Education used to be such a simple term. In fact, it used to be a concept rather than a thing. 100 years ago parents wouldn’t say to their children ‘you ought to get an education!’ — rather, you were considered educated, or not. Education was something that just happened, by living, by interacting, by experiencing; education happened everywhere. Today that couldn’t be further from the truth. Education is formalised, measured, assessed. Somehow, from this pinnacle of civilization that we pride ourselves on reaching, we can now measure the efficacy of education. A board of faceless experts, prodded and cajoled by a lambasted government, has decided what constitutes an education and how to go about getting it.
Of course we’d be kidding ourselves if it actually worked: it doesn’t. We spend more on education today than ever before — every country does — but do we see improvements? Is our society more educated today than 50 or 100 years ago?
The problem with politics in general, and bureaucracy in specific, is that everything must be measured. You must have a metric, some way to measure success or failure. The thinking goes something like this: without tests and scores and league tables it’s impossible to definitively state that the quality of education is improving. This leads to classifications, archetypes, subjective measurements of what you should know. A child might know the inner machinations of plate tectonics in the Earth’s lithosphere (perhaps he researched it after the Icelandic volcano?), but because exams don’t cover that topic, it doesn’t count. Attempting to measure how educated a nation is is beyond futile. Britain has ‘lower scores’ than Sweden — but how can that possibly indicate which country has a higher level of education? Maybe Swedes have exams that focus on the Vikings, while Brits examine geography and poetry. How can a score come anywhere close to an accurate reading of education levels?
Back to my previous point: are we more educated today than 100 years ago? Does it matter?
Therein lies the problem: it matters. Not to you or I per se, but it matters to the media – and thus it matters in politics. The Labour Party has had higher education scores than the Conservative Party, thus they are better. Does that mean they’re better at teaching our children or readying our young adults for life, or that exam scores are simply higher than before? If you throw more money at schools does education improve? Again: how do you actually measure it? Why must we measure education?
We haven’t always measured education, as I said. It’s a recent thing. A mass-media, modern-politics thing. Historically, you either went to a college — Oxford, Cambridge — or you were apprenticed in a field that interested you. You would be asked where you studied, or who you studied under. If you were a crafter, you would be assessed by the quality of your wares; an artist by the beauty of your work.
Today it’s almost impossible to measure someone’s actual skill. GCSEs aren’t worth the paper they’re written on and A-levels are a joke. Potential employers, with the inflation of undergraduate degrees, are now seeking students with postgraduate degrees. Where does it stop? It has got to the stage where we are reaching adulthood without the skills needed to survive. Not to put too fine a point on it: the system has failed. More money won’t help it. Throwing good money after bad won’t work. It is a flawed system with a broken scale, where difference is quashed and actual, real knowledge is almost impossible to obtain.
But what can be done about it?
- Remove exams, or at least remove their significance and any kind of comparison between individual students or schools. Test scores in their current form have a value very close to zero. At best they give a student something to be proud of; at worst they provide an entirely false measure of knowledge and intelligence.
- Authority of knowledge must return. Teachers must become authorities in their class room. In a geography class, the teacher is the authority when it comes to geography. Students must look to their teachers or lecturers — currently, teachers have zero control over what they teach or how they teach it.
- Specialisation must return. Schools and colleges should be specialised. Rather than having 100 schools that all produce templated, archetypal mediocre students, we need schools that have specialities. If someone wants to learn engineering, there should be a school or university for that. Children are stripped of their interests and tendencies at a very young age at the moment — instead, a child that likes art should be identified and sent to an art school.
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As you can probably tell from the intensity of this post, education is an important subject for me. I wrote this in about 25 minutes — that’s how much crappy education riles me up. Blood and spit and bile flows from my fingertips!
MentalSarcasm
Apr 28, 2010
“Specialisation must return.”
