Last night I attended an Intelligence Squared debate in London on the subject: "All schools, state as well as private, should be allowed to select their own pupils".

Lord Tebbit, one of the speakers, said that when he did National Service after the war, this was a time when the literacy of every young man was tested. He said that 95% of the young men called for National Service were found to be literate - and that despite the enormous dislocation to education that resulted from the war. This compares with some 20% of the present population who are now said by the government to be "functionally illiterate".

He was using this statistic to support his argument that the reduction of selection since the war had damaged state education. I would be glad to obtain chapter and verse on this. If the figure stands up well, it is very important since it indicates more clearly than any other fact one is likely to discover that the quality of state education has been on a declining path.

In this case it would fit in with my main contention on education, that state education has been a disaster for Britain and has deteriorated more the longer it has gone on. In the 1940s, there were plenty of genuinely independent church secondary schools and many primary schools had not been in the hands of governnent for very long.

Lord Tebbit went on to suggest that all state schools should be denationalised and handed over, I think he said, to charitable trusts. Most of the vast bureaucratic superstructure of local authority and central government would be removed. There would be vouchers which would be worth more for those children with difficulties. This, he suggested, would transform our low standards of education as schools competed for custom and parents could genuinely make choices.

The motion was clearly carried. Before the debate, there were 339 votes for, 200 against and 152 abstentions. After the debate, there were 451 for, 202 against and 48 abstentions.

For myself, I regard the argument over selection and, in particular, grammar schools as a distraction from the most important point about education: that nationalisation of education has been a disaster and should be reversed.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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One small part of the cultural decline of Britain consists of the way in which newspapers now have sentences such as this: "Chelsea fall behind in title race".

This is the use of a verb in the plural with a singular noun. The sentence should read: "Chelsea falls behind in title race". There is only one Chelsea. The fact that it is a collective noun is irrelevant. It is still singular as any grammar book will confirm.

The use of plural verbs with singular nouns can - and is - defended as being one of those developments of the English language which naturally takes place over the years. Yes, indeed it is. Not many years ago, the Daily Express, of all papers still held out against it. But now I believe it has given way. Or, "Now they have given way" as many people would write these days.

But my view is that this is not simply a development of the English language that is arbitrary and means nothing. It is a change which reflects the failure of schools in Britain to teach much grammar for the past thirty years or so. That is why the change has taken place. It is a result of the inferior education which millions of people have experienced in recent decades. It is also an example of the way in which culture can travel from the least educated upwards as well as from the most educated down.

I am sure that all the top people in the BBC are well enough educated to know that it is bad grammar to write, "Charlton Athletic have announced that they have called off takeover talks with potential investors." (Link here.) But presumably they sanctioned the change. They felt that this was now common usage and that they should follow it, even though it was wrong. Thus has our written culture been formed by the least literate. Does any heroic newspaper still hold out against bad grammar?

I thought I might check out the Times of India. Yes, it has this sentence in the current online edition: "Arsenal has kicked ahead in the Premier League title race". Ah! Marvellous. A verb in the singular. What a relief. (Link here.) But unfortunately the headline for the same story is, "Arsenal make big move in Premier League title race." So the Times of India is not wholly holding the line against the poor grammar taking over the former 'mother country'.

How about The Times here in London. Does it cling to correct grammar? No. From today's online edition: "Arsenal have thrived while Chelsea are running run out of steam in the absence of Drogba". (Link here.)Dear, oh dear. It is a long way from the days when the advertisement used to read, "Top people take The Times".

I know that I have probably made a number of grammatical errors in writing this post. I know, too, that whenever someone writes about grammar, there is nothing more pleasurable than pointing out his or her grammatical failings. I have prepared myself to suffer such blows. It will be worth it for the pleasure of writing, as I have long wanted to, about this change - no, this deterioration - in the writing of English.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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The government continues to suggest - without much objection from most of the media who simply assume it must be true - that this country must do everything possible to increase the number of graduates. The theory is that this is an information society where an increasing number of people who want jobs need to have higher level skills and education.

The first skill which state welfare in Britain is failing to teach to as many as one in five children is the ability to read. Undaunted by this failure, the government likes to imagine that the wholesale increase in university places has been a 'good thing' and there should be much more of it.

The specific argument of the government is that this expansion of places is necessary on economic grounds (not cultural or to further individual well-being). It is this ground that is demonstrably absurd for a number of reasons described in The Welfare State We're In. Now comes further evidence. High numbers of those who go to university either do not want or cannot get jobs that reflect the level of education they have received. There is no apparent desperate shortage of graduates. There is no apparent need, therefore, to make more of them. Not on economic grounds, anyway.

One in three graduates ends up in a job that does not require a degree, researchers have found.

Art, design and humanities graduates and those from former polytechnics have the worst job prospects, while students of vocational courses, such as law, medicine and teacher training, are most likely to find degree-level jobs.

This is from the Telegraph a few days ago. And again:

In 1992, one in five male graduates was engaged in non-graduate work at the age of 25.

But by last year, the number had risen to more than one in three. Among women, the proportion rose from one in four to just under one in three. Among creative and arts graduates, almost six out of 10 ended up in jobs for which they were over-qualified, as did 30 per cent of English and humanities graduates.

