The standard of Latin required for getting a GCSE has 'plummeted', according to the author of modern textbooks in both Latin and Greek. John Taylor, head of classics at Tonbridge School, says the unseen translations that used to be required at 'O' level in the 1950s and 1960s would now be considered 'A' level standard.
One other little piece of information: only one in 800 children now takes Greek at GCSE.
John Taylor was giving a talk this morning on the teaching of Greek and, to a lesser extent, Latin.
When he remarked that standards of language required had 'plummeted', another teacher said, "We're not supposed to say that".
Her remark suggests, though of course it does not prove, that teachers often have an unspoken agreement that they will try to reassure parents that everything is just fine in education. Perhaps they see themselves as having a vested interest in the status quo. Perhaps they think they have some kind of duty of loyalty to government propaganda on the subject (and rather less loyalty to the children, the parents or the truth). But there are other teachers who have a submerged sense of outrage at the dumbing down they believe they see.
It was suggested at John Taylor's that nowadays, Latin student do more literary criticism. This is the kind of excuse that is now used across all subjects. The idea is that children are being taught to think.
In many case, I would suggest, the primary and secondary school teachers who are supposed to be 'teaching people to think' are not well equipped to do so. But in any case, this attempted exercise - whose effectiveness should be demonstrated, not just asserted - does not need to take place in all subjects. Lessons in philosophy, particularly, but also English literature and history are places in which learning to think is or can be pretty well part and parcel of the subject.
The reason why this obsession with the idea of 'learning to think' is worrying is that it takes away from the business of communicating to children a substantial body of knowledge. That, surely, is at least a part of what education should be about.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
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There was a report just a few months ago, if I remember correctly, that the number of words in Latin GCSE that pupils were expected to learn had just been reduced by about a third (exact figures were given).
What concerns me, when I hear of pupils getting 11 A or A* GCSEs is that they appear insufficiently challenging to help pupils discover what they are really good at. This is a pity.
It is good to accommodate less able pupils within the exam structure, but there are better ways of doing this than dumbing down exams. For example, for the less able in maths, why can't a 'practical maths' GCSE be offered, covering things like arithmetic, probability, statistics and all the things that would be useful to someone following a non maths-based career. The rigour need be no less, but it would allow those with a talent for maths and the intention to pursue it further , to study a separate GCSE that examines the subject in more fundamental ways.
This would mean exams and a syllabus designed to really provide useful learning to pupils appropriate to their talents and without the neeed to artificially inflate the results.
Were the government to get out of the exam business, we could then allow independent providers to satisfy the market. Their reputations would then depend on relevance and rigour.
Posted by: HJHJ at May 26, 2006 02:55 PM
Nope, that's what started the slide. When exam boards competed for work, the driver was not the quality of the exam, but how easy it was to pass.
Schools would shy away from exam boards that were 'difficult'. You do need a central organisation that is tasked with keeping up standards ; just not one that can be pressured into creating artificial 'improvements'.
Posted by: Paul at May 26, 2006 03:35 PM
No. No. No. No.
The first job of education is certainly not to conmmunicate any 'substantial body of knowledge'. What we know, or what we think we know, is in constant flux. Theories come and go, old ideas quickly seem out of date. Objective truth may well be out there, but it is way beyond the reach of schoolchildren or undergraduates. The best thing educators can do is not to feed their pupils some arbitrarily constructed cohort of basic factual 'knowledge', but to train them to understand the process of critical analysis and informed decision making. This way they can sort out the plausible from the dross. Independent thinkers are far more valuable in a free society than drones with no imagination.
Posted by: Jonathan Healey at May 26, 2006 11:54 PM
Paul,
I am old enough to remember when there were truly independent exam boards and schools often chose between them according to their preferred syllabus and the reputation and standard o the exam board concerned. They definitely didn't go for the easiest - Unversities knew which exams boards were being used.
The drop in standards has occurred since exam boards were amalgamated by the government, giving less choice and inflating results to meet government targets.
A single authority is definitely not the way to go as various government-directed monopolies illustrate.
Posted by: HJHJ at May 27, 2006 04:54 PM
Err.... no.
Schools are run for targets. These are
(i) Exam results and KS2/3 tests. These are gerrymandered ; schools do dodgy courses to get themselves up the league tables, teachers write coursework, exams get easier. There was the infamous KS3 'practice' for the English tests last year which had the same questions as the real test.....
