Depressing vindication for people like myself who have argued -- in the teeth of ridicule and outright denial from virtually the entire education establishment -- that education standards have dropped through the floor, that public examinations have been dumbed down and that the universities are having to spend much of their degree courses on remedial work. Lo and behold, now the former Chief Inspector of Schools has confirmed that this is indeed all too true.

So now, multiple-choice exam questions are to be replaced by essays, to try to repair the catastophic situation where university students cannot any more sustain an argument. The decline of the essay has indeed been one of the most devastating developments in recent years. Essays teach pupils how to make a structured argument around a set of facts. They teach one how to think. The eclipse of the essay has meant that hundreds of thousands of people can no longer think because they have not been taught how to do so. It has also meant the erosion of the idea of objectivity and the marginalisation of facts. If one is trying to explain why our society now apears so gullible in the face of systematic lies and propaganda, it is because being taught to think has long been out of fashion in what we laughably call our education system.

Posted by melanie at November 12, 2003