Meanwhile, only one in 10 who did vocational courses took on non-graduate jobs, while the figure was one in five among those who did maths and sciences.

Researchers at Kent University found graduates of former polytechnics were three times more likely to end up in a job for which they were over-qualified compared to their Oxbridge counterparts.

The full article is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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The true scale of the failure of state education in Britain is reported only rarely. That, in itself, is a subject of interest. But today is one of those rare days when truly important figures providing evidence of this failure are on at least one front page.

This is an excerpt:

A quarter of teenagers are leaving school with practically nothing to show for 11 years of compulsory education, a report discloses today.

Last year, about 147,000 pupils failed to get any GCSEs higher than a grade D. This included 28,000 - almost one in 20 - who failed to gain a qualification of any kind.

The findings, in a report published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, come just weeks after head teachers warned that schools were producing an "army of the unemployable'' as tens of thousands of teenagers quit education at 16 with no qualifications.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the Government's over-emphasis on testing and targets was fuelling truancy rates and causing children to skip exams and slide into delinquency.

The report criticises primary schools for failing to help children early enough - and says secondary schools often entrench disadvantage.

It says working class pupils are more likely to attend worse-performing secondary schools, which will be seen as an explicit criticism of government reforms.

Researchers also warn that the Government's obsession with league tables had "adverse effects for low achievers.

(full story in Daily Telegraph)

It is easy to be distracted by relatively minor facts and the major, central ones can go unreported for most of the time and forgotten. But this is truly important and should be stuck on the computer screens of every education journalist: 147,000 children each year fail to get a single grade C or above in their GCSEs.

It is shocking. It is a dreadful failure of state education. It should be a scandal which reverberates year after year, as the scandal of NHS waiting lists used to do. I do not blame the present Labour government in particular for this - though it has probably made its contribution to the lower of achievement. It is the fault of having education supplied by a state monopoly. State monopolies tend to be incompetent. They tend to put in the wrong incentives for many of those involved including parents and children as well as heads, teachers and the vast, uncounted army of non-teachers employed in education by central government, quangos and local authorities.

Anyone who cares about education in general and particularly the life chances of those in the lowest quarter of society, should be demanding the abolition of state education as we know it. It condemns thosuands of children to illiteracy and makes them more likely to become alienated delinquents as they are forced to stay in education despite having lost all interest in it.

Why, then, is this failure of state education so rarely written and talked about? There are a variety of reasons. One is that those of us in the media tend to be middle-class. We are not the ones primarily damaged by the failure. Middle-class newspapers, particularly, just are not that interested.

A second, perhaps more important, reason is that education correspondents, with a few honourable exceptions, tend to 'go native'. They go for civilised briefings from well-intentioned civil servants and politicians. They thus tend to be sucked into the official view of how things are going. They read hundreds of optimistic government press releases.

Thirdly, there is a desire to believe that state education is a 'good thing'. Evidence to the contrary is seen briefly and then put to one side and forgotten.

All these are human reactions. Quite unexceptional. But it can also be seen as negligence - negligence in reporting the truth.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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I have just spent eight days in Naples. My daughter and I stayed at a flat in a relatively poor part of the City with a young couple. (They advised us not to wear good watches or carry credit cards or any substantial amount of cash.) The wife told me to that "most" children in Naples go to private primary schools. The children on the floor above with whom my daughter played - offspring of a family of modest means - were at a private school.

"Why?" I asked.

She said it was because the government schools were not 'secure'. There were children there who were aggressive. There were knives.

This seems to be the turning point for many parents around the world. I think it is often very difficult for parents to see that their child is getting a poor education. But they quite clearly grasp and react to any physical danger to their children.

The wife is not an educationalist and there was no sign of any newspapers in the house. So, while liking and respecting her greatly, I would not use the information she gave me as evidence in a book or article. It needs to be investigated and confirmed. But it interesting, as an anecdote at least, that there are people who are not rich at all, in Italy, who send their children to private schools.

She said it was quite different in Sicily, where she comes from. There, most children go to the government schools. Implicitly, the schools are safe there. She also said, more puzzlingly, that in Naples most children do go to the government schools at the secondary school stage. Her explanation was that, by then, the good children have learnt to cope with the bad children. I think that definitely needs more investigation.

The price paid for the schooling seemed incredibly low. She said it was 140 Euros a month and that the children went from 8.15 to 4.00 for that price. The cost was much lower if they left a few hours earlier. I wondered how on earth the cost could be so low.

It is a pity that, as far as I know, there is no on writing about the failure of state education in advanced countries. James Tooley writes about its failure in poorer countries. But there is another big story out there. If anyone has the time to find out more about the numbers using private schools in Italy, I would be fascinated to learn more.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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To my astonishment, James Tooley and I this evening won a debate in which we proposed the motion: "this house believes that state education has failed". The debate took place at the English Speaking Union, in London. The voting was 48 in favour and 12 against.

The contribution that struck me most came from a woman who said she had been teaching in adult education for twenty years. She said she had noticed a significant change in her students. Now, three out of four of them had trouble with reading. They also had a poor understanding of grammar and punctuation. So instead of getting into analysing the works of Shakespeare, she was having to spend time helping with these basic literacy problems.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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This interview with Richard Sykes, head of Imperial College, is another reflection of how disastrous Britain's state education has been:

Sitting in his neat office in Imperial's main administration building - a dizzying cube of blue glass that hovers at the centre of the South Kensington campus - he still gets worked up at the thought of the new GCSE. "It's superficial stuff, fine for the general populous, but where are these people who are going to be the drivers and leaders of tomorrow? How are they going to do their A-levels if they're never getting the grounding of the single subjects?"

