Daily Mail, January 23 2003

The revolution is now within sight of its goal. Our education system is finally being destroyed.

The ideological vandalism that has crippled the teaching profession and which Tony Blair once promised to eradicate is now rampaging out of control in his education department.

This week, we learned that GCSEs are to be transformed and A-levels swept away by new exams which will make it easier for everyone to say they have the same qualification. This is the logical outcome of a situation in which exams have been dumbed down to meaninglessness.

As the A-level re-grading scandal last summer showed, it is politically very tricky when the drop in standards becomes too dramatic to explain away. So – hey presto -- the government will abolish the exam altogether and replace it by ‘A-level lite’, under a fancy European name.

At age 16, there is to be similar sleight of hand.The GCSE replaced the previous system of O levels and CSEs because of sensitivities about a two-tier qualification. So the GCSE was the exam no-one would fail. But since this was a lie built upon an impossibility, everyone quickly worked out that only the top grades were really passes, while the bottom grades were really fails.

The old CSE was introduced in the first place because of the snobbishness of the governing class, who felt there was something shameful about leaving school with no ‘academic’ qualification and having a mere trade or skilled craft.

So now the government has come up with the brilliant wheeze of abolishing these differences altogether by a ‘hybrid’ GCSE which merges the academic and the vocational, and will thus persuade people that bricklaying and physics are of equal status. And it will be easier to pass. Bingo!

Yesterday, the Education Secretary Charles Clarke unveiled his controversial proposals to almost triple university tuition fees and burden new graduates with some £21,000 of debt. The political difficulties of such an imposition are formidable and will doubtless deepen.

But this risky policy is the outcome of the very same pressure behind the progressive collapse of standards in our schools. This is the ‘all must have prizes’ thinking which says that everybody must achieve equally, that no-one must fail and now that 50 per cent of the population must have a university degree.

This has meant that in the past twenty years, the number of university students has doubled while funding has halved. But these huge numbers should not be going to university. Since many have no aptitude for a degree course, the result has been the devaluation of standards and the proliferation of absurd degrees like golf course studies.

So graduates will be burdened with £21,000 debts– and many able candidates put off from applying to university – to subsidise Mickey Mouse degrees.

The government is now collapsing standards from top to bottom of the education system like a pyramid of cards. Merging academic and vocational studies at GCSE will mean lower standards in both.

Foreign languages will no longer be compulsory after age 14. Science remains -- but how valuable is this when biology, chemistry and physics are to be scrapped in favour of fuzzy discussions about cloning, genetically modified food and diet?

And A-level – once the ‘gold standard’, to be defended to the death – is to be tossed away in favour of a French-style Baccalaureate, which offers a broader range of subjects. Mr Clarke says A-levels are too ‘narrow and exclusive’.

This is code for saying they are difficult (heaven forbid), and that too many doctors, say, have never read Jane Austen. But why is breadth better than depth? Is it really progress to have a literary surgeon who was never taught the basics of science?

And huge numbers of French students fail their first year university exams. The ‘depth’ of A-level always produced, by contrast, a minimal university drop-out rate in Britain. Moreover, to get into a top university in France – which ironically has the kind of elitist system to which Mr Clarke would take an axe -- students have to take a further exam.

The government is right to stress the need for high quality vocational education. But it will not provide it, because proper vocational education involves different, specialist education for children with different aptitudes. European vocational education is excellent precisely because it is taught and examined separately from academic schooling.

Yet our government is determined to stamp out all such differentiation. The result will be the further devaluation of school exams at 16 and 18 -- with the likely outcome that independent schools will devise their own exam system.

That will doubtless make them into further targets for government spite. Significantly, Mr Clarke is now making menacing noises once again towards the grammar schools. Of course. Anything that embodies high educational standards must be removed, because its crime is to highlight the abject failure of the rest of the system.

It is here that the government’s cynicism and malice are now most apparent. Through its ‘access regulator’, universities are to be forced to take children from poor backgrounds. So as children learn less and less, the universities are to be forced to take students who haven’t made the grade, and destroy their own standards in the process.

This appalling abuse of the universities spells the demise of education itself. It penalises merit and betrays aspiration. It also reveals a deep contempt for the very people whose interests the government wears on its sleeve. For it doesn’t seem to occur to these ministers that the main reason many working-class children don’t apply to university is that they don’t want to. They’d rather have a skilled job.

If anyone has ruined the life chances of poor children who would benefit from university, it is this government by failing to raise education standards (it can’t even get children to read and write adequately, for goodness sake), persisting with comprehensives which lowered university uptake from the lowest social classes, and now by putting them off completely through fear of crippling debts.

But these ministers are not driven by a passion to raise standards. On the contrary, they want to lower standards because their most visceral belief is egalitarianism. A process that started with child centred education in primary schools and then produced the comprehensives is now reaching its logical apogee with an education minister, David Miliband, who actually sneers at proponents of academic rigour as ‘elitists ‘.

An education system reflects the vigour and the values of a society. The reason the Baccalaureate or vocational education work well in Europe is because those countries have a very strong sense of what they stand for and where their interests lie.

Our permanent educational revolution, by contrast, reveals a country that is rudderless and adrift, without any clear sense of what education is for; and which is now at the mercy of the third-rate shallowness, authoritarian control-freakery and old-fashioned Marxist class malice of New Labour.

Eat your heart out, Matthew Arnold. The ideal of a liberal education is in its death throes, with the government’s hands round its windpipe.

Posted by admin at January 23, 2003