To answer my own question, "Evidently I can." So I'll re-post my response to Lizzie Cornish 1, even though it's a little out of date now and I know I was wrong in some of my suppositions. It refers to previous posts which have apparently been deleted: hers as well as mine-posted-as-guest.

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I'm awed by the strength of your argument, Lizzie Cornish 1 (your post 10 May 09 - 03:14 PM). That "...by rearranging these words in the correct order.. 'arse up your stick head your ignorant don't why you'" is, I admit, completely unanswerable, and I can now see the error of my previous ways of thought. I do hope that sarcasm is not lost on you.

I, by the way, am the guest poster to whom you replied; do I gather that the postings of anonymous guests are deleted after a while, for I can't see my original any more?

Are you a teacher, Lizzie Cornish 1? I would hazard a guess that if you are, you have only recently qualified. And I'd also guess that you have no children of your own. I could be wrong, of course, for, regrettably, [patronise] the almost endearing naïvety that you display is not always sloughed off by the slings and arrows of experience [/patronise]. Which just goes to show that there's difference among educational theorists. If I can acknowledge that, why are you unable to see that children differ, too, which was the simple point of my original post?

"teaching a child to want to learn all their lives, is no way about banging facts into their heads, that's what we've been doing since Victorian times and earlier." But then I never said it was, for I could not be so ungrammatical I don't think that the purpose of education is "teaching a child to want to learn all their lives." For some kids, that may be the best way of "educating" them, but for others that way just won't work, which is why "banging facts into thick heads" is sometimes required to dispel ignorance.

And it seems to me (from the results that I see around me) that current educational attainments have little to boast of, whereas those from Victorian times to (say) forty years ago when the rot really started to set in, can hold their heards up.

I think that a dose of Calvinistic realism would benefit not only education but society generally.