I Was Too Kind Describing Schools as Institutionalised Childcare. The Reality is Even Worse
After last week’s piece where I suggested that schools may be little more than institutionalised childcare, I have received a number of messages from friends and contacts suggesting I have gone too easy on the current education system. People were keen to let me know that the achievement of a GCSE qualification does not correspond with any ability in the subject studied. A selection:
- “My daughter achieved a 9 (A**) in her GCSE English Literature without having read a book since she was forced to read War Horse in primary school. Despite my best efforts, she has no interest whatsoever in reading novels even though she wants to study English Literature at University.”
- “My son was supposedly taught French for five years at secondary school, got the equivalent of a B at GCSE and cannot speak French – neither can any of his friends with similar marks so it’s not just him being thick. How do all those other countries manage to teach their students English? Why can’t we do it at scale?”
- “I have just resigned from a position at a state secondary teaching Food Preparation and Nutrition GCSE to work in a prep school teaching cookery. The GCSE does not teach children how to cook. With the time allotted to the students I could teach them a whole cordon bleu cookery course, but instead we have to complete a series of dreary work about nutrition, food packaging and hygiene. In my new position I will be simply teaching children how to cook delicious nutritious food – I can’t wait.”
- “My son did well in his GCSE history and is now studying it for A-Level, but he still has no clear picture of the narrative sweep of English history. He has no intellectual scaffold of the core dates of history but instead is taught to laser in on individual documents and narrow episodes and analyse how biased they might be. It’s caused so many arguments between us, I’ve stopped trying to help him.”
Perhaps it is too difficult to teach languages, English literature and the full sweep of history while at school – perhaps all of these subjects are the work of a lifetime’s study, and school is merely there to get the life-long learning going. But what happens when a subject is skills based and children do not even learn the skills as promised? I bumped into a gamekeeper who told me that his underkeeper has got a promotion and is off to Scotland. He’s after a new person to fill the role so contacted the local agricultural college to ask if any of their Game and Wildlife Management students would be suitable. “No,” came the reply, “None of them are up to it.” What followed was a lengthy rant about “What’s the point of the college teaching Game Management if they can’t turn out potential gamekeepers?” Good question. And one that has been answered by a teacher from a similar further education college. “It’s a ruse. A financial ruse. The college takes on children who are entirely unsuited to study just to get funding.” This particular Further Education College has over 4,500 funded students on role – paid for by the Government – and an Additional Learning Support and Wellbeing Team of 52, supporting a significant number of children in further education, who require significant additional help to learn. This rather begs the question about whether further education is the right path for such students.
A woman who works in the canteen at a large Further Education College got in touch to say: “You were too kind, the college where I work is merely a holding pen. All it does is keep the children off the streets.” Another from someone who works in college admin: “I would go further, our Further Education College is a pre-custody suite. My partner is a policeman and we often talk about the direct pipeline of students from the college welfare department to his sphere of interest.”
If you are in receipt of an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) you are allowed to stay on in education until you turn 25. A charming young woman who works at one of the local pubs is one such case. She didn’t achieve any GCSEs but attend a local FE college until she was 24 doing a rotating number of courses: foundation skills, photography, childcare and then animal care. In some she received a level one qualification, in others she just completed the course. Perhaps this is a wonderful way of a civilised country treating its most academically challenged, allowing them great stretches of time to become educated, or perhaps it’s a complete waste of her time and taxpayers’ money. Would there be some other way for her and others like her to learn useful life-skills? A job perhaps?
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.
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You have to put the spirit in there first and then all sorts of things are born. Just look at fertile times in the history of literature. Solzhenitsyn said that in the purges it wasn’t just individual world class authors that were wiped out but whole unborn literary movements. If you take the spunk and the transcendence away then very shortly no one will be good at anything anymore. Rudolf Steiner said of those who are trying to build a technocratic hell – they will defeat themselves because the life of the spirit is necessary even to be able to create the machines and mechanisms of subjugation.
Steiner also said the electrictiy would fog the brain, so how much more does our constant bombardment with differing levels of electromagnetic fields do that? Maybe this explains the poor abilities of school children too.
My son did well in his GCSE history and is now studying it for A-Level, but he still has no clear picture of the narrative sweep of English history. He has no intellectual scaffold of the core dates of history but instead is taught to laser in on individual documents and narrow episodes and analyse how biased they might be.
This means your son wasn’t taught history at all in secondary school but uncritical bullshit theory and its application to arbitrary texts. This is certainly a deficiency of the teaching/ the teachers who never meant to teach history but uncritical bullshit theory.
