.
I thought I’d said all there is to say about SATs and testing, but Anne Atkins was back on the subject on Today’s Radio 4 Thought for the Day.
Nothing new or original, really, but more emphasis being given to what a futile, nasty and destructive business it all is. She spoke about how education was originally seen as something that was for the benefit of the individual, and learning was just for learning’s sake, and for the sake of the students - not for any other purpose.
She said that we’ve come to believe that every talent can be measured, which is clearly nonsense. Even the believers in SATs don’t believe that, unless they’re complete morons. The mad satters try to maintain that SATs are just a routine, low-key, end of key stage procedure that needn’t take up a lot of time and energy -which is downright dishonest and stupid, to say the least.
Anne, on the other hand, was keen to make the point that love can’t be assessed, and neither can being a good parent. Nor can ‘character’. She concluded that any quality that can be weighed and measured is not much more than that.
I just wish I could believe that this steady chiseling away at the nonsense that we currently take to be real education is having any impact on the thinking of the people who have been promoting the system we currently have in this country. I still seriously doubt it. They embrace it like a religion, and in the absence of any inclination to properly debate an intelligent rationale for our system they will go on clinging to their fundamentalist beliefs.
The stupid tendency will go on parroting their idiot mantras - “We need to drive up standards . . . Too many children are failing to master basic skills . . . We need to prepare children for the jobs market . . . There is no excuse for failure . . . SATs are just 5 days of testing at the end of a key stage . . . We need to measure the performance of schools and teachers . . . High standards are not incompatible with enjoyment of school and a rich curriculum.” Bollocks - all of it.
The problem with these fuckwits is that they have no concept of what life is really like in schools where there is no critical mass of able children, and no experience of the problems of running schools where there are huge issues with the recruitment and retention of able and well-trained staff.
They have no understanding of the impact of government directives and strategies, and an Ofsted regime that cares only to analyse spurious data. They have no clue as to the way in which school managers and governors are demoralized and terrorized into turning their schools into results factories, and to hell with the wellbeing, creativity and enjoyment of school of millions of children, both the able and the less able who struggle to cope with the rigid demands of the system.
Crime and Disorder
Half an hour before the Anne Atkins piece, and also half an hour after it, there were reports on the huge amounts of money that have been spent on locking up young offenders, and on the excessive use of custody and criminalisation, with no measurable impact on crime reduction and prevention. This is the big news of the day, according to the BBC. We lock up a much higher number proportionately than any other civilized country. The cost of this custody has been met from moving money out of the education, social services and housing budgets. We’re spending £280m a year on locking up our criminal youth, and £24m on crime ‘prevention’.
Hasn't it occurred to anyone that we need to spend more money on both education and rehabilitation, as well as on better housing and proper community policing, and less on being the best friend of the USA in its imperialistic adventures and its 'war on terror'? It's a similar issue really - first you make people angry, and then you bash them over the head and put them in detention for expressing their anger in the only ways they know how.
Why are we not rehabilitating our young offenders? Why are we not reducing re-offending? Why are crime prevention measures not working? Duh! Why are we still asking these dumb questions?
Let’s go through this again. We take money away from the education and the developmental needs of young people, from work with families, and from community development. We alienate more kids by providing an education system that cares nothing for the real well-being of children - an education system that causes them to be competitive, stressed, depressed and angry with the system that brands them as failures or also- rans, which of course is what most kids are, according to our system of grading and measuring.
We take away their enjoyment of school. We pay no attention to developing children’s crucial emotional, social and spiritual intelligences. We don’t give a damn about developing creativity and imagination, let alone caring, loving and enjoying life - every minute of every day.
We drill them in classrooms where the emphasis is on competition rather than collaboration and cooperation. We reduce opportunities for creative interaction and conversation. We never let them play and learn in situations where they need to develop skills of cooperation and dialogue, where they’re allowed to work out their own problems, rivalries, jealousies, with minimal intervention from adults who know them well and are concerned to develop their individuality, and are well trained to do this.
We spend virtually no time on developing their understanding of concepts and vocabulary around human values, morality and ethics. We never let them ask questions about real issues. We give them no understanding of philosophy, let alone experience of Socratic debate and dialogue. We give them no time for proper reflection or meditation.
We drill them and regiment them and dress them in uniform. We give no encouragement towards individuality, let alone encourage them to develop their unique human ‘voice’. We exclude them from activities they genuinely enjoy, and we remove any notion of learning through play.
