‘We have a situation where standards have been so dumbed down that even the children know it.
‘When I give them past exam papers to do from 1998, they groan and beg for a 2005 or 6 paper, because they know it’ll be easier.’
KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH (a deputy Head Teacher and ex-Marxist)
PERHAPS THE GREATEST GIFT A NATION CAN give its children is a sound and academically challenging education, where teachers command respect from parents and
pupils alike, and are able to enforce classroom discipline.
All of the above, one would have thought, needed no clarification. After all, such sentiments have been the backbone of any system of education for hundreds of years. Even today you would be hard pressed to find any member of the education profession who could find any measure of disagreement with such a credo.
Yet none of it seems to apply any longer in our state education sector, and has not done so for several decades. Slippage has been allowed to occur in our schools through well intended, but destructive new methods of teaching and learning.
There is no doubt that there was much that was unfair in the old eleven-plus system, but it did allow the gifted working class pupil a chance at higher education through the system of grammar schools. These schools provided and still do, on a smaller scale, opportunities for those pupils whose parents could not afford a private education for their children and whose talents would have otherwise gone to waste. A wastage the country could not afford.
It was a Labour government, many of whose leaders benefited from such a system, who eventually condemned it in favour of comprehensives. It was the beginning of the downward slide that still continues today.
KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH is a deputy headmistress and ex-Marxist who voted Tory for the first time in this year’s General Election. She gave a speech at this week’s Tory conference in which she tore into the state of modern state education, blaming in part the power of the teaching unions in the educational remit of our children. A remit often endorsed by Labour governments.
It is the job of the teaching unions to look after the interests of their member’s pay and conditions. They should have no authority over the way our children are taught. The voters decide this by electing governments. If, for instance, this Coalition wished to increase the number of grammar schools, it is none of the teaching union’s business. If it were, there would be no point in people voting for any kind of government if a particular union overrides the democratic decision making.
Since the system of comprehensive education was first introduced by the then Education Secretary Shirley Williams, the unions have been allowed, by the politicians, to intrude upon the standards and methods of teaching, as well as what is taught. The unions have invaded the terrain of educational standards; a topography that should be free from the union’s political prejudices.
The unions object to ‘ability’ teaching and are supported by the academic educationalists who taught them the practices of the comprehensive system.
According to Ms Birbalsingh, children today, ‘live in darkness, without any idea of how they compare to those around them, let alone to those who are educated in the private sector’. Is this what Shirley Williams intended? Of course not, but only under a comprehensive (egalitarian) system could such a folly achieve such grandeur.
But it is not only the basic standards of education that is at fault, but also what is taught to our children. The Education Secretary, Michael Gove mentioned in his speech at the Tory Party conference, the teaching of history which has been traduced by liberalism in compliance with European identity.
British history had been put on the back burner throughout the last government’s tenure, as if it had been something the people of this nation has to feel ashamed of. So much so that Mr Gove said that children were given, ‘‘a cursory run through Henry VIII, and Hitler at secondary’ before giving up the subject at 14.’
He has now invited the historian Simon Shama to advise him into once more putting history back on the curriculum: but I fail to see why Mr Gove needs such a presence to encourage what was once for centuries, second nature to any teacher of history.
THE TEACHING OF OUR HISTORY in schools has fallen fowl, like every other aspect of our culture, to Europe. The last government diminished the place of history in the curriculum, not only because of our colonial past, but also because of our historical conflicts with Europe.
British history, to the last government, became the great embarrassment and was therefore pared to its absolute minimum culminating in the teaching of the war against racist Nazism, which exemplified the profile they wished to teach the next generation in a multicultural society. Thus was the historical emphasis in our schools of the Second World War.
Ms Birbalsingh is right when she says, ‘League tables tell you nothing about how good a school really is, just how good the school is at playing the system and picking the easier exams,’ The League tables introduced by the last government allowed for exactly this.
Nothing of any educational significance is measured by such a system except the creative ability of teachers to ‘play the system’.
WHAT WE HAVE EXPERIENCED IN EDUCATION since the middle of the 1960s has been the gradual dumbing down of standards in order to prove the comprehensive theory. Even One Nation Conservatism went along with the experiment despite the many reservations held by their own backbenchers at the time .
The more one reads and learns about the last government, the more one realises the extent of the damage they have inflicted on this nation. In every sphere of economic and social activity they have meddled in, they have botched it up and left the country in a poorer state than they found it in 1997 – but they will be back again in five years time (or before) to seek power once more, without so much as blush on their thick-skinned faces.
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