If the proverbial alien from Mars was to land in Britain today and take a glance at a newspaper then the chances are he/she/it would return to his fellow Martians and report that little Billie Ray will never set foot in a British school, as they are overflowing with runaway hoodlums, poor teachers and terrible facilities. This is of course a wild and generalised statement, but it does give me a useful start on which to write this article.
Tony Blair and New Labour came to power in 1997 on a crest of a wave, defeating an immensely unpopular Conservative government and enjoying a tremendous honeymoon period that coincided with the era of Cool Britannia. It was a perfect example of how modern politics became interlinked with the media, PR and spin. For a while, it was as cool to declare your support for Labour as it was to attend an Oasis gig or wearing a Union Jack Dress. Furthermore, to declare yourself a conservative was akin to going to a Harold Shipman memorial dinner or declaring that Nazism was just an advanced kind of birth control.
It was also the era when the phrase ‘education, education, education’ came to the public fore. It was a time when the youth of Britain were to undergo a revolutionary educational experience, where every primary school child would be able to recite the Classics from memory, decipher trigonometry without something made by Sony and where each class science project to cure the latest third world disease.
However, what has actually happened is a different story indeed. Instead of education becoming individualized and unique to a child, it has become the single biggest plaything and casualty of the current phenomenon of political spin and has seen the goal posts moved so far in the last 12 years that, if the alien from the opening paragraph landed today, he would see a difference in playing fields so dramatic that it would make Plough Lane resemble the Emirates Stadium.
For ‘education, education, education’ read ‘league tables, bureaucracy and under-funded schools.’ For ‘education, education, education’ read ‘miss-mash curriculum, declining standards, regulated chaos.’ For ‘education, education, education’ read ‘illiterate, innumerate, Thames Valley University’.
So obsessed with league tables and statistics has this government become, it is plausible to suggest that a child growing up in Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany has more freedom in the curriculum. In fact, the majority of school children believe that history actually began with the outbreak of war in 1914, such is the predominance of modern history in the curriculum. Indeed, one PGCE student told me the other day that studying any history pre-1900 is a waste of time as it simply wasn’t relevant! Year after year stats and figures are released into the media that have no real tangible meaning, but provide a sound bite for the government to pat themselves on the back and introduce the next ill thought-out, harebrained idea.
Indeed, the real shame about today’s education system is that, instead of sending young people out into the world with their own personalised opinions, they are all products of the machine-like examination culture and buzz trends such as ‘thinking skills, key skills and active learning’ that promise much but deliver little. Teachers often report that their hands are tied in terms of what they can and can’t teach, as they are under pressure to deliver assessment levels, value-added scores and provide a national curriculum that is both rigid and, at times, down-right boring.
Furthermore, the insistence that 50% of the population should become graduates is as absurd as it is illogical. All this has led to is a rise in second and third rate universities and a philosophy that sees many young ‘graduates’ believe it is their divine right to walk into a 30k a year job without putting in the hard yards because they have a 2.1 in ‘media studies’ or ‘leisure and tourism’. This has a damaging effect on the economy. Not only are valuable jobs in sectors such as construction and engineering going unfilled, but the value of a degree is being diluted by the flooding of the market with artificial scores and graduates with the same level of degree scores but poles apart in terms of actual academic ability.
So, next time Ed Balls is orally farting the news, change the channel and watch a program that befits today’s intellectual culture – Jade Goody: the next Saint?
