Announced today, the latest educational silliness of the UK
government is that children are going to be required to learn their
times tables and division by the age of nine. Specifications will be
laid down by "an expert panel" (somewhere deep in Whitehall no
doubt). There's no hope of achieving this anymore than previous
governmental targets for literacy and numeracy. Both skills seem to
be highly desirable, of course, particularly from the point of view
of educationalist bureaucrats looking down condescendingly at the
masses, or politicians wanting to encourage an economic upsurge.
In fact, illiteracy and innumeracy have been growing in the last few
decades. In both activities we are almost certainly worse than in
late Victorian times. For an increasing proportion of our children,
gone are the days when young chambermaids would read the next
exciting Charles Dickens instalment by candlelight in their attic
bedrooms or when boys would read comics with thousands of words of
text. (As a boy, I used to read the latest Rover or Adventure when
riding my bike from the newsagent's shop. This habit terminated when
I went over the handlebars and broke my collar-bone.) An increasing
proportion of children, particularly boys, never read a book in their
leisure time from one year to the next.
Governmental educationalists and politicians have got the causation
upside down. They think that higher general educational standards
(which are never achieved, of course) and a 'liberal' repertoire of
subjects will somehow translate into lots of exports and economic
prosperity all round (and, of course, higher workers' wages and thus
more taxation for yet more perks for politicians, larger governmental
departments and adequate welfare for the aged). On the contrary, it's
the particular form of the economy, and its closely associated
parental culture, that produce the motivation for better education.
It is the particular repertoire of subjects chosen by parents for
their children that determines the flavour of the culture and its
economic potential.
In the great manufacturing cities of the early 19th century it was
the factory workers, not the government, that started a new wave of
fee-paid schools for their children, and to build mechanics
institutes for their young people and. later in the century,
municipal universities for young people who spoke, dressed and
behaved a little differently from those of the upper middle-classes
who went into the older, generally anti-scientific, universities such
as Oxford or Cambridge. It was only late in the century, after
several other unsuccessful efforts, that the government finally
managed to wrest childrens' education away from parental choice by
bribery (making education free) so that minds could be conditioned to
nationalistic requirements (obedient domestic servants and factory
workers, cannon fodder for its armies). Many government-trained and
-indoctrinated teachers would hang red-coloured maps of the British
Empire in their classrooms, and their children awed with great tales
of military success all round the world.
Yes, of course, a successful economy requires high educational
standards. The best thing the government could do would be to start
to unwind the previous lamentable history of state education. Give
education vouchers to all parents and allow new parentally-organized
schools to start (and to compete with state schools). At first, and
for a generation or two no doubt, many parents would choose unwisely,
or even not at all, but there's already a sizeable band of parents
who desire more than anything else the sort of education that only
monopoly-fees-priced private schools can offer. It is this 7% of
schools that actually supply about half of all the fully-educated
engineers and research scientists (the remainder coming from no more
than a handful of state secondary schools in the leafy suburbs).
At the present time no more than about a score of our 650 politicians
in the House of Commons have had a scientific or engineering
education. At my last check some years ago not a single one of the
chief civil servants of 14 departments had been scientifically
trained. No country could ever hope to remain at the economic
forefront (as England once was) with such a lamentable situation.
Fortunately, despite the latest silliness, the present government (as
with many advanced country governments) and against the fierce
opposition of teachers' unions are beginning to experiment with more
parental choice private schooling. These experiments should be
extended as rapidly as possible. Otherwise leave the state education
system to its own devices -- repeated lowering of examination
standards and the production of state-school teachers of which a
quarter can't write grammatical sentences and half can't do simple mathematics.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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