What Went Wrong with Education?

A few days ago, I went over to see old friends of mine whom I will call Lily and Manly, a couple I have known for over twenty years, before they actually were a couple rather than just two friends I hung out with, and well before their three children were born.  Lily and the youngest child, aged 11, had been working on tie-dyeing T-shirts, so I joined in with that, and chatted with the parents (the two boys weren’t inclined to chat much), and had supper. 

I had been hoping to see the oldest teenager (whom I will call Grace), who was out with friends during the day, and arrived home in the early evening.  She needed to go upstairs to get on with her maths homework, but had a bit of time to chat to me first, mainly about how much she hates college. 

Grace is halfway through A-levels at the same sixth-form college that I attended and loved, and where my mother taught for a number of years.  I enjoyed studying there, taking four A-levels, a spare GCSE, and (most usefully in terms of getting a job) a word processing course.  I enjoyed the way that the more relaxed atmosphere was like a halfway step between school and university, where we were treated as young adults rather than as children, and were studying because we were interested, rather than because we were forced to be in school. 

But I didn’t only study.  I also have happy memories of joining the Duke of Edinburgh Award group, for the first time going walking and camping just with other teenagers and without an adult to supervise, and getting fit for all this hiking and rucksack-carrying by working out in the college gym and walking to and from college (about an hour’s walk each way).  I had time for hobbies like writing stories and poetry and painting, and I read a wide range of books out of interest, not just the ones I had to study for my course.

Grace isn't interested in or enjoying any of her subjects, and doesn't plan to go to university, and says that nothing she has learned in her entire time at school has been either interesting or something she needs to know.  She says that ‘only weird people enjoy learning’, and that the maths geeks in her class are usually the people who are so busy studying that they forget to wash, so that the teachers complain about how much the maths block stinks. 

One of her classmates is selectively mute, which she finds weird and annoying.  I explained to her that people usually go selectively mute because something bad or stressful is going on in their life, so her classmate really needs sympathy rather than criticism.  Still, Grace feels that she has enough stress in her own life without worrying about anyone else’s.

Yet she won't consider switching to a vocational course, or leaving college and getting a job.  As she says, ‘Everyone at college thinks that not doing A-levels means you're dumb, and I don't want to be judged by the popular people, and if you drop out of college you might as well be an unemployed sixteen-year-old single mum in a council flat because that's how dropping out of college is always portrayed on television.’

Lily and I tried to persuade her that she needs to do what is right for her, and that just because studying A-levels is the right path for her friends doesn't mean it's the right path for her if she's not interested in learning the subjects, and that she shouldn't let media stereotypes be more important to her worldview than her own experience.  I told her about my brother, who didn’t get on well at school and didn’t complete A-levels but has brilliant practical engineering skills and is highly valued by his employer.

I don't think we got anywhere.  Grace is at an age where what her friends think is more important than what people a generation older think.  Of course, I'm very glad that she has friends, as I had no idea how to have a social life at her age.  I’m glad that they are the sort of friends who study, rather than the sort of friends who would encourage her to truant, smoke and shoplift.  But still, I still wish she had more confidence to be herself.

Grace is an intelligent, creative young woman who has plenty of ideas, and used to have lots of enthusiasms outside school, like gymnastics and acting.  When she was eleven and PDB11 and I were getting married, she wrote a poem to read out at our wedding.  Even a couple of years ago, studying for GCSEs and grumbling about how much she hated school, she gave me an impassioned talk on what she would do to re-organise the curriculum to create more of a balance between academic study and sport.

Now, she doesn't seem enthusiastic about anything in life.  She doesn't like school, doesn't want to go to university, and can't think of a job she wants to do.  I asked her what she wanted to do after college, and she said, ‘Travel,’ which sounded encouraging.  She isn't studying any foreign languages at college, but I told her that I had an uncle who had worked in lots of foreign countries and picked up languages much better by living and working there than he could ever have done at school. 

