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I protest!

By Arthur Webster of Ask Old Coot

Once again the UK education(sic) authorities are making massive claims of 12% top rank passes in the end of year secondary school examinations.

This just cannot be true! These figures are simply confirming what myself and many others of the older generation have been suspicious of for many years.

Isn't it about time that a more up to date and realistic look be taken at the way we educate our children?

In my childhood years it was necessary for me to have a good recall of things I had learnt in order to be able to converse and debate with my peers. The exchange of ideas and information was at a much slower rate than our children have to deal with today.

It is no longer necessary for any child to be force fed anything but the basic abilities to do arithmetic, read and effectively communicate with others.

The education(sic) authorities are still working in an age of ignorance and they have not taken account of what our children can do in this modern world. The children of my age group needed to carry around a great wodge of knowledge that had been learned (almost) by rote in order to be able to participate in the world around them.

This is no longer the case.

Children are now able to access first rate information on just about any topic that they could imagine - within seconds. They do not need to learn how to remember things, they need to learn how to use the information that is at their finger-tips. We should be teaching them how to use modern technology to enhance their lives and to improve their performance in the wage race.

It is my honest opinion that people over 35 years of age are not competent to say how children should be taught in school. The information age has changed our perception of the world but it has not given us the necessary insight into how it has impacted upon the world of our children.

The humourous complaint of many an adult is that every DVD player should come with a 4-year old to operate it. Now, this might be funny but it is far closer to the truth than many of us are comfortable with. Imagine what our children could achieve if they were taught how to appreciate the way information comes together to create new knowledge and ideas. Imagine the benefits if our children were allowed to use their (currently) wasted talents for productive enterprise rather than for seeing how many people they can dismember in how many imaginative ways in some brain numbing video game.

The world for our children is full of promise and we adults have not seen either the benefits or dangers.

It is time for a radical re-think of what school is all about. We need to get our children on the fast track of the information highway and off the even faster track to the acceptance of violence as a normal pass-time.

We adults need to look at our children and decide that we are going to do our best for them to be able to do their best in a world that, bluntly, we cannot fully appreciate.

Contributor's Note

The hardest thing for an adult to say is "I don't know".

The easiest thing for a child to say is "Just a second and I will tell you."

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Personally, I think there is a dumbing down, Make no mistake the kids at the top of the logs work hard, but today underachievers are moved on because the word fail has been removed from the English Language.

instead of FAIL on my kids school reports. I remember when below 50% was an automatic redo, now it's a Pass with a Not Yet Achieved.

I agree with you, Guy, but I think the biggest 'failures' are us - the adults.

We are stuck in an old fashioned world where knowledge was accumulated by the individual - and some individuals did better than others.

The information highway has levelled the playing field and, it seems to me, any child can access that highway so fast that what they struggled so hard to memorise yesterday is already irrelevant and revised today.

If you think about it, a school end of year examination can only ask questions that are already dated. The answers the children give might have been over-taken by developments. The likelihood is that the examination markers are giving 'incorrect' when the child's answer is actually 'correct' because nobody adjusted the marker's crib sheets to maintain currency in the face of developments.

The basic pass mark when I was at school was 75% for a 'C'. The examinations I passed were only evidence that I could learn to a certain level. The stuff I learned at school only gave me a starting point and was mostly irrelevant to my working life.

I think children today can find the correct, current answer faster than I could remember the correct, 'learned' answer and we should encourage the teaching of the application of knowledge rather than the accumulation of knowledge.

Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, and how to find and create solutions would create very wise students, throw in a little History and Geography to round it out and what more do you need.

Guy Mclaren Aug 23, 2010 01:48

I have to agree. My view generally has been that British education simply sucks now. It's far too commercial to be productive and all education in the UK is now driven by the 'job' market. So most kids couldn't care less about school or university anyway. If you will need a professional certification to get a job after going through schooling anyway, most kids simply fail to see the importance of schooling and unfortunately faculty and teachers simply don't care enough to fix the problem.

I wrote some rants on the issue when I first had to deal with the generally high level of incompetence in the UK marketplace. Here are the links if you fancy rants:

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