And this is news?

Today, as usual, I had a quick flick over the BBC News website, whilst slurping my breakfast pint of tea, to see what was going on. My eye was caught by an article saying there have been criticisms of the education system which is apparently not teaching children maths properly - they are merely being taught to 'pass the test'.

Frankly, I am astonished this is considered to be 'news' as it's been painfully obvious to me this has been the case for at least the last five or six years, given the woeful performance shown by anybody under the age of about 30 when they are expected to do simple arithmetic. [Note - 'arithmetic' not even 'mathematics']. Indeed, I question whether 'teaching to pass' hasn't ALWAYS been a problem with regard to mass public examinations, as I can distinctly remember a teacher commenting when the 'new' GCSEs were introduced something along the lines of 'Oh I daresay we'll learn how to get the kids through these, just like we did with O Levels'. The bottom line is schools, whether there have been exam tables in existence or not, have stood or fallen in the public imagination on the perceived number of qualifications their pupils manage to amass: it's therefore always been in the teachers' interests to suss out the way the examiners' minds work. (Or don't work - but that's another issue).

However, I suspect the main problem with the current format of GCSEs is they have been so degraded with regard to content that even when a child passes one they have no idea of the basic disciplines of the subject in question. This is borne out by the comments of one of the people making the report on which the BBC article was based:

Chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: "As well as developing fluent numeracy skills to deal with everyday mathematics, children and young people need to be able to think mathematically, model, analyse and reason." She added: "We all benefit from the advanced mathematics that underpins our technological world. We need children to be equipped to use mathematics with confidence in and beyond the classroom to play their part in a rapidly changing society." No shit, Sherlock.

By the way, I'm sick of hearing the public denials of the dumbing-down of GCSEs: anybody with half a brain can look up old O level question papers and contrast them with what a child is expected to know to pass a GCSE; and there isn't a comparison... I don't really want to go into that particular rant just now, so bear with me and just share my assumption for the duration of this blog that GCSEs HAVE been dumbed down. The situation is made worse by the low thresholds set to actually pass the things in the first place - I recall hearing that to get a C grade pass at Maths GCSE this year, kids only had to get 17%. SEVENTEEN PERCENT?? In my senior school (admittedly a particularly repressive girls' grammar) if anybody had got only seventeen percent for even a pissy internal half-term exam they'd have carried the shame with them for the rest of their school days. And now this is considered sufficient to give a person what is considered to be the mark of a basic education.

OF COURSE people need to be able to "think, model, analyse and reason" to quote Ms Gilbert - and not just in maths. The problem is people this days are NOT taught any such thing: England has lost, if it indeed ever had in the first place, the value it placed on 'true' education - ie. not the mere passing of tests, but the training of minds to enquire in the first instance and then to develop the tools to serve that enquiry effectively. [As an aside, I use 'England' quite carefully in this context - based on my studies my opinion is the English have never really had the same sort of reverence for education which exists in Wales and Scotland - I would suggest any country which can use 'clever' as in insult in the way the English do has got to have deeply suspect attitudes to intelligence and education].

To get back to the point, more fundamentally if we cut through vogue, prejudice, political-correctness and other flim-flammery the fact remains that to 'think, model, analyse and reason' people need to know the first principles of the subjects in question, otherwise they are just groping around in the darkness of ignorance. Unfortunately, the bottom line is these days children are not even taught the basics - they are taught whatever is in fashion at that particular time, as the educational gurus in power lurch from one thing to another. Sometimes the approach works, most of the time it doesn't. Evidence? Look at a report from a year ago, also on the BBC; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7027569.stm. For those who can't be bothered to look this up, LearnDirect has calculated that 13.5 million people in this country experience stress on a daily basis when they do thing requiring basic literacy and maths skills - because they don't have these skills. Now, before anybody starts imagining 13.5 million people being expected to do nuclear physics, LearnDirect listed the following as being examples of the said 'stressful' activities:
- Calculating best foreign currency rates
- Answering a tricky maths question in a pub quiz
- Working out cooking times
- Unfamiliar words with difficult spellings
- Using grammar or apostrophes correctly
- Hand-writing notes for their boss
- Reading instructions on a label

These are not Nobel-standard events, now, are they?

To cut to the chase, it is absolutely clear to me, and I expect to plenty of other people, schools are not turning out people with the basic skills necessary to carry out 'normal' life - regardless of whether they have GCSEs, diplomas or whatever else the Government have introduced in an attempt to mask this fact. This is because we have, as a society, allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by those who have been telling us things like 'spelling is not important - it's the meaning which matters' and 'you don't need to drill the times table into children'. These people are dangerous, if essentially well-meaning, and the sooner we give them a good verbal kicking - and consign their destructive ideas to oblivion - the better. I am absolutely unshakeable in my opinion that children need to have a solid platform of unfashionable things drummed into them - these are the tools which enable them to "think, model, analyse and reason" - and yes, to rebel if they want to. Without this foundation we are consigning them to the street-corners, and worse, of society... and we all, as a community, share the guilt of this waste.