His tirade against falling standards is backed up by a count of those he welcomes to his college every year. "More and more come from outside the UK: 30% of our students now come from outside the EU and 50% come from outside the UK. What we're doing is educating the elite of the world, not the elite of the UK. Young people in the UK today, particularly from the state schools, are not able to get the qualifications to come to a place like this."

The full article is in the Guardian (see also the entry below).

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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What is the point of David Cameron if he is going to send his children to maintained schools? Why have a Tory leader who leads his children towards an underperforming nationalised industry?

We have had universal free state education in Britain for more than a century, yet swaths of our population remain uneducated. The government's own Moser report of 1999 found that one in five adults was functionally illiterate (given the Yellow Pages, they could not find the page for plumbers).

And this section is to the point:

Cameron should advocate vouchers for the UK. He may have found a good maintained school but, by sending his children there, he has ignored the many pupils who leave school functionally illiterate and innumerate.

The full article - in the Guardian(!)- is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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Figures have now been released which provide further evidence that the supposed improvement in educational standards under the current administration is not what it has been claimed to be. Fewer than half of children manage to get five GCSEs that include maths and English.

Overall the pass rate drops from 56 per cent achieving five A* to C grade passes to 45 per cent once maths and English are included.

The full Telegraph story is here.

The only thing that surprises me is that a government that has been so keen to mislead the public for so long about its achievements in education should now be releasing these figure.

Additional...

The BBC website has slightly different figures. The following story also shows that the performance of state schools looks even worse once they are separated from the independent schools:

The tables confirm that, across the country, 45.8% of pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 of the national curriculum attained the equivalent of five GCSEs at grade C or above including English and maths.

The director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, David Frost, said this figure was "shocking".

The tables, compiled by the Department for Education and Skills, provide a school-by-school breakdown of those national averages.

In 114 schools every pupil achieved the new English and maths benchmark - 34 of them state schools, the rest in the independent sector.

and

New benchmark includes English and maths GCSEs

43.8% of pupils in state schools attained it

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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This short, simple story below - from the Independent - really brings home how badly state education has failed:

Millions 'cannot read well enough for karaoke'

By Paul Bignell

Published: 17 December 2006

Millions of adults have such poor reading skills that they will struggle to keep up with karaoke lyrics at Christmas parties this year, government research has found.

Research for the Department for Education's Get On campaign found classic songs like Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" require the reading skills expected of an 11-year-old, lacked by more than 5.2 million adults. Other karaoke hits, such as "Angels" by Robbie Williams, pose a harder challenge, which nearly 18 million adults will fail.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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I sat in on a class at a state primary school recently. I have been a severe critic of state education and I remain so. But I aim to be honest even when evidence appears that is against me. I have to say that the class I saw was nothing but exemplary.

There were 30 children in it. They were attentive. The teacher was respectful of them but also maintained his authority. The class was designed to help them look critically at their own compositions and improve on them. That seems to me a worthwhile thing to do and it was very well done.

It is true that the teacher knew well in advance that I was coming. So perhaps I got a better lesson than average. But I am not inclined to be sceptical. Most of the class was interactive and it would have been difficult to 'fix' a good class of that sort.

State education has been, in my view, a terrible mistake. But it is fair to say that sometimes there are genuinely excellent classes.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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I have previously suggested that schools are teaching that global warming is a major threat and that it is caused by human beings. I have suggested that this should be called propaganda, not education, since there continues to be debate among scientists about the truth of these assertions. Some people have suggested that no, there is no real debate. So I link here to a speech in the US Senate on the subject. I am no expert in global warming but it sounds like a debate to me.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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I heard George Osborne, for the Conservatives, saying on the radio yesterday that his party would improve schools by giving them independence. He would give back schooling to teachers.

I am not fully up to speed with current Conservative policy on education. But I would observe that giving independence to schools and giving power to teachers would - if that were the only change - be very risky and potentially damaging. If you give untrammelled power to the producer interest (teachers, in this case), then the consumers (the parents and their children) are likely to suffer. Teachers could indulge their pet theories regardless of exam performance or achieving what the parents want schools to achieve.

Independence and autonomy can be very important in causing schools to do better. But it is vital that is combined with consumer choice. For consumer choice to be a reality, instead of just political talk, the schools would have be 100% independent and capable of going bust.

Schools should be free but they need an incentive to be good and to do what the parents want. That requires competition between them and choice for the consumer. Politically, it is almost impossible for a school to go bust in the state system. So to ensure real competition, we would need, essentially, the end of most state schools and the replacement of state ownership by the ownership of independent trusts, charities and commercial companies.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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It should not be difficult to spot the flaw in the argument for making all children stay at school until they are 18. It is contained within the first two, short paragraphs of the news story in the Daily Telegraph:

Teenagers should be forced by law to stay in school or training up to the age of 18, the review of skills ordered by Gordon Brown said yesterday.

More than one in six young people leave school unable to read, write and add up properly and the proportion of 16- year-olds staying on in full time education in the UK is below the average for developed countries, it said.

