Personally, I'm most grateful to Tom Walker for posting Michael Young's
article in The Guardian (at 23:05 28/06/01 -0700).
I thought it was suberb. In four of its short paragraphs he succinctly
described exactly what I feel about the educational system and the modern
dilemma. These paragraphs are so brilliant in my view that I'm going to
extract them here and comment briefly on them:
<<<<
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit.
It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a
particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for
others.
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between
the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly
concentrated by the engine of education.
A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and
universities to the task of sieving people according to education's
narrow band of values.
With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal,
education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of
disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are
relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.
>>>>
Exactly. And this is why I feel so badly about the plight of hundreds of
thousands of our young people (particularly males) in England who are
deemed failures by our educational system even when they are at a
pre-puberty age when, in any normal environment, they are still young
enough to want to learn.
And it is these same youngsters who vandalise property, burn down schools,
cause about 75% of all crime, substantially overload the social benefits
system for the rest of their lives and comprise most of the 20% fraction of
the present population in the UK which is functionally illiterate (one of
critera being unable to find a plumber from the Yellow Pages)
However, Michael Young doesn't exactly make clear what he means by
"meritocracy". In some passages he clearly means that the credentialising
educational system adopts a form of what I can only call "filtration" which
separates a sizeable chunk of youngsters from the rest. This is not the
teachers' fault, and blame can also be placed on the parents, but most of
the fault lies in a type of sophisticated linguistic-type middle-class
method of teaching which demarcates against certain youngsters with
incredible accuracy.
It is, if anyone has read my previous message, a similar method that
Stafford Northcote used when instituting the examinations for the Civil
Service, so that only Oxford and Cambridge graduates had any chance of
passing. Unlike the exams of the Civil Service Commission, however, the
present educational system is not consciously designed to relegate certain
types of youngsters to the bottom of the heap.
But it most definitely does so all the same. The problem is that (a) the
private education system cannot do anything about it because these
youngsters' parents can't pay for private education; and (b) the state
education system can't do anything about it because the centralised
Department of Education feels it needs to impose methods and tests on all
the schools under its control (in order to "raise standards"!).
Almost all geniuses and brilliant innovators of the past 100 years, say,
have proceded from middle-class families where the children have had the
benefit of high articulacy from the beginning, a high degree of social
confidence, and where there has been no pressure at for the children to
work early in life.
But before that period, there have been enough example of other geniuses
and brilliant inventors who were lacking in all these early benefits but
who still rose to the top of their vocations. I am thinking of people like
Telford, Brunel and Davy among several (but not too many) more.
I'd like to suggest Thomas Telford (the builder of the first suspension
bridge) as an example. The son of a poor Scottish family who worked as a
road-mender as a child, then a did a bit of masonry, then built a little
pedestrian bridge of stone over a stream, etc, etc, and found his first
patrons. He learned about stresses and materials in a practical way, but
probably as sufficiently as a modern architect (plus also a structural
engineer) still does today after at least 12-15 further years of formal
full-time learning from the time of puberty onwards (when Telford started
labouring).
But, today, it is highly likely that young Thomas Telford would be screened
away from formal education at a very early age, just as hundreds of
thousands of young people still are.
There is enough research in brain science today to blow the present type of
state educational system to bits and release masses of talent if only the
results of this research were were allowed to happen. To my mind, two of
the most important results are these:
1. A rich and active environment needs to be available to a child from its
earliest weeks and months. What takes place then in the home, or whatever,
largely determines the potential of an individual for the rest of his life;
2. The brain is not one unified whole, but a "department store", as it
were, of many different faculties. There is hardly any adequate intelligent
test which can give an idea of what a particular person could achieve,
given the right opportunities, even if that person was woefully inadequate
in other faculties which are more usually regarded as signs of intelligence
(such as articulacy -- or, rather, articulacy of the middle-class sort).
In using "meritocracy" in its wider meaning (not the meaning that Michael
Young says the system imposes), then we really do need more meritocracy not
less. The UK has a society that needs tens of thousands of teachers,
engineers, scientists, doctors, and nurses every year, never mind other
professions. And yet the state education system, with 90% of the country's
children at its disposal, cannot supply more than a fraction of these and
we are having to import them on a large scale, like America. There is
something badly, badly wrong with the assumptions of our middle-class
dominated state educational system. (If this begins to sound like a
diatribe against the UK, I'll mention that much the same is happening with
the same dire shortages of skills in several west European countries, most
notably Germany so far.)
Keith Hudson
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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