Whistle Blowers’ Refuge Area

Dumbing Down Our Education System

We reproduce below a thoughtful and informative piece contributed by a professional teacher, which casts a cold, clear light upon our schools and the deterioration of standards therein as well as the pressure on teachers.

No wonder we cannot produce skilled youngsters if so little is expected of them and so much of teachers.

How many students does it take to change a lightbulb?

How many A level students does it take to change a lightbulb?  Well, they can all do it.  Even those £400 ones in the projector that links the computer to the smart board in my classroom.  They’re very tech-savvy, A level students.  But how many A level students does it take to pass an A level?  Well, that all depends when the paper was written.  Nowadays more than 25 % of them get an A grade and nearly 100% of them pass.  But how would they fare if they were presented with the A level papers I sat in 1976?  (I still have the papers, so it’s easy to make a comparison.) 

Take the French and German A levels I sat, for example.  As well as a reading comprehension, a listening comprehension, a dictation paper and an oral exam (for which we had no idea of the topics we might be asked about, and we were certainly not allowed to have any notes with us) we had to study five – yes, five – set texts. 
Apologies here to the non-linguists, but just to show that these were not lightweight texts, here’s what we had to master: Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac; Molière’s Le Misanthrope; French Romantic poets; Gide’s La Porte Etroite and Camus’s La Peste.  And for German, Goethe’s Faust; Grass’s Nun Singen Sie Wieder; Dürrenmatt’s Der Besuch der Alten Dame; the poetry of Schiller; and Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. 

Now, the government and even some people in the world of Education are incensed if anyone suggests that the standards are lower than they used to be.  But when my daughter studied French A level (having passed her GCSE at A grade) I had to teach her the perfect and imperfect tenses at the start of the A level course because she needed to know them for A level but had not been taught them at GCSE.  She had the option – not a requirement – of studying French literature; an option I encouraged her to take up because of the wealth of beautiful French literature which is so worth reading.  The literature option turned out to consist of reading Camus’s L’Etranger (a book which my French teacher gave me to read at the age of 15, before I sat my O level) and answering some questions on it in her oral exam – no other books to read, and no written paper on literature at all.  What’s more, she was allowed to write herself a crib-card of notes about this book and take it into the oral with her as an aide-memoire. 
Yes, today’s A level students are getting higher grades than ever before.  But I’d like to see them try and tackle the papers I sat.  This is not just the ranting of an ignorant oldie – as a teacher I know what A level standards were like when I sat my exams, and I know what they’re like now.  When I sat O level English, we were not allowed to take any books into the exam with us, and we were expected to quote from memory.  Today’s students are allowed to take their set texts into the exam with them.  Ye gods, what are they being tested in?  Literacy?

Recent research has been reported in the press, which shows that today’s 12 and 14 year olds are at least 2 years behind their counterparts of 20 years ago in comparable tests.  And do you know what the really amazing thing is about all this?  Back then, teachers managed to achieve those results without having to meet TARGETS all the time.  Teachers were actually trusted to be self-motivated and set their own standards – and apparently they reached far higher standards than we teachers do now when we are constantly having to provide evidence that we have met various targets. 
So what do we do?  We play the system.  In the past 5 years, I’ve only ever had 1 A level student in my subject who didn’t achieve an A or a B (and he achieved a C so it wasn’t a bad result).  Every year my Head of Department is summoned before the Head teacher to set the exam targets for the coming exam season.  I have persuaded my Head of Department to set my A level target as “80% of students will achieve A or B”.  Most years I know perfectly well that 100% of my students will achieve A or B – but I set the target low, so that it looks very impressive when I exceed it every year.
And yet it remains true that though the grades awarded are higher, the standards achieved are lower.  I recently heard from a University maths teacher that he now spends the first 2 years of the degree course bringing students up to what used to be the old A level standard.  All this target setting has done nothing to improve our children’s education.  It has just resulted in a generation of teachers straining under a huge burden of paperwork which has increased their working hours to ridiculous proportions.

The government has 2 new mantras: whereas we used to speak about teaching and learning, we now have to speak about learning and teaching (as though the learning could precede the teaching).  And we have now been told that lessons are to emphasise skills over content.  In other words, we are giving our young people information but no wisdom.  We are turning out a generation who can change lightbulbs, but are ignorant of the wealth of knowledge and understanding that have enriched our culture and made this a once-great nation. 

We would welcome comment, confidentially if you wish, to whistleblower@laughingcavalier.co.uk