To put the same information in a different way, this advisory body suggests that children whom Britain's state schools have failed to teach even to read and write should be compelled to stay at those schools for an extra two years.

This is absurd. You might call it 're-inforcing failure'. This is an idea according to which, if you have a system for climbing a mountain which does not work, then you should be made to go on using it.

The damaging consequences of increasing the school-leaving age are serious. We already know - in a big and undeniable way - that many of those children whom state schools have failed even to teach how to read and write, are disenchanted by school. It would be surprising if anything else were the case.

We also know that such children - especially the boys - are the ones who are likely to establish gangs within the school, to disrupt lessons, to bully, to truant and to commit crimes. This is already a major problem. An astonishingly high proportion of street crime is already committed by children of school age in school hours.

What would be the effect of keeping even bigger boys at school who are disenchanted by the experience and who have not even learned to read and write and who have already formed gangs and become juvenile delinquents? It would undoubtedly be to breed bigger and more dangerous young men present in school. It is not an exageration to say that the crime rate in Britain would increase. More teachers would be too frightened to even attempt to exercise authority. More knives and drugs would be brought into school. More lessons would be disrupted. At present, those who stay on are the keener ones. They have a better chance to make progress in those two years because the disenchanted ones have left. That chance would be seriously endangered by this proposal.

Raising the school-leaving age is a seriously bad idea.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Education

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Which country is this about? "We argue that the prevalent private tutoring is a market response to the government's rigid and uniform education policy".

Is it Britain? Certainly in Britain, private tutoring is now 'prevalent'. It is used by parents of children at all sorts of schools - perhaps most frequently of all by ambitious, well-off parents who send their children to what they hope are the best government schools but who realise that the education their children are getting - while wonderfully cheap (free) - is not always so very good. So they pay for tutors to try to get their children into better universities.

It is easy to think of an example of this: Mr and Mrs Blair hired tutors for their children. Not any old tutors for them but tutors from Westminster, one of the best private schools in Britain. So in this country, the Prime Minister, while ostensibly a great believer in state education, has found it inadequate and paid for private education on the side.

But Britain is not the country in question. The government of the country does its best to squash private education. But...

"Unsatisfied demand for education by parents and students in a highly regulated educational environment has resulted in an enormous increase in private tutoring despite government's strong policy measures to reduce it."

It is a fascinating example of private education flourishing in face of government opposition. The government tries to ban it but the people, finding state education so inadequate (like Mr Blair) go for it anyway.

This is a link to an academic paper on the subject which refers, incidentally, to private education in other countries around the world. In the narrow debate in Britain, people often assume that Britain is unique and strange in having private education. Actually private education occurs all around the world and for the obvious reason. State education tends not to be good enough. In some places - in certain schools in America, for example - government education is morally and physically dangerous.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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Some of the science in the national curriculum is what could be called 'doh!' science. It consists of statements which, though perfectly true, do not greatly advance a child's understanding of the world.

In my home-educating I cover the science in the national curriculum in case my daughter should need, at some time, to take a test in it. Most of the science in the national curriculum is fine - how plants reproduce themselves and 'what makes you ill?' are well worthwhile. But there are also parts which are either statements of the obvious or else consist of defining and categorising rather than teaching something scientific.

For example, in my Schofield and Sims revision guide for Key Stage 2 science (one of the better such guides), there is a double-page spread on 'materials and their uses'. In this, we learn that "Windows are made from glass because it is transparent and hard". I would suggest that the appropriate reaction to this information is 'doh!'.

A similar reaction is called for in response to the information that "Tables and cupboards are made from wood because it is hard and strong". The creators of the national curriculum are trying to teach children that different materials have different 'properties'. In short, some things are hard, some are soft. Some are flexible and some are brittle. Well, that is certainly true. But how many children did not realise this? How many did not know that a steel knife is stronger than a woollen one? How many children, even in the most backward areas, try to cut their food with a knife made of sponge?

Another example: 'The human life cycle' has a pretty high 'doh!' rating. In this guide it appears on page 16 and informs children that you start off young, become an adult and then get older. (Death is tactfully left out.) Well, well. Fancy that.

It is tempting to laugh. But for the teachers who must teach this and the children who must listen and carefully write out: "Your body changes as you get older", it must be dreadfully tedious.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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A head teacher of a primary school told me tonight, 'schools are lying' about the results for their tests of young children. Young children take SATS tests (in year 2, I think). Children are then tested again in year 6. The government uses the figures to create tables of 'value added' by schools. The idea is to measure how good the schools are at improving the educational standards of children. The reason the government introduced this was not unreasonable: to give credit to those schools which have an intake from difficult backgrounds yet which manage to improve the educational performance of such children.

But, as with many government tests and targets, ways have been found to manipulate them and render them unreliable, perhaps even meaningless.

A head teacher told me today that schools with 'good' intakes (i.e. middle class children with English as their first language) 'lie' about the results of the first assessment. They mark the results down. He named three primary schools in London which, he argued, had absurdly low marks for their Key Stage 1 assessments. Judging by their names, these were Church of England or Catholic schools (in the state sector).

By marking down their results for younger children, these schools could easily achieve a big improvement by year 6. So their 'value added' looked good. But the whole thing was a farce and an illusion. The obvious implication of what he said was don't trust 'value added' tables.

