Daily Mail, February 11 2002

The British education system is the casualty of decades of manipulation, meddling and muddle. Indeed, education policy resembles the product of a visually-challenged seamstress with blunt scissors, who thinks she’s running up a pair of curtains but is actually ripping to shreds a priceless tapestry.

The latest brilliant wheeze, to be unveiled in tomorrow’s green paper on the 14-19 curriculum, is to do away with compulsory modern languages and geography and replace them by lessons in tourism, manufacturing and leisure.

This is supposed to end ‘intellectual snobbery’. It will actually be the biggest triumph for philistinism since Samson lost his hair.

It has nothing to do with the country’s crying need for proper vocational education. This has certainly never been taken seriously in Britain, to our inestimable disadvantage – as you find to your cost when you hire a carpenter or plumber and find they haven’t a clue how to mitre a cornice properly or supply hot water to the loft.

But tomorrow’s proposals will not provide proper vocational training. Instead, they will kick away the last vestiges of the kind of basic education that is taken for granted in the rest of western Europe. What is the point of the Home Secretary expecting new citizens to know about this country’s history when there is already no requirement to teach it in school beyond age 14?

We are hopeless at foreign languages, as the Education Secretary Estelle Morris has admitted. Indeed, to add to our humiliation many Europeans have a far better command of English than we do. But instead of telling us how she is going to put this right, Estelle Morris is proposing to abolish compulsory foreign language teaching altogether.

She is right to stress the need for vocational education. The English ruling élite has never taken it seriously, for the simple reason that it has never thought the vast majority of the population mattered very much. The technical education introduced by the 1944 Education Act withered from neglect. And although we have vocational qualifications, the situation has not changed -- for these ‘vocational skills’ are a sham.

Unlike their European equivalents, these courses do not generally train young people in practical skills to the level required by employers. Instead they are so generalised as to be virtually useless. They do not provide young people with the wherewithal to enable them to start work as a printer, caterer or engineer.

Not surprisingly, they are therefore regarded by school-children as a con-trick. But instead of reforming the content of these flaky qualifications, Estelle Morris intends to re-name them GCSEs, on the utterly misguided and patronising assumption that the reason children don’t take them is because they sound different and inferior.

She should be looking instead at what Barking and Dagenham education authority in east London has done. This has devised its own vocational syllabus around practical skills taught up to industrial standards level. So its pupils are taught on the same equipment and to the same standards as industry. As a result, companies collaborate and take on these young people because they can actually do the job.

But most of the ‘new’ vocational GCSEs and A-levels won’t be like this. They will useless hybrids, neither academic nor vocational, whose main purpose is to provide a spurious veneer of social equality which won’t fool our savvy young people for a minute.

The proposal to allow 14 year-olds to leave academic education for vocational training may be useful in a few cases. But the danger is that schools may use this to wash their hands of trouble-makers when it may be the school itself that is failing. And vocational skills should not be used to drive out general education. European children on vocational courses still receive general education until they are 18.

But there’s the rub. For the national curriculum, brought in at the end of the 1980s to correct the disastrous slide in British educational standards, was hijacked from the start and turned into a Trojan horse for many of the failed theories it was brought in to combat.

So our young people still leave school unable to write a job application letter intelligibly. They turn up at university unable to think for themselves beyond the propaganda they have been spoon-fed about global warming or class prejudice, or needing remedial education in maths or foreign languages.

The collapse of language teaching goes to the core of why education standards have imploded. For teachers simply refuse to teach formal grammar. Instead of being taught to decode language, children learn a kind of Berlitz method of memorising words and phrases. Public exams are dumbed down accordingly, and so hardly any school-leaver can actually speak a foreign language and even university students now have to read foreign literature in translation.

The reason for the refusal to teach grammar lies in the wider retreat from the fundamental understanding that teaching means imparting a body of knowledge, rules and authority to provide children with a set of route maps for the world they inhabit.

Not only has the government failed to correct this; it is compounding the damage. It is replacing knowledge by ‘skills’, or pseudo-skills, because it cannot see any purpose to education beyond economic advantage. Its approach was summed up by Mike Foster, a junior education spokesman, who remarked on BBC2’s Dispatch Box programme recently that the purpose of a university education was to enable people to earn an extra £400,000 over their lifetime.

This is as degraded as it is destructive. The purpose of education is rather to transmit the best that has been known and said in the world so that children are able to understand their own culture and the world around them and can thus cope with the challenges life will throw at them. Only if that is done properly will a society, its values and its economy thrive.

But the government is not really concerned with education, or with vocational training. What drives it instead is the impossible dream of eradicating all social distinctions. This ‘all must have prizes’ philosophy is behind the proposed matriculation certificate to be awarded to all who reach a minimum standard at 16.

It is behind the aim to get half of all 18 year-olds into higher education. It is behind the grade inflation which is forcing the introduction of a new, super A-level plus, which will only add to the general confusion without correcting the drop in standards this new exam implicitly acknowledges.

The national curriculum has failed to remedy our education malaise because the problem is far deeper. It is rooted in a failure to agree what education is for; a failure to agree what culture and values it should transmit; and a failure to agree even that there is such a thing as truth.

Until all this is confronted, Estelle Morris and her successors will only be unravelling the tapestry still further.

Posted by admin at February 11, 2002