too many do on the Right. If you don't have skills you can't write an essay, speak French, solve a mathematical problem or indeed lay a brick. HMI's expression under Sir Mike Tomlinson was "knowledge, skills and understanding". The three go together.
The Left has done most of the damage, and is based on a contradiction. On the one hand, it worships people it sees as great intellectuals - Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, Lilburne, and in educational circles, Labov, Harold Rosen, James Britton, Dewey, Bourdieu, even the small fry Terry Eagleton. On the other, it treats intellect and intellectual achievement as profoundly anti-social and elitist. Some achieve more than others, therefore education is divisive. In practical terms, the subversion and control taken by the Left, through the National Association for the Teaching of English and the more diverse group that has wrecked language teaching, has seen the idea that literacy and formal language are the basis of education as elitist and has almost succeeded in destroying them. In so doing, they have deprived the people they thought they were setting out to help of essential skills - without precise, formal language, there is no science, no technology, no history, no employment and no future.