At 14:39 21/07/00 -0400, Victor Milne wrote:
>[snip]
(KH)
>> (*Having said that, I am becoming increasingly worried that, in this
>modern
>> informational age, the state educational systems of advanced countries are
>> falling down badly on the teaching the necessary skills required for jobs.
>> Even basic skills are less well taught than they were in Victorian times.
>> In the UK, one person in five cannot use the Yellow Pages or can do simple
>> arithmetic. Illiteracy and innumeracy are growing steadily. For the first
>> time in history there appears to be a situation where increasing numbers
>of
>> people are unable to progress upwards because their motivations and
>> intellectual skills have become permanently blunted early in life. I hope
>> I'm wrong about this.)
(VM)
>I think people have been saying this since Christ was a cowboy. When I was a
>young junior university instructor 30-35 years ago, my contemporaries and I
>were always decrying the way standards had slipped--presumably in the 5 or 6
>years since we had graduated! My wife is a Grade 3 teacher, and looking at
>the curriculum for the elementary grades, I think it much better than when I
>was there in the late 40's and early 50's.
The curriculum may indeed be richer than it ever was (or at least it
appears so on paper), but quite what this means for jobs is another matter.
However, the point I was making concerned basic skills -- the three R's --
the skills on which most other intellectual (and now, increasingly, job)
skills are based. Victor has quoted anecdotal evidence so I will, too. This
evening I have telephoned a dozen experienced recently-retired teachers of
my acquaintance about basic educational standards today compared with those
of 30 or 40 years ago when they started teaching. They were all uniformly
of these opinions:
reading is worse than it was,
writing is far worse and is now deteriorating rapidly,
arithmetic is calamitous
(VM)
>The notion that people were better educated in the Victorian era seems
>inherently improbable to me. Remember many people never even got through
>elementary school back then. There were illiterate masses in Dickensian
>England. While the public (private) schools in England turned out many
>brilliant people like Matthew Arnold, they were also part of the old boys
>network. If your father had got through Eton or Rugby, then you did, and you
>got a job (if you actually needed one) and probably didn't get turfed out of
>it over a minor matter such as incompetence or semi-literacy.
Some three years ago in an Institute for Economic Affairs pamphlet, James
Tooley showed that in 1870, 99% of children in England attended school.
Why? Because parents knew that they needed to give their children a good
start in life. They were motivated to send their children to school and the
children were similarly motivated to attend and to learn. And this was at a
time when every school, even those run by the Church of England and
philanthropic societies, charged fees. Of course, the very poorest parents
didn't pay fees and were subsidised by parents who could afford them.
True, the school-leaving age for the vast majority of children was only 11.
But, by then, they were well educated by modern standards -- better in the
basic skills than 15 or 16 year olds are now. According to specimen test
papers of Victorian times, their arithmetical skills far exceeded those of
15 or 16 year old children today and was probably similar similar to the
standard of the newly-qualified teacher of today -- a quarter of whom in
recent government tests failed to meet the standards of the normal GCSE
mathematics exam taken by 16 year-olds.
Sorry, Victor, you don't convince me. The fact is that, bit by bit, State
education systems in almost all advanced countries has been sliding
inexorably towards disaster over the last 50 years. They have taken over
far more than they can chew. They are run by centralised bureaucracies and
have no realistic idea of what skills are needed. They have been chasing so
many theoretical hares in the last half century that the basic subjects
that were well taught a century ago are now falling through the net. This
has now been going on for long enough that part of a badly deficient
generation of schoolchildren have now become "qualified" teachers themselves.
But I'd like to return to my reason for raising this matter. Despite what I
wrote in opposition to John McLaren's assumption of a "perpetually
disadvantaged" class we may, for the first time in history, be at the
beginning of one. By this I mean the class of people now living in the
1,300 'sink' housing estates around this country (and the equivalents in
other developed countries) who have no motivation and no means of acquiring
the minimal skills to get into the economic network. However downtrodden
poor people have been in the past, however manipulated by the
establishment, however exploited by their employers, they have had the
motivation and sufficient skills to struggle through sooner or later and to
share the fruits of economic development. It is possible that this is no
longer the case for a steadily growing minority of poor people today. There
are now something like 300,000-400,000 young men in England without any
educational qualifications whatsoever, who have been totally alienated by
the educational system and who refuse to take part in the government's
attempts at New Deal skill training because they consider it (probably
correctly) as a waste of time. Because of this they have thus lost
unemployment benefits and have now disappeared from official statistics --
not even being counted as unemployed. So maybe John is right after all. We
could be at the beginnings of a permanent underclass.
Keith Hudson
________________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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