Incidentally, how does a school mark down its test results? According to a colleague of the head's, the Key Stage 1 test calls for quite subjective judgements by a teacher of a child's command of English and his or her knowledge of the world. If that is right, it would be easy to assess young Jonathan as having only a modest command of English, compared, at least, to Benedict or Charles, his companions at St Toff's school in Belgravia.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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One of the problems with the state take-over of education is that a single way of doing things is prescribed. This happened with the learning of reading. Teachers were told to use the 'whole word' method of teaching. It plainly did not work well at all. It has resulted in millions of children now being 'functionally illiterate'. It has been a disaster.

Another, less serious, example of government prescribing one way of doing things is the current way in which children are taught history. This, from yesterday's Times, gives a good explanation and critique of it:

David Starkey, the television historian and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said that A levels were too often taught as if they were miniature degrees, with so much analysis crammed in that the periods they covered had to be cut short into “tiny gobbets of chewed-up material”.

He said: “There is no point in doing merely a fragment in time with no sense of what might have led up to events and what consequences flowed from them. At the moment, pupils study a bit of American history and a bit of Hitler. That’s almost useless.” Dr Starkey said that it was absurd that the main history syllabus covering Hitler stopped in 1939. “There is no Second World War and no Holocaust. This approach does a lot of damage. It glamorises Hitler. You have to ask yourself, what is the point of studying it at all?”

He was equally critical of how syllabuses tackled Henry VIII and the Reformation, his own specialist period. “With Henry VIII, the syllabus covers 1502 to 1529. It stops when things get interesting. The other part of the syllabus covers 1529 to 1547 — the interesting bit. This is an absurd fragmentation. It leaves no space to take a step back and discuss what came before or after.

“History, if properly taught, should give people a sense of time and a map of time. You should be able to place yourself in time,” he said.

Dr Starkey said that teaching also placed far too much emphasis on the science of gathering evidence for historical events, an approach known as the discovery method.

“Teachers use the discovery method to teach when the Norman Conquest was. We know when it was. What’s the point in having a teacher if not to tell the students what the facts are?” He added that the study of original documents and the search for evidence should not come until university level.

Dr Starkey also despaired of the way his own works and those of other historians were used in schools, with teachers focusing increasingly on historiography — the study of the way history is written — rather than history itself.

“A-level students would not be able to tell you what happened at the beginning of the Civil War, but they would be able to tell you what (the historian) Conrad Russell thought about the Civil War,” he said.

I agree with Starkey that it is worth studying some history before going on to historiography. Not that there is anything wrong with historiography. It is an interesting and worthwhile thing to study. But the government has simply gone too far with the idea of teaching it.

The troubles that arise when the government decides what should be taught (and how) keep on mounting up. The government makes mistakes. There is a kind of totalitarianism about it which is repellent in itself. Education and intellectual activity should be open and involve debate and different ideas. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Don't let us have a government deciding what is good education and what is bad.

It is worrying that people should have so much confidence in governments as to think they are bound to be right. Firstly the evidence is against governments. Second, what happened to the spirit of freedom and independence that used to be so strong in western civilisation? Third, it is through experiment, variety and opportunity for independent action that new ideas and methods come through.

Reverting to the particular point about the teaching of history, I have noticed in bookshops that there are quite a few histories of the world for sale. Publishers are responding to a desire among people to know the narrative of the history of the world as a whole. It is natural for people to want know where they stand in time and space.

I should add that there are some perfectly good things about the teaching of history today. I think it is quite reasonable to learn about how the Romans and Egyptians lived. That is something that did not exist when I was a child. History-teaching in the 1950s and 1960s also tended to concentrate too much on small periods of time. It was mimicking the activities of academics. It was failing to give students an understanding of 'the big picture'. So I do not look back to a 'golden period' of history teaching. But I do think that modern history teaching has chucked out too much of the narrative and too many of the facts.

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There is a great deal of 'green' propaganda in schools these days. It is concentrated in geography classes but also reaches into science lessons, school assemblies and even drama classes.

My younger daughter, prior to being home-educated, had a drama class in which she was told to hug a tree. She understood that this was because trees were precious and in danger.

My other daughter, on one occasion, had a school assembly in which there was a presentation on renewable energy and then she went into her first lesson of the day, a science class, in which the subject was, lo and behold, renewable energy again.

Of course, you can teach children about renewable energy in a wholly scientific way. But it would be naive of us, surely, to think that this subject is being taught without there being a 'sub-text'. The sub-text is either that our non-renewable energy is running out in a way that should give us considerable concern or else that burning non-renewable energy is a danger to the planet through global warming.

Again, of course it would be possible to examine the merits of these concerns. But that is not what actually happens in schools. In my experience, children are only given one side of the story. They are told that the non-renewable energy is running out quickly. They are told that burning fossil fuels is causing a present danger to the planet. They are told that forests are vital to the survival of the planet and that they are being quickly depleted (by ruthless capitalists, if the propaganda is really running hot).

This is not education. This is propaganda.

A vital part of education is learning to assess opposing sides of a argument. But when it comes to green issues, the children are not even told that there is an argument at all. That is why it should be termed 'propaganda'.

