Steve - Lambasts The Education System

I've just finished all my state education, couple of months back. I've been heavily critical of it since about year 10, but I feel like doing it again now, so I will.

My main issue, and what I believe is the crux of the issue, is qualifications.

My school's motto is relevant here. It actually has two mottos. A modern one, "Working Together for Excellence", and an older latin one which translates roughly as "Learn or Fuck Off" (actually as "Learn Or March", but that's less fun to say). The key words here are 'excellence' and 'learn'. Nowhere does it say "Get the Grades" or "Prepare for the Workplace". Sadly, this is what it's about. Teachers teach for exams. Exams are there to assess your ability in a subject and give you a bit of paper certifying that. Those certificates are used by businesses to choose the right employee.

Learning and understanding are merely coincidental. You only get that if it fits in with the course specification. Skeptical? Go up to a teacher after a lesson and ask them whether teaching to exams often comes at the expense of the ideal way a student would learn. The good teachers factor in a few non-curricular lessons to their schedules, and will explain things outside the course structure if you ask them to, but not all will, not all can!

Order is one of the best examples of this. When I was confronted with my first sums "2+5=8", I was under the impression that the you worked out the left hand side and put the answer on the right hand side. True, and enough to get me through that set of exams, but was it a helpful way of learning? A couple of years later they confronted me with sums that were 'backwards',"8=5+?", this made absolutely no sense to me. It was like making a sentence backwards. I told my teacher about this and she just said we had to do them backwards. If I had been taught what the equals sign actually meant, then this would have been easy to tackle. As it was, I was very confused.

And there's another example. Anyone who has been in school a while will be familiar with the chime "why do we have to know this?". We're brushed off with some answer about how it will be useful later on or that a qualification in German makes us more employable or whatever. Fact is, that doesn't help at all. To understand something properly, and I imagine this is true for others too, I need context. Context is essential to have a working knowledge of almost anything. All the teachers know is that we need to know it to pass the exam, but saying this would lead people to the conclusion that the whole system is pointless, and that is not good for well settled classes.

There's a concept called the 'hidden curriculum'. This is a word for a whole group of things that school teaches you but doesn't say it's teaching you. Getting up early in the morning is one, the intrinsic value of work, the idea of obedience to an authority figure, the subdivision of time into little blocks with little or no bearing on understanding or even reality (obedience to the bell) and the idea that there are specific times for specific things, conformance in general (ask anyone why you have a uniform and you'll see what I mean). What do all these things have in common? That's another concept called the 'correspondance principle', that school corresponds to the workplace, and a major function of the education system is simply to drum into you that these things are important.

In a sense, I'm stating the obvious. We all know:

1. We work hard
2. We get good grades
3. We get a good job
4. We get lots of money
5. ???
6. Happiness!

You know, one of the most offensive and/or shaking questions you can ask someone is "Are you happy [with your life]?". Try asking a couple of people, preferably those past their younger years and see what answers you get. Some people might get upset. Who would want to admit that all their life's work, completing step 1, 2, 3, and 4 at much expense, hasn't paid off. Admitting that they're not happy, fully admitting it, is effectively saying they've wasted a huge portion of their life. No one wants that.

Anyway, I digress. Most of us know that the education system is for getting us jobs. You might wonder how different things would be if we learned for learning's sake, I wonder that fairly often. But anyway, at least it's fair, right?

Those entering sixth form now will be completing something like an ALICE test. This can come in the form of a full test or just a questionnaire asking you your race, gender, parent's occupations, etc. Most don't give it a second thought. Most aren't told what they're used for.

They're used to set the first target grades, the grades that the school has to get most people achieving or it's failing, teachers don't touch them. If you're black or your parents have 'working class' jobs, or you don't answer the survey like I did, you'll find your target grades are perhaps even comically low. That's right, black and working class students are predicted lower grades. These grades are used to assess how the schools are doing. If the school is failing working class pupils for some reason, that's okay, because they were predicted lower anyway and the school's statistics won't suffer.

So why are they predicted low in the first place? Because on average, in order of widest gap:

• Middle class students achieve better than working class students.
• East-Asians and Whites achieve better than Pakistanis/Bangladeshis and Afro-Caribbeans.
  
• Girls achieve better than boys.

The argument goes that schools should not have to pay for the fact that certain groups achieve on average worse grades than others. It's not the school's responsibility. From the perspective of the statistics, this makes sense. Schools in working class areas, without the predicted grades lowering, would achieve less than schools in middle class areas. It essentially evens out the table. This makes sense if you're looking at protecting the schools and making the statistics valid.

What does this say about priorities in education? Do we care more about the individual student or the school/stats? Do we accept the inequality as it is (and, as it is, social class is six times more influential on attainment than IQ), or do we do our best to encourage schools to improve everyone? You already know the answer.

I studied Sociology. Can you tell? It's a bit ironic really. I probably learnt more in real terms on that two year course than I did on any other, mainly due to the quality of the teaching. Even then, because we had to cover so much in such a short time, we didn't actually read any theorist's work in depth. As for the other subjects... yes, I suppose maths I learned a lot, but there was no context so it's probably going to be totally useless to me. Computing was an utter joke. If I didn't know about computers before I started that course, I would have failed. Part of this was due to one of the teachers being absolutely terrible, but a large part of it was also due to the nature of the course. It was plainly wrong in some cases. But rather than actually learn about computers as I have been doing since I was 10, we... memorised facts about them. It was possibly the most useless, in terms of learning, course I have taken ever. I stopped going for the last three months because it was just insulting. I got a B. I could have done better, but it wouldn't have been worth it, every moment of that course was agony.

And yet I've coded and run three websites, innumerable scripts, and I've worked for three years as a computer technician. I got into a Writing course at an Arts university when I only took English to GCSE level and didn't even take an arts based subject that far. Go figure.

One day I'm going to start up a free school, and there won't be any fucking qualifications, just learning.

Well... this blog post was a good effort... went off the rails a bit at the end...