Saturday 25 August 2012

The Education Delusion Revisited.

The furore over the falling GCSE grades reported here has moved on a stage. Those employed in the world of education are now seeking a wholesale review of this year’s marks. Teachers are very angry apparently. They say that revised methods of assessment have caused the apparent decline.

That’s hardly a surprise, is it? The problem with running a culture on numbers is that numbers are easily manipulated simply by changing the method of calculation. They’ve been doing it with crime and unemployment statistics for decades. So why are both sides in this dispute still slavishly accepting the axiom instead of challenging it? Why is nobody seeing the bigger picture and asking the fundamental question.

If you exclude the professions, there are relatively few jobs that require a level of education beyond numeracy, literacy, computer skills and a working knowledge of the culture. You can teach all that long before the school leaving age, while individual skills are best learned at the workface as they always have been.

Send more and more young people into extended education if you like; I have no objection to that. Just don’t pretend it serves any purpose other than to reduce the unemployment statistics in a world where there simply aren’t enough jobs. And, most importantly, don’t place so much freggin’ reliance on it! Doing so creates monsters, including greater levels of stress and an increasingly divided society.

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