哲学教育在英国：没有法国的“硬性四小时”，却无处不在
France has required four hours of philosophy a week in the final school year since 1808 and examines it. England has no equivalent slot. Dr Zhihao Yan, a philosophy PhD now teaching in an English primary school, argues that philosophy is nonetheless everywhere in English classrooms — inside religious education, PSHE, oracy work, English writing and even science — and names the cost of that arrangement: content with no exam output is the first thing squeezed out in SATs and GCSE years. He traces England's philosophy-for-children infrastructure to SAPERE, founded in 1992, whose accredited schools serve an unusually disadvantaged intake: 59% of pupils on free school meals or Pupil Premium in its 2024 impact report. And he follows the evidence where it goes, from the EEF trial that found two months' progress in reading and maths to the £1.2m scaled replication that found no significant attainment effect at all.
看学习障碍门诊不是新鲜事，难的是教师该不该区别对待
A learning-difficulties clinic at a Shanghai children's hospital drew a wave of comment from parents hoping a prescription might fix a bad report. Dr Zhihao Yan points out that such diagnoses are routine in Britain — and that the British worry runs the other way. There, the fear is that a label licenses a teacher to expect less. He reports from an East London primary where a class of thirty may include two or three pupils who cannot follow the lesson and one teaching assistant to support them, and from a classmate placed in a class with eight; a teacher cannot designate a child as having special needs, only a doctor can, and the application for more support can take two years. He then takes apart learning-styles theory, which he argues turned respect for difference into a licence to lower the bar.
英国教师危机：从热爱到离职，只需三年？
"I can't remember the last time my husband and I had a serious conversation." Dr Zhihao Yan heard that from an English primary teacher on a month-long online training course where two-thirds of participants could not stay for a full session. He uses it to open an account of why England cannot keep its teachers. A primary teacher may cover up to thirteen subjects. Teaching is only part of the job; assessment reports and administration push real hours well past contracted ones. He traces the shortage from the late 1990s through austerity-era budgets and rising rolls to the post-2015 spike in attrition and the early retirements of the pandemic, and notes that around 42% of secondary physics is taught by non-specialists. His own PGCE opened with survival advice and the line that nobody who has not cried has really done a PGCE.
中考作文“高考化”，值得点赞，但还可以更好
Shanghai's 2024 zhongkao asked fifteen-year-olds to write on "I too am a water-drawer", against a prompt comparing the world to a formless pool. Dr Zhihao Yan reads this as real progress: it is harder to pre-package than the narrative titles of the previous decade, and it rewards handling an abstraction. He then names its limit. The prompt fixes the metaphor — why must the world be water rather than a mountain, a fire or an atom, and why must growing up be drawing water rather than digging or climbing? His larger argument is about what the exam teaches teachers to teach. Because high-scoring zhongkao essays reward emotive narrative and ornamental phrasing rather than argument, classroom writing has drifted that way too — leaving pupils underprepared for the reasoning demanded at gaokao, at A-level and in any university.