Brainless comments from education maven, part aleph-null

[Nancarrow]

[was gonna put in MPSIMS. Then thought, actually there’s vitriol here, off to the Pit. Now just realised entire rant could be result of coffee-deprivation]

So here’s a BBC news report about proposed changes to the primary school curriculum in the UK - that’s 4-11 year olds for non-Brits. I have mixed feelings about it in general… yeah computers are now a major part of our lives and will become even more so in the future (especially when we upload our minds ), but I worry about the guy who says the curriculum has become too fat. Perhaps he referred to very specific parts that are unnecessary, but like most Brits, I think, I have a perception that education gets increasingly dumbed down over time, so the comment raises an eyebrow.

[digression] Certainly I remember that back when I took GCSEs [exams for 16 year olds] 14 years ago*, we got to practice on old O-level papers at least in maths and latin, and we all noticed how difficult they were compared to what we were doing at the time. And now I tutor kids privately in maths, and I see how both algorithmic aptitude and conceptual understanding have been watered down even more. Hmm, need to find the roots of this quadratic, are there two whole numbers that multiply to give 63, holy crap I can’t think of any ZOMG! I’d better use the quadratic formula. Oh noes, I’ve lost my formula booklet. Thank God my calculator can solve polynomials, whatever those are, up to degree 12, whatever that means. But wait! How do I access that menu? [/digression]

What did I come in here for?

Oh yeah, the article. And for me, the money quote:

@Head of the Policy Exchange's education unit

Even with lower pass marks, easier tests, widespread ‘teaching to the test’ and millions of pounds spent on consultants and advisers, our literacy and numeracy standards are woefully behind those of other countries.

Just two little words. What could have been a very meaningful critique of our educational system turns into blathering droolness with two little words.

“Even with”.

No, it’s not “Even with”, you moron. It’s “Because of”. Those things you mention. They do not combat the problem. They almost certainly CAUSE the problem, or at the very least, do nothing at all to combat it. I suppose her “reasoning” must go something like this: our standards are shit compared to other countries. That means our children aren’t scoring as highly on their exams as other countries’ kids. That means we must make our exams easier. That way, our scores will go up. So standards will go up. Yay!

Christ on a stick. You know what’s always annoyed me? I always wanted to be the tallest guy in the world**. But it appears I’m not. What can I do about this? I know! I’ll measure my own height in centimetres, but everyone else’s in inches. That way my height will be the biggest number. Which means I’m the tallest! Yay!

ETA: and now I’ve just realised. There’s a possibility that by ‘even with’, she meant ‘even taking into account’. IOW she understands the link between dumbing down and being substandard, and wanted to say that they’d already accounted for the easy-exam factor, and found that our kids were still dumb as rocks even compared to other kids taking the same stupidly easy exams. But if so, I MPSIMS her ambiguous phrasing. Anyway the main point of this OP, I now realise, was to vent about my incapable tutees. So up it goes.

*if you are a British schoolchild, please don’t bother attempting to, ahem, “work out” how old I am. Save the wear on your calculator’s buttons. Get some boffin from a university to use their spooky quantum physics (or sociology, whichever of those two it is that tells people how to do addition problems) to tell you the answer.

**this is not in fact the case

[Martiju]

There’s a lot in this, so just a couple of points.

Anna Fazackerley is well-known as (at best) an agent provocoteur (at worst a troublemaker issuing handy sound-bites). Her history was with the Times Educational Supplement (and T Higher ES also, which covers universities). Those comments don’t reflect policy in any official capacity - noone would agree at that level that there are lower pass marks, easier tests etc.

O’levels and GCSEs were never intended to be the same. The whole basis behind the development of GCSE education was that the rote-learning, deep knowledge of the O’level system was deemed to be outdated and what was needed was more applicable, base knowledge and, importantly, transferable and key skills. The relative merits are, of course, up for debate but trying to make a comparison is rather like comparing apples and the moon!

That said, in the later Conservative years, following the introduction of the National Curriculum, emphasis began to grow on testing children throughout their educational experience. An almost inevitable by-product of judging schools by the performance of their students is that day to day interactions focus on the assessment and not on the learning - ie. teaching to the test.

This is, I understand, the point of the article. The NC has meant that emphasis is highly concentrated on numeracy and literacy (and some ICT) whilst schools and teachers naturally are keen to bring in subject specialisms - hence the ‘fatness’. This is at best only tangentially related to ‘dumbing down’ which is, as I hope I’ve explained fairly briefly, a bit of a fallacy.

Just one other thing - every single generation thinks the one following has it easy. Having recently looked at some Maths homework with an 11 year old, I would guess that he’s covering things I did at about 14. That said, the NC is designed to introduce concepts and then reinforce them periodically, so again - trying to compare is a somewhat meaningless exercise!