Education is of vital importance to the functioning of a healthy democracy as well as to its future prosperity.
But there are problems in what happens at present.
We take bright articulate 3-5 year olds and send them to school to prepare them for their rewarding adult life as useful citizens of our democracy. From that promising beginning we develop 10-12 year olds too many of whom are surly, demotivated and inarticulate, averse to any kind of learning, unskilled in even the use of language and of numbers, and determined to be ignorant and useless. There is a problem.
Teachers are generally very bright and highly dedicated. All are overworked and underpaid. They are not the problem. They are victims of a system which, despite all their hard work and dedication to the well-being of their pupils, inevitably forces them to be the operatives of a machine which is too often harmful rather than beneficial.
Subjects. It is taken for granted that education has to be partitioned into distinct “subjects”. And we need specialist teachers for these different subjects, because nobody can know and teach everything. But why then expect pupils to learn and know everything? And subjects stultify by segmenting learning and putting boundaries between different aspects of a topic.
I want to know about China. Does that come under Geography? Yes, I do have some interest in knowing of its geographic characteristic (mountains, rivers, deserts, etc.). But there are many other things I want to know even more, such as its history, its boundaries, who lives there, their religious beliefs, China’s relationship with other nations, its industries, the global significance of its products and resources, its economic system, its political system and current leadership. What “subject” does all that come under? China, of course!
Exams are needed so that we can measure and certify attainment. But we measure attainment for the benefit of the teachers rather directly for the pupils. And we certify attainment primarily so that future judgements can be made on the basis of formal paper qualifications, thus minimising the need for subjective assessment of competence.
When females were first reluctantly admitted to university courses, they were denied the right to any “qualification” at the end. Did their education in any way suffer as a result?
When the primary objective of education becomes the attainment of good exam results, the exam becomes the subject and all else is a distraction. The pupil is not taught to understand but only how to answer a specific range of questions.1
Moreover, examinations do not produce very reliable results when they assess matters of taste and opinion: the grading is then necessarily largely a matter of taste and opinion. With the result that examinations, and hence the subject itself, can degenerate into the study of facts (names and dates and who said what).2
The inevitable quest for objectivity leads to the widespread use of limited-choice papers. Which has the added advantage that e.g. examinations on technical subjects do not test the literacy of the student, but with the sad effect that even the highest qualification in a technical subject does not certify any degree of literacy. And it comes with a serious danger that, unless the questions are very carefull formulated, an intelligent pupil who is completely ignorant of the subject can get a very good score.
Performance. It gets worse. “League tables” of examination results are compiled and published, and they are used to measure schools and their staff. This adds to the ethos in which only exam results matter, and everything which does not contribute is a pointless distraction.
A successful school attracts better staff, even though it needs them less. And a successful school attracts better pupils to maintain its demonstrable success. Which it will also maintain by declining to let pupils enter examinations unless it is confident they will do well. The whole thing becomes a farcical perversion of “education”.
Certification is needed for some things. Particularly where we depend on the skill and knowledge of a practitioner: dentist, heart surgeon, lawyer, accountant, bus driver, scaffolder. And in all cases formal assessment of conformity with prescribed standards is highly desirable — national, or preferably international.
But certification is less obviously needed for many school subjects: history, geography, english literature, even mathematics
Teacher assessment desirable complement to exams. Or professional examiner.
But subject to personal bias (a) towards pupil3 (b) in subject. Needs much effort to impose uniform standards.
Computer assistance increasing use for teaching.
- always automatically tailored to individual (unlike class teaching)
- option to automatically explore subject, try different approaches to overcoming blockages
- hence built-in option to assess quality of different ways of teaching
- can undermine the artificial boundaries between different officially recognised “subjects”, and thus help recreate a more holistic form of learning
- automatically provides a multi-dimensional attainment profile of the pupil, and thus lessens the need for a separate written exam
Syllabus. Subjects tend to be inherently infinite. To impose national standards we need to decide which parts are to be included at which level. The result tends to be the imposition of a stultifying and insensitive production line: a specification of exactly what every pupil is expected to learn in each successive year of their education. For many this adds to their feeling of inadequacy, and increases their determination not to learn. For a few it can be a frustrating barrier to progress.
Academic bias. The whole educational machine is necessarily run by academics, a hierarchy of professionals from teaching assistant in primary school up to professor in university. And the priorities are too easily set from the point of view of the professor.
The problem is most starkly exposed in mathematics. The university view is definitely strongly biased towards “pure” rather than “applied” mathematics, which is all by itself a major turn-off for most pupils, particularly as many teachers do not even understand what pure mathematics is. Within that, some things are excluded because no longer fashionable (e.g. quaternions, and line geometry in three dimensions). The syllabus is then constructed as a statement of exactly what you should learn each year if you are eventually to become a professor of pure mathematics. And that syllabus is demonstrably an extreme form of aversion therapy.
Worldy wise. You really need to know a bit about how your body works: what the different bits do and how you can harm, protect or even improve them. You also need to know enough to get by in this increasingly complicated world (i.e. about e.g. laws, jobs, taxation, banks, services, etc.). And if you are to be an effective participant in this democracy it will help to know something of our political and economic systems, and our various relationships with the rest of the world.
And where will you learn all that? Probably not at school. Why not? It’s all of too little academic interest, or too political, or too controversial, or too untestable. And it’s impossible to formulate an appropriate universal curriculum. In a nutshell, nothing really useful can be taught at school.
But nor can anything demonstrably useless.
Useless subjects. There seems to be decreasing time spent on schools on subjects such as art, music, and drama. It is true that some idealists would maintain that the arts are the essential core of any true education. But we have to be realistic. These useless subjects offer no material benefits to the pupils, tend to be a drain on the school’s limited funds, and (most importantly) are a distraction from the vital task of getting good exam results and a high ranking in league tables.
Similarly with sport. It needs facilities (We can’t afford it, especially since we sold the field), it provides useful physical and mental exercise (Do it in your own time), and it can be very pleasurable (You’re not here to enjoy yourself).
Fun. In the good old days we got children to learn by sitting them in rows reciting multiplication tables, and imposing strict discipline with physical and mental punishments. We don’t any more, so they don’t have to listen. We have no way to make them learn. So they don’t.
Look around. The young of all animals except humans learn by play. They try things out. They have fun.
Unless learning is fun children will not learn.
Notes
- I spent an entire term at school studying previous examination papers. ↩︎
- I spent two terms at university studying “philosophy”, and was passively discouraged from even talking about the subject. ↩︎
- It used to be widely believed that no female was ever allowed to pass the driving test at the first attempt. ↩︎