More than half a century ago, we learned “the narrative sweep of history” in school by starting every year at the beginnings of history for our country and the world, being taught the generally interesting and important things that happened IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, usually ending the school year in modern times before WW1.
By repeating this chronological order every year, with new information added in for variety, the narrative sweep of history became natural to us, and we grasped the bigger picture.
In other words, instead of jumping around all over the place in history in a confusing manner, or focusing on narrow parts of history, as if we were doing a PhD, we learned a little bit about as much of the narrative sweep as possible, giving us a clear mental picture of Time— “an intellectual scaffold”, as the author says.
We were taught chronologically, with getting closer to modernity with each school year. But that’s an aside and I think their might be a misunderstanding here. You were taught history at school. And so was I. But the boy mentioned above wasn’t. He was taught Critical Race Theory and how to apply it to historical texts to ‘prove’ that ‘Britain is and always was inherently racist.’
In other words, he was taught how to manufacture anti-British propaganda from historical sources by teachers who wanted him to learn that.
Excellent points.
I had a short spell over a decade ago teaching science at GCSE (and above). It was all about sound-bites about the environment and Evil Industry. One textbook had as a topic how magnetic fields are related to the current in wires. I was expecting to find it covered, at least qualitatively if not arithmetically, what the field around a wire looked like and how it varied with distance from the wire. No. The exercise at the bottom was not “Calculate the field..” but “Draft a letter to your MP expressing your concern that overhead power lines have not been shown not to cause cancer to nearby residents”. Ostensibly this exercise was to help children who could write sentences but couldn’t do arithmetic. A year later the kids were given two documents to compare and contrast, about the efficiency of LEDs versus incandescent light-bulbs. One was a mock government directive related to Peak Oil, the other a mock company product advert for brighter lights. The spin was that the kids were invited to believe that the company were biasing their figures in order to sell their product, whereas the government gave factual information. It was clear propaganda for [what eventually… Read more »
Thanks to Joanna Gray for this fascinating article with comments from people with personal experience of the problem.
May I add a snippet from a local librarian who immigrated to the UK from Russia decades ago, and speaks nearly perfect English? She said that when she was at school in Russia, her chemistry teacher was one of many teachers who told the students that as long as they KEPT QUIET and didn’t bother her, she would give them full marks. She did not even attempt to teach them anything at all, but just got on with her own work, or leisure reading, at the front of the class, and only interacted with them if someone made any noise.
My kids are now 26 and 23. Apart from the eldest attending for one year, neither went to school. I didn’t ‘teach’ them but encouraged them to delve into topics of interest. We went all over the place, using every opportunity to learn something. They attended social groups, workshops, short courses, museum classes, science & tech classes, etc. It was hard for us as my partner was just an HGV driver, I managed to work a couple of part-time jobs at home so we could scrape by. No expensive holidays or anything. Best time of my life 🙂 They have no GCSEs or A-Levels. The eldest went to college at 15, got an HND, then a PGCE and now teaches in that same college. The youngest also started college aged 15 at Level 1 and was moved up to L3 within two weeks. After taking a year out to work for a music company, she achieved a first at uni (not that she was stretched as it was during Covid), and has just completed a PGCE to teach over 16s. She’s job searching at present. It’s ironic that both have entered the teaching arena but they have a unique insight… Read more »
Will they survive, probably, and will the others that surround them? 🙂
Or, maybe it will be their institutions that collapse.
Well, my son would be able to apply for that gamekeeper’s job mentioned in the article, as well as any other land management/conservation positions. My daughter is qualified in sound technology and, presumably, we are going to need sound engineers for some time yet.
Childhood can be seen as a series of trances. Those states of mind we long for them again. A real teacher understands the enchantment required to bring the realm of the rational to life. In a truly vital culture it is there is every moment and syllable. When that energy dies down it takes huge effort of will to fight against the entropy.
“The college where I work is merely a holding pen. All it does is keep the children off the streets…”
…Brings to mind a long-ago article by Times columnist Giles Coren, recalling how his Westminster College housemaster used to openly tell students the real purpose of education was protecting the public from feral kids roaming the streets.
Cities of Europe – London: We Live by the River – BBC iPlayer If you watch this from the bbc archive you will be amazed to see how we treated children in the past (Obviously it is stage to a degree but still shows a completely different view of childhood and adults relationship to children) – really recommend viewing it.