(ii) Truancy. Reduced by fiddling the figures, subject to occasional purges. As with all managerialism, the purges concentrate on soft targets.
(iii) Incidents of violence etc., dealt with by 'sweeping it under the carpet'. Most people do not realise how bad schools (at Sec. level) are, they are far worse than most think & it is deteriorating rapidly. It's a mirage. Made spectacularly worse by inclusion, and the quite amazing decision to include all pupils with behavioural difficulties by 2010.
Teachers do not have choice over what to teach. If you look at the "samples", supposedly voluntary but mandated sometimes by schools, sometimes by LEA, and often by OFSTED they tell you waht to do, what to say (absolutely literally), what the answers are, what to do next.
e.g. Try reading http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/keystage3/respub/ictsampley7 sample 7.6 on Control (it's down at the bottom).
It is so boring it's unbelievable. It takes real skill to make control (controlling devices by computers) dull but they've managed it. I think the pupils should be commended for not rioting.
Posted by: Paul at May 28, 2006 09:38 AM
My old school dropped Latin a couple of years ago... :-(
Posted by: Raw Carrot at May 28, 2006 11:32 AM
Paul,
You're missing the point. We all know that the government is fiddling the figures and applying ever more central control so your comments are hardly a revelation. The solution is not only to do away with it when it comes to exams, but do away with government control completely. The government has no business running education.
One central exam board (which will inevitably be government controlled) is not the way to go. We have seen how government control of exams has reduced rigour even in independent schools. Competing suppliers is the way to go throughout education.
Posted by: HJHJ at May 28, 2006 09:51 PM
I see where you are coming from HJHJ but it's more complex than that.
In the past most people stuck with their own local exam board - mostly anyway. If you were in Wales you did the Welsh one, in East Anglia, Cambridges and so on.
Two things came into play more or less at the same time, and interplayed to produce the current shambles.
The first one was the introduction of a desperate desire to up the exam results at any cost.
Teachers used to - I did when I first started - do their best for their classes, try to make work interesting, help them and so on, but basically it was up to the pupils to pass the exams. Unless your exams went spectacularly awry it didn't really matter, no-one bothered with it, no league tables.
Nowadays your career can be damaged by a drop in exam results even if that's simply because you've got a lower ability bunch than you had the previous year. Some groups are simply better than others, for arbitrary reasons. Teachers know this, so they gerrymander.
The second was the quasi-privatisation of the exam boards.
The two together caused a spiral of collapsing standards.
An exam board perceived as "easy" (whether correctly or not) acquired a whole new stack of candidates. Exam boards perceived this and followed suit.
Where the privatisation/capitalism argument doesn't work with exam boards is because the quality of the product can be whatever you want it to be. You can write a really tough exam or a really easy one, it requires the same amount of time, it doesn't cost any more. It is a classic prisoners dilemma. The reward for an exam board for producing a rigorous exam is going to be mass movement of pupils to easier exams to keep the league tables up.
It's almost like inverse capitalism, where people are drawn to the poor quality product.
Exam boards could run more efficiently privately (they are laughably incompetent) but that wouldn't solve the quality of exam problem.
It needs an unbiased standards monitor (and how I hate standards monitors !).
It's like if you privatised driving tests. If you don't lock the quality in the standard will drop because of the pull to the perceived easier testers. Even if this is *wrong* other testers will pick up on it and follow suit.
The apotheosis of this is Thomas Telford School, which you may know of, with it's laughable GNVQ ICT course, allegedly worth 4 GCSE grade C - and that *is* run like a private commercial entity.
Posted by: Paul at May 29, 2006 11:21 AM
Universities did know what boards were used. But these days they want one thing ; numbers. It is no longer a challenge to get into University.
Posted by: Paul at May 29, 2006 11:24 AM
Education is about preparing for life. It is right that our education system adapts to reflect the changing nature of work and of society.
We no longer live in a blue-collar low-skill economy. We should welcome the dropping of dead languages in favour of technology, business, and communication skills.
Posted by: Nuke Labour at May 31, 2006 08:33 PM
Nuke Labour,
While Latin/Greek are "dead languages" they are of immense value. As for "technology, business, and communication skills", what does anyone learn from a degree in Business Studies that they couldn't have learned through experience at the coal face - rather than over 3 years of drunken excess and debt?