Grace said she didn't really want to work abroad, but just liked holidays where she could sit on a beach.  What she had really meant by ‘travel’ was ‘I need a holiday to help me de-stress after A-levels,’ rather than ‘I want to do a gap year,’ Of course, wanting a holiday is reasonable enough (I wish I had taken my father up on his offer of the two of us going on a safari holiday to Africa to spend some quality time together after I’d done my A-levels), but it doesn't do much to help her find a direction. 

What does it say about our education system that it has turned the bright, confident, curious child whom I remember Grace being into a young adult who shows little interest in anything? 

School usually becomes more pressured and less fun from age 11 onwards, but from what my mum tells me, my nephew, in Year Three, has been suffering under this sort of hyper-academic, no-fun-allowed approach to education even at primary school.  Like Grace, he is intelligent, creative, curious, and – most surprisingly for a member of our family – sociable and tactful.  What he isn’t, however, is enthusiastic about reading and writing, particularly as it is taught to 7-year-olds – or even 5-year-olds – nowadays.

Near the beginning of this school year, when he was seven, my mother asked him what he had been learning at school.  He explained enthusiastically how they had been learning in History about the three different periods of the Stone Age.  Brilliant, my mother agreed, and what about English?  His mood grew gloomier.  ‘We’re learning about the different sorts of adjectives, but I can’t remember what they’re called.’  My mother – who had been an English teacher for most of her career – had no idea either, and was astonished that the government expected teachers to impose formal grammar lessons on seven-year-olds.

It’s not that teaching grammar has no place in primary school.  When I was in Year Six, my mother took a small group of us for advanced English lessons once a week, which included – amongst other things – learning about parts of language like adjectives, verbs and nouns, and learning about how the English language has developed and which languages have contributed to it.

But, first of all, we were ten, not seven.  We were also the pupils who were most advanced in English and were likely to get bored if we weren’t challenged.  More importantly, my mother’s lessons were fun.  She taught us from a wonderful book called Logos, which opened every chapter with an entertaining story about the misadventures of the Greek gods, and then led into a lesson related to this.  For example, a story about Hephaestus the god of engineering might lead into a chapter about how sentences are put together, or about how many scientific and technical words come from Greek.

Perhaps most importantly, we weren’t only looking at technical aspects like grammar.  We discovered how English had developed over the centuries by reading passages of English from different times: an Anglo-Saxon version of the Lord’s Prayer (‘Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod…’); Chaucer’s story of Chauntecleer the cockerel; Caxton’s anecdote of how the dialects of 15^th century English differed so much that a northerner mistook a southerner’s speech for French; and the whole of As You Like It, which we went out to see an outdoor amateur production of.  It was exciting to be treated as old enough to read proper grown-up books.

But then, our primary school had prepared us well for studying literature, not just by teaching us to read and write, but by reading stories to us and discussing them as a class.  This wasn’t just when we were in Reception and could enjoy being read a simple picture-book, but when we were mature enough to follow a novel read as a serial: I remember Gumble’s Yard, Star of Light, The Horse and His Boy, and Elephants Don’t Sit on Cars. 

The teachers used the books to encourage us to think about how writers tell a story: ‘Why do you think Patricia St John, instead of saying straight out, “The baby had a disease,” just hints that there is something wrong with Hamid’s baby sister?’  ‘Most of the stories in Elephants Don’t Sit on Cars are about normal family life, so why do you think the book opens with a story about an elephant sitting on Daddy’s car?  And why do you think the last two chapters are about a funeral and a birth?’

From what my mother says, my nephew’s school doesn’t seem to bother with anything as frivolous as reading stories to children any more.  School is for analysing grammar and filling in worksheets.  If children want to be entertained, they can watch television at home when they’ve finished their homework.  After all, read stories to them in class, and they might expect learning things to be a pleasure rather than a chore, and you can’t have that, can you?

