Poor misled consultants

Educational quackery has had a hard time lately. Questionable approaches such as learning styles, multiple intelligences, facilitated communication and Brain Gym have come in for a lot of negative comment and bad publicity. It has been said that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but let's trust that parents and schools take note this time and seriously start demanding evidence before they commit to questionable educational solutions.

Spare a thought, however, for some misled consultants selling snake oil educational products. Many of them were duped by the unscrupulous originators of these products. I have come across teachers who were retrenched and then used their retrenchment packages to acquire training up to the required level in the quacking granfalloons (franchises) that they bought into. Having spent their measly severance pay on nonsense, they now had no option but to continue. Yes, they should have known better, but critical thinking and evidence supported practice have never featured strongly in teacher training.

Even sadder are young people whose parents paid for them to do courses that sounded scientific and that they hoped would set them up as entrepreneurs in the burgeoning market for educational solutions. Neither they nor their parents had the background or training to distinguish science from pseudoscience.

I've seen this happening especially in the brain based pseudosciences. The charlatans who sell neuro-nonsense know only too well the allure of neuroscience.