So sang those Pink Floyd boys, no doubt seeking to be post-ironic (or something), given the grammatical incorrectness of their warbling plus of course they were all terribly well educated chaps themselves. In my earlier post I lamented how successive governments have messed around with education and merely succeeded in making it less effective and more expensive. I suggested people should leave things (all things) alone. The latest proposal from HMG is to declassify a load of things like BTECs in nail varnish application as being no longer equivalent to GCSEs. If I stuck to my principles, I'd say they should have left things be but of course I do not have to stick to any principles so I'm going to suggest they might usefully have been a lot more radical.
We're in a kind of "two wrongs don't make a right" situation here. I agree with the government that it is wrong to encourage schools to play games with the league tables the way they do. As a for instance, I know of someone who puts kids through a BTEC thing in business studies. Sounds a bit more academically rigorous than painting your nails you might think but the thing is, this qualification is assessed entirely on course work which can be almost endlessly resubmitted, the result being that it's almost impossible to fail and it counts as 4 GCSEs. It is of precious little value to the pupils but doesn't half help the school climb up the league tables. So stopping this kind of nonsense must be a good idea, right?
Well not completely. The thing is this: how much of the stuff you studied at GCSE (that's O level in old money of course) is of use to you now? In my case, precious little, unless you count getting the odd pub quiz question right but I don't think that's the main point of an education. The same probably goes, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, for A levels and degrees. Now I say this and I'm an academic sort of a chap, who likes learning stuff and is not so good at practical things. But what about all those kids who are not academically inclined: if it was a waste of time for me to do Latin and chemistry O level, how much more of a waste is it for them to be forced to do this kind of thing until they're 16?
What I think we need is to do GCSEs, or a similar thing, at age 14. One would hope that after about 10 years of schooling that everyone has a decent grasp of the 3 Rs (optimistic maybe but if they haven't by that age, will another couple of years help?) Then after that, you should be able to decide whether to go down the academic or practical route. It would seem to me a much better use of many people's teenage years to learn about plumbing, electrics, carpentry, etc., rather than learning the names of the bits a plant or which French verbs take etre (sorry - can't get a circumflex accent in this thing) rather than avoir in the perfect tense (I know this but can I speak decent French? Pas du tout.) If you're destined for a vocational career, the sooner you start learning, the better. And for the academic types, it might be better to start specialising a little earlier too: universities are regularly bemoaning the poor standards of their first year students so a couple of extra years spent in more depth on your degree subject might be handy.
So maybe my former call to lie down and do nothing should be modified. I think it should be something like: lie down and do nothing until you've thought it through properly but when you have, do something radical - don't tinker!
As any fule no!
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