In fairness, my nephew prefers reading non-fiction to fiction anyway.  He is a curious little boy who wants to learn all he can about the world around him.  For the time being, he can enjoy subjects that aren’t English, such as Science and History.  But by the time he reaches secondary school, what will even those be like for him?  In another ten years, will school have succeeded in crushing curiosity out of him by turning all knowledge into something to be memorised for an exam?

Yes, the government wants to drive up educational standards, even if it seems to be under the misguided impression that very young children practising their native language learn in the same way as teenagers studying a foreign language.  But in practice, its desperation to ensure that every pupil gets as many qualifications as possible is doing nothing to achieve real education.

A little over ten years ago, I applied for an evening class in A-level French as a mature student, and, as there was insufficient interest to fill an evening class, I was allowed to join the regular class of sixth-form college students.  As someone studying the class just out of interest, obviously my motivation was very different from that of the teenagers – but I sometimes got the impression that the teacher found my interest in general learning, rather than simply swotting for an exam, nearly as frustrating as my classmates’ reluctance to learn anything.

In one lesson, the teacher introduced the imperfect tense – which I remembered doing at GCSE, but which was now apparently part of 2^nd year A-level French.  She gave us a story written in the present tense, and instructed us to put it into the past tense, sorting out where to use the passé composé and where to use the imperfect.  I thought, ‘Well, in a literary narrative like this, I’d use the past historic.’  The rest of the class were horrified that they were expected to learn more grammar and more vocabulary at A-level than they had already learned at GCSE, and that if they went on to study for a degree in French, they would be expected to learn even more!

We watched Matthieu Kassovitz’s films La Haine and Les Rivieres Pourpres, and Molière’s L’Avare.  The rest of the class grumbled about having to read a French book, especially an old-fashioned one, and wished we could have studied paintings by a French artist instead.  For myself, I wished that instead of watching the films (where, to be honest, I had been relying on the subtitles because the spoken dialogue went too fast for me to follow) we could have read a novel or a collection of short stories in addition to Molière’s play, to force us to practise language skills.

Our teacher explained that she would be our examiner for the oral exam, and while obviously she couldn’t tell us what questions she would be asking us, she could hint at the sort of the questions we would be likely to get (translation: tell us the questions in slightly different wording).  She encouraged us to write these questions down on cue-cards so that we could prepare our answers and rehearse them, in order to be able to answer as many questions as possible in the short time available, and get maximum marks.

I asked whether that didn’t defeat the point of having an oral exam.  Surely, I said, the point of studying French was to be able to hold a conversation with a French stranger, not to rattle off a set of pre-rehearsed answers to a pre-arranged set of questions.  The teacher pointed out that this might be my reason for studying French, but I could afford to take such a dilettante approach to education, because I had already been to university.  For the rest of the class, whose chances of getting into a good university depended on their A-level grades, it was a lot more serious than that.  And, of course, since the college needed to be ranked highly in the league tables, the teacher’s focus was the same as that of my classmates: good grades above all else!

So the government is pressuring schools, and schools are pressuring young people, to work harder and harder for better and better grades that say less and less about what school-leavers can actually do.  Where A-level classes and university used to come as a glorious relief to the most academic pupils because those who wanted to do a vocational course were doing that instead of A-levels and those who weren’t interested in learning had left school, now more and more pupils feel obliged to take academic courses, regardless of whether they are appropriate to a pupil’s interests. 

Fewer and fewer British young people are learning practical skills, so there is more need for immigrants who have them – at a time when the government is becoming more and more hostile to immigrants.  A decade or more ago, the Sunday Times carried a news report about the shortage of care for vulnerable adults – and an opinion piece urging parents to warn their teenage children, ‘Make sure you pass all your exams, or you could end up working as a carer!’  At the time when I read these, I was a graduate who was working a carer and found it the most meaningful job I had ever done, so I was not greatly amused.

What is the answer?  As someone who is neither a teacher nor a parent nor a very recent student nor an employer, I am the wrong person to offer a plan.  But I suspect that a good start would be to ask, ‘What is education for?’  When we have some answers more meaningful than, ‘To get good exam grades,’ we might be able to start planning how to achieve it.