Posted by: Raw Carrot at June 1, 2006 11:05 AM
You think they are replaced by useful skills ? They are replaced by 'citizenship' (aka New Labour Studies), Media Studies and similar tripe.
The useful skills are the difficult ones. They're the ones being abandoned at a rate of knots. Read the new 'Science' syllabus and weep :(
Posted by: Paul at June 1, 2006 01:45 PM
Unfortunately education is one of those areas not served well by markets. The 'competition' in the form of league tables has encouraged grade inflation and falling standards because schools are forced to turn their pupils into exam-passing machines rather than actually teaching and assessing them.
I know it won't wash well with many of the readers of this website, but the fact is education needs freeing from the dead hand of the market.
Posted by: Jonathan Healey at June 2, 2006 08:19 AM
Well, yes and no.
The market forces on schools are, as you suggest, a complete shambles. It simply produces joke standards where the barely literate get reams of A's and a degree. Warwick Mansell in the TES did a very simple study of 'the 100 most improved schools' ; he removed the joke qualifications, the GNVQs etc, and this removed *all* the improvement in all cases except two.
However, the market doesn't rule in other places. Schools have little choice over what to teach. One doesn't suggest they can teach anything - it's just now regimented (everyone does the same thing, literally) and (as to be expected from this lot) boring beyond belief, as everyone religiously sticks to the dullest curriculum ever created (it takes real effort to make Control in IT boring).
Some other things are wierd. Teachers all getting paid the same. There is a surplus of primary teachers, and a shortage of maths teachers. In the real world, maths teachers are paid more than primary teachers. Not in the fairytale land of the Public sector though. (Teachers I have mentioned this to say that any other system 'wouldn't be fair'). The salary you get is also tied more or less to your length of service (except for promoted posts of course). Thus there is a tendency to employ inexperienced teachers over experienced ones because they cost less ; and even if the experienced teacher is happy to work for the same they can't. This also encourages teachers to make a nest for themselves. Likewise you get paid the same for working in a leafy middle class primary than you do a tough inner city one (excepting the London Allowance).
As with any system where there is zero competition, it stagnates, people skive (why work if it makes no difference ?) and so on.
So markets out in terms of exams and league tables, and freedoms for schools within that.
Posted by: Paul at June 2, 2006 02:58 PM
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I think it's more the case that teachers will get into trouble if they state publicly what they (mostly) admit privately ; viz.
- exams are far easier than they used to be
- exams provide far more information than they used to (e.g. the latest ruckus over 'source books') which makes some exams a test of comprehension not the subject
- some subjects are simplified further so they can be taught by non-specialists ; e.g. science and "ICT" (an education only concept) which attempt to remove the 'difficult stuff' (and the interesting stuff !)
- coursework is cheated on far more than is publicly admitted, and there is a vast grey area of 'help' 'writing frames' and 'resubmissions', before you even look at coursework on ebay and companies who write it for you and more blatant cheating.
- a large amount of the improvement in exam results is down to joke courses which are overvalued in the league tables. Remove those and the improvements vanish.
The cast iron evidence of this is grade inflation.
It is feasible that with better teaching and education, one could say improve grades by 10-20% (though there is no evidence of such improbement and much against).
It is implausible that it has risen to the extent that it has - 97% pass at A level - and this is with pupils being encouraged to stay on post-16, so the ability range of 'A' level groups has widened and fallen on average.
When I was at school (& I'm only 42) getting an 'A' level A was an achievement ; only the real smart children who worked their socks off got those. I was smart but lazy, so I got B's. AAA A-levels were even more unusual. Now they come free with a packet of Smarties.
I recall the exact point of change in Computer Studies (a subject I used to teach). In late 1987 I picked up the first ever sample 'A' level paper that was designed for pupils who had done the 16+/GCSE (e.g. not 'O' levels).
I read it through and puzzled what I would teach my new 'A' level group for two years, as I reckoned they could already answer the questions. I tried it. They did.
The difference between the new sample 'A' level paper and the one that had just been sat by my other groups was absurd.
The sad reality is that no-one in the system has a vested interest in pointing this out : Government, Exam Boards, LEAs, Teachers, Pupils and Parents all 'gain' - theoretically from this pretence.
Anyone who goes against the flow is likely to suffer. Independent Schools talk of doing the IB, the 'O' levels and so on ; there exam results will 'fall' in comparison to those who play the game.
Posted by: Paul at May 26, 2006 10:36 AM