I recently have started using the well-known book, The Skeptical Evironmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg as the basis for countering some of the propaganda my younger daughter has already received. In doing this, I hasten to add, I emphasise to my daughter that there is considerable disagreement about these matters.

In the section on forests, Lomborg states that in the previous 50 years before publication (in 2001), contrary to the assertions of various people and organisations, the total area of land covered by woods and forests barely changed at all. He cites figures produced by the United Nations.

When it comes, specifically, to tropical forests, he states that the best estimate is that the area covered by them decreased at a rate of 0.46 per cent a year in the previous 15 years. Again, he cites United Nations figures in his analysis.

I don't say that Mr Lomborg's analysis is right. I am not an expert in the area at all and do not pretend to be. But he is a man with considerable credibility on the subject. I tell my daughter that his view is clearly not shared by others. We write down in our summaries that these facts are claimed by him and we describe the source of his information. It is a beginning, I hope, of an a true sense of enquiry after truth. It gives her, I hope, some notion that one needs to compare evidence. These things, I suggest, are quite different from what many schools are now teaching when the subject has any connection with the environment.

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The following is not directly on the subject of this blog. It is the unedited draft of an article that appeared in the Spectator the week before last about home-educating my daughter. But it does contain, among other things, some of my concerns about how education has developed in Britain. It seems to me that the state's influence has extended increasingly from the state schools into the private schools, too. I should emphasise that I believe there are many fine schools and excellent teachers. But there are problems, nonetheless...

Unlike most nine-year-olds, my daughter Alex, is not back at school this week. She is not having last-minute morning rushes to find her self-losing shoes. She is not getting used to a new classroom or meeting a new form teacher. For during this term at least, I am going to home-educate her.

Alex has been at good private schools. Most recently she has been at a warmly encouraging one with an outstanding headmistress (who has been very good about what I am doing). Before that, she was at a school noted for its academic and sporting success.

But by the time you read this, Alex and I will be in a little cottage outside Aix-en-Provence, staying with an old friend who lives with her bee-keeper boyfriend. The first objective of our home-education will be for Alex to learn French.

Of course, in theory, she has already been learning French for five years and more. At the particularly academic school, she had, I think, three French lessons a week. But a few months ago I asked her - and her 12-year-old sister who is now at one of London's top private secondary schools - to decline the verbs etre and avoir. Neither of them got close. Even the best private schools - or most of them - don't seem to teach French grammar any more.

You might wonder what do they do in French classes? I am not sure but I remember the day my elder daughter's French homework at the 'academic' preparatory school consisted of finding pictures of tourist sites on the internet, drawing them and colouring them in. That reflects something about how French is taught these days - and many other subjects. Another great educational tool of our time seems to be papier mache.

I would like Alex to have some notion of English grammar, too. My children often say things like, "There is loads of..." and "I could of gone on the trip". They have little idea about nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. As for their spelling....

I don't want to give the impression that I will be a Gradgrind. We will have some fun, too. Alex loves to paint. We will go to the current major Cezanne exhibition in Aix and see his paintings of Mont St Victoire. Then we will see the mountain itself from the same viewpoint that he used. I hope we will settle down to paint it ourselves - perhaps copying Cezanne's technique.

One of the joys of home education is that one has the freedom to pursue things that already excite a child. Alex is fascinated by bugs. She likes shells and stones. I hope to use these interests to lead us into natural history.

While in Provence we will also go to Arles to see the amphitheatre and other Roman remains. We will learn some Roman history. History is still taught in schools and better, I think, than most subjects. But it has been squeezed into fewer lessons to make way for Information Technology, Design Technology and any other 'technology' that 'educationists' can think up.

I have the idea, which some may think eccentric, of giving Alex a big picture of the past, starting with the creation of the universe, going through the development of the surface of the earth and then on through the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to the present. Perhaps that will prove overambitious. But having been repeatedly taught the 'Tudors 'n' Stuarts' through my childhood, I want her to get an idea of the big narrative sweep.

I think it is right that parents should be able to pursue particular ideas on what they want their children to learn about. Why should politicians and civil servants decide what is important and cause it to be learnt by every child in the country - in the process ensuring that many other things, such as a second modern language, are not taught?

Private schools are not - in theory - obliged to follow the national curriculum. But they live in terror of a bad report from school inspectors who follow government guidelines. One thing Alex wouldn't get in any London preparatory school I'm aware of is a knowledge of Italian. She is already getting towards the end of the time when she is most easily able to absorb a foreign language and I don't want to leave it any longer.

Home education is growing fast in Britain and has already become big business in America where two million children are now being educated at home. The reasons, as in my case, can be a mixture of things.

One of my minor reasons is that I want to remove her - for a time at least - from the undercurrent of propaganda in most schools today. Geography lessons have, to a remarkable extent, been turned into vehicles for passing on the views of Friends of the Earth. My children come home from school believing as uncontested facts that forests are being destroyed apace and that, if this does not stop, the planet is doomed. .

Much teaching about the environment is based on one side of the argument alone and I think that is the opposite of what education should be. Another kind of commonplace propaganda is a quiet but insistent sub-text in the teaching of many subjects that business and capitalism are bad. I would like her to hear the other side of that particular story.

More personally, I want Alex and I to have more contact while she is young. She is a lively, charming girl. I don't want to see her only in the evenings when she is tired and has homework to do. I want to know her better and for her to know me. I want to enjoy her sparkle and share the learning experience with her. I think that will be exciting.