We could have a civilisation that is way more advanced than this crap if the impetus is found. You look at these centralized power structures. Everything about them deadens the real human spirit. They seek to destroy truth and beauty and they do it very efficiently. There is a message there. It is very difficult to reject the Satanic system because it has inserted itself into so many nodes. And it isn’t enough just to escape. You have to bring about blue skies and beauty again.
Shocking, not shocked.
In most of the countries I know reasonably well, children are present everywhere, all the time, causing zero hassle and the parents are totally chill about it all. French street parties in particular, it’s 1am and great granny is still boogying gently with her 3 year old great grandkid.
In Britain, even marriage receptions are often described in advance as “child free, please”. It’s a sickness, Britain is scared of children. And at the same time, many adults seem utterly infantile, dressed as superheroes and cartoon characters or in pyjamas.
See my comment above to A S and here is the link again Cities of Europe – London: We Live by the River – BBC iPlayer 2 boys wandering around London in 1950s. Very well treated by all the adults in the film and showing independence and sound judgement (plus whistling to get attention in pre-telephone days)
A language at GCSE used to be mandatory. Then Estelle Morris, who soon resigned when she became the last person to realise that she wasn’t up to the task, came along.
She abandoned 2nd languages because they were discriminatory towards excluded kids. It was decided that as leaning a language is a linear experience, miss a chunk & you never catch-up. So, it was abandoned. Now the numbers doing a language are small & getting smaller.
The fact that people can now get A** in GCSEs perfectly demonstrates that exams have become easier over time. If achieving A grade required lots of hard work and a really good understanding of the subject they’d be no need for higher grades. When I took GCSEs in the 1990’s grades meant something, I went to a school that was known for it’s high academic standards, was in the top form (no doubt this would now be considered elitist and pupils and put into classes based on ability) but only got 5 A’s at GCSE and one A at A level. I’m sure that if standards were as low then as they are now I would of got straight A’s, A* or A**.
My 3 children were all born in the 1990s. The now 32 year old told me how someone in their English Literature A level class was told by the [excellent] teacher that his essay was undergraduate standard but she couldn’t give it the grade it deserved because of the marking scheme. The eldest also told me getting an A* in GCSE Geography was dead simple – just lob in the relevant buzz words and phrases and voila! What I found dreadful was that pupils who actually loved a subject and read lots about it in their own time got NO acknowledgement if that additional knowledge was used in an answer in exams due to the marking scheme. Teaching to the test indeed. Now we read that you can pass GCSE Maths without knowing how to calculate percentages??? In fact by scoring just 14% of the total marks you would get a grade 4 which is equal to an old C. WTAF!
Read the article again and it’s worse than I thought. That 14% figure is for the higher-tier maths GCSE for grades 4 to 9 [old C-A*]. If taking the lower tier aiming for grades 1 to 5 [old G to high C].
the report states “… we have thousandsof students able to navigate through GCSEs in such a way that theyavoid mastering key concepts such as decimals, averages, estimation and correlation.
From a report by the not-for-profit “Purposeful Ventures” co-led by Helen Drury their dean of maths
My daughter got a French GCSE grade C without knowing the difference between past and present tense. She now has a 2.1 Philosophy degree despite not reading books. My (bookworm) son found his Latin GCSE so easy he revised for it the night before and got A*.
I know a History graduate who knows only what she was taught to specialise in ie the harrowing of the north, and nothing else about history, not even the date of the gunpowder plot, so she clearly has not read anything else about history.
Rockefeller would be proud.
If you want your children to really learn something, you are going to have to teach them it yourself.
Collecting GCSE’s isn’t learning: it’s just demonstrating the ability to perform …. rather like a performing seal.
It was ever thus in FE in the last 20 years or so. The ‘students’ were warm and dry with pals to entertain them. Many of them were on courses that were of no benefit for them in the future. The teachers/lecturers got paid which was of benefit to them but the courses were rubbish. There were students who moved from one course to another to keep their benefits. They weren’t interested in anything apart from the social side of things and their phones.
There were pre-university courses which did have standards but only just in some cases.
Most students passed their courses with a lot of administrative juggling to maintain the funding of the college. A lot of it is a farce.
As a linguist and previous teacher of modern languages, I can confirm that a GCSE will not teach you to speak French! Nowadays it may not even give you an overview of the grammar. In the past it may have done this, but you need to spend time in the country concerned to really speak the language. There may be other intensive methods of course, but very many hours would need to be put int.