Secondary teachers probably despaired at the news that universities believed undergraduates are reaching them unfit for degree courses, and needing foundation years to get up to speed.
\nUniversity staff apparently believe schools are spoon-feeding to ensure children pass examinations. And they\u2019re right \u2013 that\u2019s what government wanted.
\nIn fact, what else did anyone expect when the world started to judge schools by the pass rates in public examinations?
\nOnly now have the universities woken up to protest that, without old-style education, undergraduates are not what they used to be \u2013 not sufficiently inquiring, not so capable of independent study and more demanding of more spoon-feeding and direct teaching than any researching, book-writing lecturer likes.
\nTough. Live with it. In the end, schools can only deliver what the boss wants.
\n\u00a0
\n
\nThe trouble is that when any boss demands something on pain of the sack, workers will do anything they can to provide it. Jobs and lives depend upon success. Exam passes do not constitute education, but the government says they do.So \u2013 you want five GCSE passes? Let\u2019s see which subjects pupils in our school have an outside chance of passing. The year GCSEs were introduced, the large comprehensive in which I worked introduced media studies for students who hated English literature. They could pass media studies \u2013 and they did.
\nI thought it was quite legitimate \u2013 early personalised learning, since we were catering for students\u2019 enthusiasm, which they never had for Jane Eyre. And actually, the course \u2013 the detailed analysis of soap opera structure \u2013 was just as tough in its own way.
\nPersonally, I had grave doubts about an ICT course which gave a student four GCSE passes just like that! \u2013 but who am I to argue with a school which considered its pupils and went for it, shot up the league tables, and won awards for its head who had the balls to devise a way for his pupils to satisfy the government edict about five passes.
\nAs a teacher, I had grave doubts about the amount of information examination boards produced about how to get good grades, especially at A level. I rather liked the old days, when they asked things like, \u201chow far would you agree that Chaucer fails to arouse pathos in The Clerk\u2019s Tale?\u201d (AEB English Paper 1 NEC Syllabus, November 1972), and you had very little idea how they would be marked, and teacher and candidates crossed their fingers a lot.
\nBut these days there is such scrutiny of examinations \u2013 all those appeals! Jobs and lives depend upon success. Teachers are given detailed outlines of That Which Must Be Known before the candidates go near the exam room. There is neither scope nor motive for independence of anything \u2013 not teaching, discussion, study or thought.
\nAnd where there might be, in coursework, teachers have descended, unsurprisingly, into limiting the range so that the material can still be taught, not explored independently. In the olden days of early GCSE, there was such a thing as English and English literature syllabi that were 100 per cent coursework. A class of 30 would produce about 900 pieces of coursework from which the final 300 would be chosen, just for Eng language. I know \u2013 I marked them.
\nNo wonder teachers started saying: \u201cLet\u2019s all do the same 10, okay? Now, what you do for this one is\u2026\u201d (And note that even this reduction produced 150,000 words to be marked) Then they reduced the coursework to mini-proportions anyway, and teachers said: \u201cLet\u2019s do the same book, the same essay on the same character, and it goes like this. And I will correct it until it is completely sanitised and indistinguishable from anyone else\u2019s and you will be sick of the sight of it.\u201d
\nWhat did we lose? Individuality and independence of thought. It used to be called education.
\nWhat did we gain? More children got taught to pass exams. Exactly what the government wanted. And parents, heads and children \u2013 just look at the pictures on results days, and the knighthoods for heads who make it happen.
\nUniversities, it seems, do not want it, maybe because they will have to work harder where secondary teachers left off \u2013 actually teaching, rather than reading aloud notes written a few years back and flogging their own textbook to those who are able to read the whole thing for themselves. And, of course, charging for it.
\nWelcome to the 21st century. \b
\n\u2022 Hilary Moriarty taught English for 25 years, and media studies for three. She is currently the national director of the Boarding Schools\u2019 Association, but writes here in a personal capacity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You mean you still want us to educate people? Why didn\u2019t you say so?! Hilary Moriarty reacts to the recent claim by universities that students reaching them are not fit for their courses<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,20],"tags":[80,186],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-sec-ed","tag-education","tag-sec-ed"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}