The reactions of friends are usually positive and teachers, surprisingly, are often the most enthusiastic. But there is one recurring, negative response: "What about her socialisation?" Many worry that children cannot learn to rub along with others without going to school. Yet I am told, by those who have studied the evidence, that it is actually the other way around: those who are home-educated are better "socialised".

I have also noticed with my elder daughter that the longer term goes on, the more she says "whatever" and affects disinterest in pretty well everything (except horses). Only as the holidays progress does she rejoin the human race and allow herself to be enthusiastic. I have come to wonder whether schools have a tendency to put children off learning.

That could be arrogance before a fall. Alex may be going to resist learning even more when I am her main teacher. She may refuse to decline etre and not give tuppence for the universe. I can't know whether this is going to work. But I am going to have jolly good go at it.

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Over the holidays I have been reading Washington: the indispensable man.

I was interested to see that although not much is known about his education, one of the two subjects he is known to have learned about is astronomy. I occurs to me that one could make quite a good case for astronomy as one of the subjects that should be studied at primary schools. (I think it is sometimes included in science lessons but only to a minor extent.)

What could be more fundamental than to learn about the universe in which we live? For millenia, people have struggled to understand the nature of the world we inhabit and what is in - or beyond - the sky. Now, at last, we understand more about the extraordinary universe than ever before. We know we are a planet in a vast solar system which is, in turn, a small part of a much bigger galaxy which is one of many, many galaxies.

Yet while knowledge about this is far more extensive than it was in Washington's time, he learnt about it whereas children today do not.

The subjects that children are told to study at school have developed in a haphazard way. In the 19th century, religion was the main thing. Currently, the government decides the curriculum and thinks that the main purpose of education is to promote economic success - a rather grim idea

IT and CDT have become fashionable and now take up plenty of time in the curriculum. Languages take a back seat. And so on.

In addition to astronomy, there are cases to made for studying geology, industry and agriculture. I am sure other people could make cases for other subjects, too.

We should not allow ourselves to be trapped into a fixed idea of what children should study.

As I mentioned in the additional chapter in the paperback edition of the book, I was impressed by the way a secondary school in Miami was teaching aviation. The subject involved plenty of science and gets otherwise disenchanted boys interested.

(I will be away for a while, so please do not be offended if I do not get round to approving comments for a time.)

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The number of schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB)has jumped from 34 in 2000 to 85 this year. The organisation which runs it expects the number to increase to over 100 next year.

Of course, while A levels have deteriorated markedly, the IB is not ideal. Anthony Seldon will host a conference this week on alternatives to A level.

Further research by Robert Coe of Durham University provides further evidence of the dumbing down of A levels.According to his work, an average candidate who got a who got an F in A-level maths in 1988 would have got a C in 2005.

The above, with more detail, is in an article in the Sunday Telegraph today.

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Stephen Pollard, a talented and likeable journalist, wrote an article for the Daily Mail today which, like my own article below, dealt with the disproportionate success of children who go to private schools. He looked back with nostalgia to the existence of far more grammar schools.

It is true that grammar schools used to give people from less well-off families a better chance of success. But I disagree with the idea that bringing back grammar schools is the great solution to our problems. My main reason for dissenting so is that it would still leave us with a large body of schools providing wholly inadequate education for most of the less well-off.

A secondary reason is that I believe the standard even of most grammar schools has declined. For my reasoning on this, please see the education chapter of the book.

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The unedited version of my article in today's Daily Express:

Sometimes terrible truths come out just 'by the way'. Alan Johnson, the education secretary, made a speech on Wednesday about the challenges facing Britain and how he was going to make our schools 'even better'. But a long way down his speech, just incidentally, he mentioned some appalling facts.

"Despite all our progress," he said, "five million adults in Britain cannot read". And, as if this were not sufficiently bad, he added "and 15 million people, almost half the workforce, are not properly numerate".

These are staggering statistics. The state has provided free primary education for nearly 90 years. Yet five millions adults in this country cannot read this newspaper because they are incapable of doing so. They are living in a world that those of us who are able to read can only imagine. They have difficulty filling in forms or understanding such things as advertisments for pop concerts. The twilight world in which they live represents a shocking failure.

To ram the point home, it also emerged this week that 54 per cent of top news journalists in this country went to private schools, a very large proportion considering that more than nine out of ten children attend state schools. The Sutton Trust, which researched the figure, previously discovered that, similarly, 70 per cent of top barristers went to private schools and 42 per cent of those at the top of politics.

Everyone knows Tony Blair went to Fettes College, a private school in Scotland and David Cameron went to Eton. But there are plenty more. In journalism, for example, Jeremy Paxman went to Malvern College and Katie Derham to Cheadle Hulme School - both private schools. Yes, it is true that the BBC's inquisitor, John Humphrys, went to Cardiff High, a state school. and both Gordon Brown and William Hague also went to state schools. But state-school children who have reached the top have beaten the odds. You could even say that, though their success, they have shown that they (or their parents) have been exceptionally clever and determined.

