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I also think that we demand much too little from our students. I would like to see schools set their own exams twice yearly, and for them to be appropriately rigorous. It felt like there was really no expectation from the standard exams to achieve any real level of problem solving, or interest.
I remember an A level practical exam, based around a series of chemical tests to identify an unknown compound, where out teachers told us that in 90% of the exams the chemical tests were set in blocks 1 (a) 1(b) etc, and the last question in each block would be the one that was positive. Thus the ideal strategy was simply to complete the last test in every block, and then having seen that they were positive, and worked out the chemical, you could fill in the results for all the other tests, knowing they were negative, and making sure to use all the buzz words. E.g. You would lose marks for using "clear" instead of "transparent" despite my dictionary insisting they were synonymous.
It was just completely bizarre. A practical exam set up in such a way that the teachers would tell you that the optimum way to take the test was not actually to do most of the tests, because the exam setters seem to assume that all students are idiots and will not recognise the patter in a dozen years of passed papers. Or maybe they didn't care as it was an easy way to boost marks.
This stuff is completely widespread. English literature, we were advised that the examiners would not actually check your quotations, and since there was no requirement to reference them to an edition and page number, we could just make them up. Full marks without ever reading the set text. No problemo. And they were open book exams, so you would buy the editions that have copious notes on the main themes and cultural information, and had lists of useful quotations at the back. That was perfectly within the rules.
The hardest GCSE exam by far that I sat was Latin, as you had to do a forty line translation from the Illiad, and that is pretty hard, so obviously we didn't do that. There was a restriced set of about 250 lines that they were allowed to ask you from, so we just learned the english by rote, along with the last work of each line in latin. No need to do any actual latin.
When an exam system has become so corrupted that "good teachers" are those who advise their students on the best way to game the system, it should all go to the scrap house imo. Exams need to be much harder, so that it is no longer the case of applying algorithms by rote, but that genuine thinking is required. Before I went to university I had never seen an exam question that required you to think in a new way, or do anything other than regurgitate past material and solutions.
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I also think a large part of the problem is the psychosis of the the education establishment. On the one hand they believe that education is fundamentally a good thing, and on the other they have made a sort of idol out of educational equality, and these goals are in tension, because a good educator will fundamentally make his class more unequal. To say that it is hard/impossible to teach some kids from disturbed backgrounds is true. So you teach the rest, and if you are a good teacher who enables learning, then every year your class will become more unequal as the good students move every farther away from the worse students.
You see it clearly in the large scale movement in the UK (and a little in the US) to abolish private schooling. Here in the UK, private schools have historically been given charitable status, and removing charitable status will effectively bar the middle classes from elite educational establishments. It has always been seen in the past that giving a child a good education was a good thing, in and of itself, and if parents were prepared to pay extra to have their children in private education, instead of state schooling that is doubly good, as the child is getting a better education, and the state school has one less child to spread its funding around.
However, its evident that having elite private schools perpetuates inequality, because two students who started off the same, and worked the same amount, and one went to an elite school, and one went to an average school, will have vastly different outcomes. Moreover, its not just a question of skills, more stimulating environments help increase your general intelligence. One study suggests that the difference between a good and bad education adds at least two IQ points per year of education. A child with an elite educational establishment, compared to a poor one, will be twenty five IQ points better off over the full school career. That is HUGE, and it is permanent (this result is for average children, its easier to have big changes towards the mean than away from it in terms of absolute iq scores).
The progressive response is to claim how unfair all this is, and that if only we forced well off parents to put their children in comprehensives like the rest then this would drive up standards in the rest. However, this, imo, is just a pretext. In reality they view this inequality as a bad thing, and would rather the children of the well off received a worse, but more equal, education. I cannot understand this sentiment, but it seems fairly widespread among the intellectual left.
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Thirdly, My generation regards teaching as what you do when you aren't smart enough to have a real career. I don't know how this happened. My grandfather told me that when he became a teacher (1940) it was regarded as on a par with being a surgeon or a GP or a university professor. I.e. A high status job. I think status is more important than money in attracting young applicants to teaching. We are young and idealistic, but the one thing we really can't abide is being looked down on by accountants.
I think society has moved towards equating status and money, and that means that we will have to pay our teachers more to get better teachers. I am at peace this this fact.
I think teachers salaries should be in the 30-60k (in pounds) range, which is about 50% higher than they are, and will put them on a par with young professionals in law, tax, computer science, civil servants and universities. Of course, there will never be as much scope for progression as these other careers, but they do have much better holidays. ======================================
PS: The information age is here. Teachers unions need to adjust to the fact that you can actually measure teacher performance, and that some teachers are much better than others. Once they have accepted this (incontrovertible) fact, then there is a long conversation to be had about the best ways to use that information, about how to deal with the inherent randomness of stats applied to individuals and all that stuff.