Why is valuable learning time being wasted?

He’s bored because he is intellectually underchallenged by the work, even now in his GCSE years.

The level of work during both his primary and secondary school education, and the education of my other two children, is consistently set to the level of the children of the lowest intelligence, presumably so they won’t be left behind.

This gives scant consideration to children who need to forge ahead, who need a higher level of education than lessons devoted to watching DVDs, or designing posters, or sitting around a table together in a group to do work together instead of individually.

This last gives pupils an ideal opportunity to just giggle together and waste time while teachers can check their emails.

I hate to sound scathing about teachers, who I believe are an invaluable resource, but I can’t help agreeing with Tom Bennett, the Government’s school behaviour expert, who has written an article in the Times Educational Supplement describing the “burning up of an hour” of children’s education with “the latest Hunger Games film” as “just lighting cigars with fivers made out of children’s opportunities”.

He writes, “Every second counts in a school; many children won’t get a second chance to sound out letters, learn about Vikings, run their tongue around algorithms and formulae and rhyme”.

Describing some activities, he says they “generate heat and light but offer no warmth or illumination”.

He singles out asking pupils to design posters or to put themselves in someone else’s shoes: “Role plays are frequently not teaching... especially if the teacher insists on drearily parading every troupe’s re-enactment of the death of Lennie (but updated for the 21st century! Lol) featuring wrestling and five seconds of dialogue.”

He also writes that tasks that ask pupils what they think about a subject, for example “design your ideal room/house/theme park,”, are almost always not teaching, describing them as “usually an attempt to sacrifice content for that holy grail of zany education – engagement”.

He’s so right. Engagement, alternatively known as “being down with the kids,”, is education lite.

It is merely lazy teaching that plumbs new depths of educating that manages to avoid delving into subjects in any depth at all.

My own children have endured lessons where they have watched DVDs, where as teenagers they have sat around a table with other pupils to design a poster – an activity that surely should be confined to primary school pupils – and yes, they have scoured such intellectual tomes as Hello! magazine to find pictures of celebrities whose Louboutins they are asked to imagine themselves in.

I feel impotent with fury that my children’s valuable learning time is being wasted with activities they should have left behind years ago. The children of a friend of mine are pupils at the private Brighton College and on many occasions I have gnashed my teeth as she detailed how her children, the same age as mine, were writing essays in Latin while mine were colouring in posters.

As Bennett writes: “... the learning mind learns from what it attends to, not from what it avoids.

"Education is not some bitter pill to be slipped inside a chocolate drop. Learning about the world is an extraordinary thing.”

So it is and children can’t learn from DVDs or colouring in. It’s scandalous that state-educated pupils are short changed intellectually. Education should be stimulating and exciting, not boring and shallow.

No wonder the UK is slipping down the league tables.

HOW tragically ironic that in the same week it was reported that there are crises in both overeating and undereating.

Last week, the first World Health Organisation global report on diabetes showed the disease is growing on an enormous scale, with four times as many diabetics in the world than there were 30 years ago, fed by a fatal diet of unhealthy foods.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the food scale, people are having to wait sometimes up to a year to see a specialist for eating disorders in England, according to data collected by BBC Breakfast last week.

The two reports highlight how skewed our relationship with food has become, with half the population overeating themselves to death and the other half starving themselves to death.

Both “disorders” are symptomatic of a society saturated not only with too much food but also with too much bad food and too much choice.

If we as a society don’t have the will to eat normally any more, it will take a strong government to withstand the incessant lobbying by the big food companies to lead us all out of temptation and into safer eating habits.