A Tangled Web

Education Debate - "De-educating Rita"



Mick Fealty's latest contribution on the topic of the "A" level can be found here.



This is my latest response.



Mick,



Thank you for your recent response on the topic of our Education system. I think it important for me to try and outline what I see as some practical steps necessary to restore the traditional values I have advocated.



1. The National Curriculum should be transformed and focused entirely on English, Maths and History. The teaching of these subjects should be much more rigorous with the emphasis shifted away from experiment and discovery and towards teaching a body of knowledge. Without a sound basis in these subjects, other subjects become less meaningful.



2. Teacher training colleges should be closed in order to negate the influence of university-trained educationalists whose contribution to teaching has been a total disaster. Instead teachers sould be trained in selected schools in the public/private sector.



3. The radical egalitarianism of successive Governments to ensure that an exam is only a "good exam" if it enhances the "self-esteem" of those taking it must be stopped dead. Enriched self esteem is not the purpose of the education system -knowledge is.



4. Parity of input and output are two very different things. Students do have varying abilities and it's time to realise that lowering standards so everyone can claim a prize makes the prize itself worthless and defrauds those awarded such. We must ensure examinations allow for varied output - 96% pass rates suggest the opposite is happening.



It is my view that Britain is de-educating. The corruption in our education system is evident from infant classes to univerity.. To deny that the "A" level has been bastardised in the name of radical egalitarianism is, in my opinion, to deny the evidence produced each August when exams results are unveiled.Of course the "A-level" scandal intensified when even easier AS-levels were introduced a year before A-levels were completed. These were even easier and then contributed to the overall score for A-levels when the final exams were taken.



As David Hargreaves wrote in the Daily Telegraph a few weeks back,



In 2000 there came a further, seismic, shift. From now on, all A-levels

became "modular", with half the papers customarily sat after one year (the AS) and the balance (the A2) at the end of the upper sixth. Pressure for this had arisen, in part, from the politically awkward recognition that "full" A-levels were simply unattainable for some pupils. It was a change with which many teachers were compliant: some were fired by considerations of equity, and some by an understandable anxiety to protect numbers studying their subject. Pupils were often enthusiastic too, being less intimidated by

a subject when they could accumulate marks towards their result through regular examinations, with opportunities to re-take if they scored poorly. Great for grades this may have been. It has only harmed scholarship.



To be a "traditionalist" in 2004 means being a radical. It means considering an education revolution. It means challenging the educationalist elite and their political accomplices. It means swimming against the flow before standards go right down the drain.



The debate on this topic has been stifled because the media itself is rampantly "progressive" and views traditionalism with ill-disguised contempt. Thus the web provides one of the better places for this important debate. Let's see one politician in NI prepared to stand up and challenge the Educationalists, the Teaching Unions, the fraudulent examination standards. Are we really to believe that this is the ONE topic on which there is political harmony - even as industry and universities struggle with educated ignoramaces?



The truth is that there IS a crisis in Education - but it is considered impolite and politically reckless to mention it.