No no no no! Specialisation would mean that there are children out there who are better at something than others and that’s not FAIR! All children must be the same, if necessary that means the bright ones must be shoved down to the level of the less smart ones so they can all be uneducated idiots together!
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I’m sure I read somewhere that literacy levels in this country have gone down, we used to be quite high in the European literacy tables and now we’ve slumped down the list, which suggests that we’re going wrong somewhere if children can leave school barely knowing how to read or write.
I agree with scrapping exams though. Both my sisters are in middle school now and they seem to be tested more often than not tested, and the results are absolutely bizarre, when my eldest little sister started the school they had to do a bunch of tests to find out how proficient they were in various classes (because, you know, those damn Primary schools always lie in the reports they send on), she was 11 at the time and they calculated that she had a reading age of 13 years and four months. FOUR MONTHS!!! They even managed to calculate right to the sodding month! They didn’t even need a test, if they wanted to find out if she was an advanced reader all they needed was 5 minutes with a selection of books!
Sorry, I’ve now turned your comments section in to a rant of my own, this is the problem with having younger siblings still in education, the system become even more daft when you’re watching your own family go through it DX
Hezabelle
Apr 28, 2010
The interesting thing about tests, exams and standardized education is that there’s a certain level of intelligence that has always been attributed to “working the system” or “street smarts,” even, which means learning to work within societal norms. Whether that means learning to deal with people who smarter than you, stupider than you or just with people who have different strengths. Eventually, when you leave the public school system (I know it’s not called that in the UK but your terms always confuse me) you learn to specialize and you start doing what you’re good at… generally while being surrounded by other people who are also good at it. Whether that’s in a trade-based education or a university.
Also, a general education allows children to learn a little bit of everything while they figure out what they’re really interested in. Since most people don’t really know what they want to do that early.
I do, however, agree with number 2.
Eleni
Apr 29, 2010
In the olden days, parents didn’t tell their children to go get an education because the boys would naturally inherit their father’s work, and the girls were considered ineducable. Is that the education system you’re idealizing?
There are many difficulties in the current education system, but I think it is important to give every child a general education up to a certain age so that they have a wide exposure to different fields and fair opportunities for jobs not dictated by their heritage. It’s obviously debatable how long a child must be given a generalized education–people take different amounts of time to discover what they want to do with their lives (if they ever do)–but since children change so dramatically as they grow towards adulthood, it makes sense not to specialize an education too heavily during that period so that children don’t miss out on topics that they might find interest them. Moving on to the university level, having some specialized colleges is fine, but they don’t all need to be specialized because even at the college age, not all students know what they want to specialize in. I don’t see how liberal arts schools or their graduates are a bad thing. Besides, colleges have specialized departments, so people gain a strong background in whatever major they end up choosing. This doesn’t require a specialized college.
Society has always struggled with the tendency of children to inherit their parents’ place in society (though this was not always viewed as a problem). Attempts at measuring the education offered at different schools, while flawed, are made to ensure that all children, regardless of their economic or social status or where they live, receive an education that gives them a fair shot at pursuing whatever vocation they want. Obviously this is an essentially impossible goal to reach, since there are too many barriers and complications, but we live in a society that believes that all children should be given the same opportunities regardless of birth, so attempts to facilitate social mobility are not all bad.
That said, I agree that many aspects of the education system are flawed. Exams within a given class are a reasonable measure of a student’s skill in the subject, but there is a trend of increased standardized (for instance, state-wide) testing that is being used to rate schools in often meaningless ways. Teachers should be able to teach what they deem important within the given subject and should not be forced to ‘teach to the test’. I think the restrictions of teaching to a test have negative effects that outweigh any benefits.