We exclude them from school for petty breaches of discipline, including not wearing the approved shoes and socks. We exclude permanently the less able (who are going to mess up the school’s statistics) at the first possible opportunity, often on the flimsiest of pretexts.
And we wonder why they turn out to be anti-social, angry, unable to exercise self-discipline, bitter, resentful, depressed, psychopathic and thoroughly fucked up. And that’s just the ones who do well in SATs and GCSEs.
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Children and families cope with their lives and make something of themselves in spite of, not because of, the pathetic systems of education and social support that we have in this increasingly materialistic and nasty society we’ve been creating since the beginning of the Thatcher-inspired counter-revolution against progressive values and social democratic politics.
If children and young people don’t turn out to be basket cases it’s primarily down to their own resilience and spirit, and the support they get from loving parents, and some very caring teachers who do right by them in spite of excessive work loads and demands for treating the kids like units of production.
Brain-washing the kids into conformity and willingness to cram for tests, and to do ever-increasing amounts of homework from the age of 5, is now the name of the game.
The education system is a mess, and everyone knows it, though virtually no-one is willing to admit it. It’s architects have been people like Thatcher, Baker, Blunkett, Woodhead, Barber, Blair . . . and Adonis! And now we have Balls and . . . Jim Knight! Hurrah!
The only decent Secretary of State for Education we’ve had in the past 20 years, the only one with any experience of teaching (in secondary schools only, admittedly), the only one who spoke from knowledge and conviction and from the heart, without briefing notes, has been Estelle Morris - and she resigned because the system was beyond being steered by a single individual in a proper progressive direction, and it was doing her head in. At least that’s my take on her demise.
Coincidentally she was a student in Coventry (at the College of Education, where I went to many a disco, in spite of not being a student there myself) at the same time as me, graduating a couple of years after I did. I like to think that teaching in a Coventry comprehensive school did her a power of good, at least in terms of seeing real life and real working-class kids and families from the perspective of a class teacher. Coventry was the first city to adopt comprehensive education and build new comprehensive schools. The one I attended was on a large green-field site, the first in the country, and was totally brilliant, apart from the odd teacher, like the one who tried to teach me to speak German for 5 years. And even he wasn’t a bad old boy.
Individual schools may do well by their kids in spite of the system, not because of it. The system does not encourage doing well by the kids. The system does not care about the kids. Not really. The system cares about results.
Results. Results. Results.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7411909.stm
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This is what Polly Toynbee had to say about Estelle Morris at the time of her resignation:
She never played the Westminster game. She spoke gently and intelligently, made reasoned arguments persuasively. Anyone who heard her fine speech in Blackpool - the best and the best received of the conference - knows that she has done herself a grave injustice, fatally colluding with her thuggish attackers. But in a state of meltdown, people do and say the wrong thing. "There! That proves it! She couldn't take the heat," says Westminster. Why should she - or anyone else?
Some say her unwarranted insecurity springs from her own failed education, failed A-levels and a retreat to a teacher training college at the age of 18. School failure - at 11 or 18 - often does scar for life. Even those who rise above it later can find that in adversity and under stress, lacking the false affirmation of paper qualifications, they buckle under the illusion that they are essentially stupid and will be "found out", as they were at school. (As an 11+ failure with one A-level, I should know.) People retain a mystic faith in old exam results or in the snap judgments of school reports, dogged by lazy character assassinations for the rest of their days. That is why education should always try to praise a child's talents, not brand it with failure. These things she knew well, and it made her a humane politician and a good education minister.
What made her job unendurable was the perpetual interference of Downing Street's bright young men, filling the prime minister's head with their not so bright ideas. She was never in favour of the spread of yet more faith schools. Nor was she in favour of anything that smacked of a return to selection at 11.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/oct/25/publicservices.gender
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estelle_Morris
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2355059.stm
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The Dalai Lama is in the House.
Visit the following page for details of what religious nutters can be like when they fall out with one another. Talk about spiritual intelligence!
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080520/tuk-britain-china-tibet-protest-a7ad41d.html
“A Buddhist group on Tuesday announced plans to picket public appearances in Britain by the Dalai Lama, accusing him of restricting religious freedoms in his homeland and among exiled Tibetans. The Western Shugden Society, a branch of Tibetan Buddhism that reveres a god denounced by the Dalai Lama since 1996, said demonstrations were planned outside Britain's parliament and at several other locations on his 11-day tour.”
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