The education world is reeling. Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, uttered the first semi-sensible words in years to emerge from his benighted department when he tentatively suggested that just possibly there was an outside chance that perhaps a few teachers might not be altogether spectacularly gifted and supremely competent at all times at teaching children -- and was immediately shot at from all sides, with teachers dancing up and down on his head in rage.

Given the scale of the problem in education, what Mr Clarke said was remarkably mild:

'"Overall, the system is quite unreliable if you are a pupil or a parent," he said. "It's not quite hit and miss, but it's almost hit and miss whether your classroom teacher is working rigorously and systematically to improve the classroom experience for every child." '

'Quite' unreliable? Now look at what Sir Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial College London, told the Financial Times: 'Now we are diverting resources in the university sector to the universities that are having to bring these kids up to speed with what they should have learnt in primary and secondary. And that's why you're moving money away from places like this to your third-class institutions, because it costs more to teach those kids because they've never been taught'.

'Never been taught'. In other words, the quality of education in our schools is not just 'hit and miss', as Mr Clarke would have it, but disastrously bad. And as Richard Levin, president of Yale, told the FT last month, the government's whole ideology is making things far worse because of its 'political bias egainst intellectual elites'.

As Sir Richard said, widening university participation was causing 'unbelievable stresses'. As a result, as the Times reports, Oxford university is now following the inevitable logic of widening participation with not enough money to fund it by planning to concentrate on students who will actually pay the market rate for their education:

'BRITISH undergraduates will represent a minority of students at Oxford under proposals for an historic shift in the university’s role to safeguard its world-class status. They will lose out to foreign undergraduates paying the full cost of their degree courses and to postgraduates whose numbers would double to boost Oxford’s income. The plans, set out in strategy documents drawn up by the university’s governing council, would recast Oxford along the lines of an American-style Ivy League university, concentrating on the lucrative postgraduate market. Papers circulated to academics suggest that the number of home students should be cut from this September by one percentage point a year over the next five years to create more places for foreign undergraduates. This would take place within a freeze on the overall numbers of undergraduates while Oxford mounted an aggressive expansion of postgraduate provision.'

Thus the de-education of Britain steadily accelerates towards its denouement.

Posted by melanie at March 11, 2004