OK, time to get back to my education… I should add a disclaimer that I went to a pretty elite university, so my estimation of the success of the education system is likely skewed. But I’m at a state school now! Maybe if I interacted with the undergraduates, I’d get a broader view…
Alex
May 1, 2010
I usually comment on your blog (I have a problem with blog lurking), but this one really stood out to me. Love it. I agree that education needs to change everywhere. I was blessed to go to a high school that offered advance courses and am now in graduate school to become an expert in a particular field. Graduate education, at least in my program, is a better method. It forces us to learn details, but also teaches us how to do research and to analyze and synthesize information. We have exams, but they test our ability to analyze information and apply it to our specialty. I know for a face I have learned more in two years of grad school than most of college. C’est la vie. ANYway… great post.
Lady M
May 1, 2010
As my year of teacher training draws to an end, l have to say that my eyes have been opened as never before about the state of the education system in the UK. It is flawed, MAJORLY, and mainly because while the world around us has evolved, become dependent on new technologies and innovations, where information is available at our fingertips, 24/7, we are still told to educate our children in the same ways the Victorians did. That is, sit in rows, learn facts, and regurgitate them to get a decent exam mark so that the government can be happy. Teachers are expected to do more and more paperwork, to take the blame for failing to reach standards when their class sizes are ridiculously large, and include children who often have severe and specific learning difficulties. With no extra time, money or training. What the government fail to realize is that we are educating children for jobs that don’t exist. So should we be focusing on developing skills such as team working, independent thinking, creativity, problem solving that will actually aid our pupils in succeeding in any area of life they go on to after school? I think so. It is not exams that are the problem, as pupils are much happier and progress more quickly when they know exactly how well they are doing. It is fundamentally WHAT we are expected to teach and HOW we are expected to teach it. Alistair Smith is the don when it comes to educational reform. Google it sometime.
topsyturvy
May 3, 2010
I couldn’t agree with your post more! I have been blessed to have 3 children, all boys, ages 7, 6, and 2. As they venture into school I’m finding myself facing the dilemma of keeping my own children challenged within the school system that is available in our area. My oldest son is in 2nd grade, and is bringing home algebraic equations, and not only reading between a 5th and 6th grade level, but COMPREHENDING it as well!!!! His teachers have approached me several times stating that they are finding it difficult to keep him challenged, and they aren’t sure what the next step should be. While intellectually, he is ready to advance grades, he is lacking the desired social skills to do such. The school board, faculty, as well as some college students have come up with a curriculum that he works on at home to keep himself challenged. So, I do agree that it is important that education be adjusted with the times, our children should have the opportunity to become better educated than 50 years ago. The technology that is available today, the information that they can search on the web, the different educational shows that they may watch on television, or the educational games that they may play have offered a new route of knowledge to grow from for our youth. So, it seems for my specific situation, the dilemma wouldn’t be making a higher education available so much, as it is that the mind of a child seems to be growing wise beyond their years.
Foggy Dew
May 3, 2010
I learned the value of testing when I took my SATs before applying to college. Somehow, some way, my score actually improved, significantly, from when I when I took them as a high school junior to six years later after I’d been in the Marine Corps for five years. I learn many things in that time, none of it covered by the SAT, but the one thing I did learn was how to take a test. A skill that served me oh so very well during the next four years in college.
I watched friends worry so much over coming mid-term or final they were almost paralyzed with indecision. What concerned me during school? Classes requiring theses. These classes, in many cases required you to think. To actually use information to form a cogent answer to a question. You could maybe BS a little here and a little there, but in the end you’d better be able to answer the question because the prof had your thinking there in black and white.
Grading written exams is a pain because the teacher has to think about the process rather than just running a bubble sheet through a machine. I agree with your concepts, but maybe switch the first two. Make teachers know what they’re talking about first so they can impart that knowledge on students and then they’ll be better able to judge the students’ progress.
My university had many different colleges and schools. Perhaps it was my affinity for the written word, or the thousand words of a picture that led me to School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Not sure exactly how it happened, but I know one thing for sure. The professors took their jobs seriously knowing it was their reputations I would reflect when I made it out into the professional world. And I’m the better man for it (he said, ending a sentence with a preposition).