I am a governor of a state primary school and I know how dedicated and talented many of the teachers there are. But state schools were created partly to equalise the life-chances of the rich and poor. We need to face up to the fact that this isn't working. State schools might actually be reducing the chances of the least well off. The proportion of privately educated children getting to the top seems to be rising. An earlier study showed that a bright girl born into a low-income household in 1958 had a four in ten chance of getting a university degee. Twelve years on, a similar girl had only a three in ten chance of getting that far.

Prior to the creation of widespread government education, there were a surprising number of people who rose from the working class to the top. Nye Bevan, the minister who created the NHS, was a miner's son who left school at 11. But there was no question of him not being able to read or write. David Lloyd George, one of Britain's most famous prime ministers, was brought up by his uncle, a cobbler, and educated at an independent church school in a remote part of Wales. When he left school at 14, he was better educated than many a graduate of today.

Sadly, the way our state system works, the poor tend to end up in the worst schools. The upper middle classes - people like Tony Blair - get their children into the best ones. So the least well-off start with disadvantages and then often go to schools which give them virtually no chance of breaking out.

But why? Why have state schools failed to do what was intended and hoped for?

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Despite all our progress, 5 million adults in Britain can not read and 15 million people, almost half the workforce, are not properly numerate.

In the workplace, basic skills are a pretty fundamental requirement for success, as the IoD has argued; whilst, nationally, poor basic skills costs us £10 billion a year in lost productivity and welfare benefits.

From a speech by Alan Johnson, Education Secretary, yesterday

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From John Clare's column in the Daily Telegraph yesterday:

My son, who has just turned 16, is being urged by his school to sign up for a "Connexions Card". What's it all about?

Another Government black hole. More than a million cards have been issued over the past five years supposedly to encourage youngsters aged 16 to 19 to "keep learning". Holders collect "reward points" for turning up at school or college and then "spend" them on CDs, DVDs, mobile phone accessories or whatever the scheme's commercial sponsors are peddling.

As harmless - and pointless - as a supermarket "loyalty card", you might think. But so far, issuing the cards - which contain a chip storing the holder's personal details - has cost taxpayers £72 million, of which £66 million has gone to Capita, the Government's favourite private-sector dog'sbody.

What proof is there of any educational benefit? "There is no evidence that the originally intended impact on increasing post-16 participation in further education and training is yet being achieved" - Beverley Hughes, a junior minister in the Department for Education (with commendable honesty). Capita, however, has been told to carry on churning out the cards, for which it will be paid another £40 million between now and December 2008. Isn't it fun wasting other people's money?

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So how do O-level and GCSE exams compare? In history, the difference is stark. O-level requires candidates to know and understand rather a lot. GCSE requires them to know and understand rather little. This is obvious from a study of the exam papers.

Take, for example, questions about the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles from last year's GCSE history paper set by the AQA board and compare it with O-level questions covering the same period from the Cambridge board's specimen paper.

The first question for GCSE candidates was: "What does Source A tell us about the main aims of the League of Nations?" "Source A", printed immediately above the question, said: "The League of Nations aimed to keep peace through collective security and to encourage disarmament." So it is no more than a simple test of comprehension.

By contrast, the first question for O-level candidates is: "Show how the peace settlement of 1919-20 changed the European boundaries and reduced the power of (a) Germany and (b) Austria. To what extent were German-speaking people disadvantaged by the peace settlement?"

The above is from an article by Chris McGovern, a history teacher, in yesterday's Telegraph.

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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.

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The revised and updated paperback edition of The Welfare State We're In is published tomorrow. As part of the publicity for the launch, I have written an article that appears in the Sunday Telegraph today. Here is an extract:

According to research published last week, Britons have the worst reputation for yobbish behaviour in Europe.

Three-quarters of Europeans think Britain has a problem with anti-social behaviour - a higher figure than for any other country on the Continent, the study, devised with help from the Jill Dando Institute, discovered.

It blamed drunkenness and a breakdown in discipline in homes and schools.

The Victorians would have been appalled and astonished. A principal finding of this report would have been quite contrary to one of their strongest beliefs: the idea that schools have contributed to the "loutification" of Britain.

Victorians thought that education was crucial in the fight against crime.

When I first came across the assertion that compulsory state schooling had contributed to the amount of crime in British society I found it an extraordinary idea. We are so accustomed to thinking that schools are good, admirable institutions that it is strange to think that they might be doing harm in any way at all. But the more one considers the evidence, the more credible this surprising thought becomes.

The full article is here.

There is more on the subject in the chapter on education in The Welfare State We're In.

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Gordon Brown would like to send taxpayers' money to provide more education in Africa, by which he means more state education. There are far better ways of helping Africa. Below is part of an article in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph. It graphically describes how money put into state education in Pakistan has been wasted on an astonishing scale.

Of course Africa is not Pakistan. But it is hardly renowned as a place where government corruption is unknown. And James Tooley's Newsnight report from Africa last year indicated that, on the contrary, money spent on state education in certain countries there was by no means well spent.

If poor people in Britain were taxed in order to hand over their money to African government to waste in anything like the way described below, it would be appalling.

Millions of children in Pakistan are denied even a basic education because of wide-scale corruption and inefficiency in the state system, an independent watchdog has revealed.

At one school, the playground is so full of rubbish dumped by neighbours that the stench is too foul for children to play, in another, the classrooms are used to store grain and at a third, 49 teachers draw salaries even though ther