Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Brighton college, issued a call to arms the other day when he told a conference that independent schools had to get up off their knees before the government and start fighting it instead:

‘Independent schools should be setting their own agenda, not merely reacting to the Government, said Dr Seldon, who has written biographies of John Major and Tony Blair. They should be represented by a body akin to the CBI or the TUC and led by a figure with a national profile whose voice would be heard as regularly on the media as that of Chris Woodhead, the former head of Ofsted. They should set up their own college for training the heads and teachers of the future. And they should devise their own exams to replace A-levels.’

This last point seems to me to be crucial if education in Britain is ever to be rescued. The situation is now beyond disaster, as Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, acknowledged when he told the conference that

‘…A-levels no longer differentiated between good candidates and exceptional ones. "They don't test the ability to think, analyse or reason - they don't tell us what we want to know," he said. "The introduction of bite-size modules has led to predictable questions, prescribed answers and a mentality of 'learn, examine and forget'. Able candidates have lost the opportunity to demonstrate their originality and creativity. The failure of A-levels is a tragedy."’

State education is almost certainly now beyond redemption in itself. Whatever governments try to do to education while it is under state control, standards will be sabotaged either by ideological administrations or ideological educationists or, as at present, both. The only way to stop education sliding off the cliff altogether is to restore a system in which both the pedagogy and the examinations are under the control of educationists who remain true to the principles of a liberal education, or education for its own sake, and to the fundamental notion of transmitting both this nation’s culture and the tenets of western civilisation down through the generations. At present, because of our homogeneous exam system and the stranglehold of state-funded universities, the independent schools are despite their best efforts being sucked inexorably into the vortex of educational decline. Only if they break free will they be able not only to rescue individual children but also to bear witness to what education really should mean.

Posted by melanie at May 15, 2005