Primary school closing early.

Malthusian

Cakeguts wrote: »

so why are children leaving school unable to do simple arithmetic or read and write

Because most children have always left school unable to do simple arithmetic or read and write.

Most people are not as clever as you, and will not need maths or writing skills in their career as an unskilled labourer.

ValiantSon

Cakeguts wrote: »

It is interesting to me that the people of my age were educated in schools that were not full of "things" and yet our standard of eduation was better than it is today. So clearly all this stuff is not needed for a good standard of education.

Please provide objective evidence, preferably in the form of standardised scores and metrics to substantiate your claim that education standards when you were a child were better than they are today. This is your utterly subjective opinion and seems to be based on nothing more than you having watched a TV news report in which you saw some young children using A3 paper and cutting out shapes.

By the way, I very much doubt that the children were being taught how to cut out shapes and that was the learning objective. It is much more likely that the objective was completely different, but part of the task designed to achieve that objective involved the children in cutting out shapes. It may have been a geometry lesson.

Furthermore, children do still use exercise books, but you just didn't happen to see any in this very short snapshot (set up for the cameras) of what goes on in the school.

Additionally, state education is provided free of charge and schools cannot require parents to pay for it in any form. This means that the school does have to provide crayons and pencils, etc. By the time the children are in Key Stage 2 it is more common for them to bring some of their own pens and pencils, but it cannot be demanded, and there are parents who will refuse to do so. Should the children of those parents be refused an education because their parents are !!!!less? By Key Stage 3 it is normal for pupils to bring their own pens and pencils, but even then, if a child doesn't have a pen, the school needs to be able to provide them with one.

Cakeguts wrote: »

The other thing is that the school education system doesn't reward people who think outside the box. It is all spoon fed with the answers for the exams written in the questions.

What is your evidence for this? Please provide a representative sample of exam questions from recent public examinations where the answers were contained within the question. (You won't be able to, because they aren't).

It does seem that your entire knowledge of the education system is derived from the Daily Mail and their ilk. I suggest that, should you wish to start debating education policy you should do a lot more research.

ValiantSon

economic wrote: »

The point is school should give the necessary education in things like maths and grammer and programming. But at the same time, much more more crucially, it should be aimed at helping kids think for themselves, not spoon fed facts and answers so that they can pass exams and help make the school look good.

I don't disagree with that sentiment, but the picture is more complex than you suggest, and schools exist within a system that requires them to demonstrate ever greater exam success and does not account for the individuality of the children they teach. The system is deeply flawed, but that is the product of successive generations of government ministers sticking their oars in.

ViolaLass

Cakeguts wrote: »

Yes but we didn't have calculators so it all had to be done by long hand so why are children leaving school unable to do simple arithmetic or read and write when so much time is being saved by not doing anything by long hand and the availability of calculators?

Very, very few leave school literally unable to do simple arithmetic or read and write. You need to be able to do a lot more than that, however, to pass GCSEs.

Mildly surprised that that needs pointing out.

ValiantSon

Cakeguts wrote: »

They aren't. This is what normal educational standards are these days. What you would call high iq whatever that means are not getting the education they should be. They are all behind what was possible in 1960s when there were no things in class rooms expect desks and people. You would think that with computers available children would be more advanced educationally than they were in the 1960s when people were still doing arithmatic in imperial measures but they aren't they are about 5 years of education behind people who went to primary school in the 1960s.

If you are under 40 and have done GCSEs you have studied the dumbed down version of UK education. The over 40s all took O levels not GCSEs. The difference between O level music and GCSE was this. For O level you had to be able to write harmony and play an instrument to a certain level as well as study the history of music read a music score and study the history of composers in order to get to understand the different styles of music. So if you find someone who has got an O level in music you will know what they have done. In contrast you can pass GCSE without being able to read or write a note of music, have beginner skills in playing or singing the sort of level that most people would get to in less than 6 months and by making up supermarket type music on a keyboard and recording it without knowing what kind of music you had made up and without it having any form of interest for anyone to want to listen to. So complete junk. However if you go to a really good school you will still be taught the harmony and all the other music knowledge even though you don't need it to pass GCSE music. So it is a complete lottery as to whether you know anything about music at all at the end of a GCSE music course. The reason why some music teachers can't teach the harmony and history of music is because they haven't done any of it in their training. We know that some degrees are about the standard of 3 old O levels. So at the end of a degree someone might know as much about music as a the average 16 year old in the 1960s. There is no way that someone like this can teach to the old A level standard of music. This is why if you don't go to a top school where they have well educated teachers with high standard degrees from top universities you find people at middle level music colleges doing in their 3rd year of a degree course what I did for A level. This means that the lower level degrees are the same level of education as 3 1960s A levels. Of course the top university degrees are as good as they have always been. The bottom level degrees are a lower education standard than the 1960s A levels and are around O level. So you can basically finish up after a degree with an educational level of a 1960s 16 year old. So apart from the top 10% of students who get degrees from the top universities everyone else is any from 3 years to 5 years behind what was possible in the 1960s when schools didn't have loads of stuff.

All the teachers who say that this is not true but who didn't do O levels and A levels are not helping the situation by not finding out about the dumbing down and trying to reverse it. Not admitting to it isn't helping the students who now have to pay for their education instead of getting it free at school. The people who lose out in all of this are the students. The UK state education system is failing large numbers of children especially those from poorer areas who can't catch up.

The scandal that most parents should be complaining about is that their children now have to pay for 3 years to study at university the level of education that used to be taught at school in 2 years in the 6th form. It means that a Labour government introduced private 6th form education by stealth. Now most of the 6th form level of work is done at university and you have to pay for it. Remember the university year is shorter than the school year so that 2 years of free education at school 6th form has now become 3 shorter paid for years at university. What totally disgusts me about this situation is it is really bad for students from poorer families because they are now expected to take out loans to pay for the 3 years of education that they used to get for free in their schools 6th form. So the expansion of university education has made it much much harder for poorer students to get a high standard of education because of the cost.

What a load of drivel.

O Levels did not match the level of modern degree courses. This is just utter rubbish.

ValiantSon

Cakeguts wrote: »

I haven't got a clue what you are talking about but I have noticed that it is the wrong spelling of practise.

The problem with answers like that is that I am old. I have done what I needed to do with my education so apart from the fact that I can't get any paper work done correctly the first time or the second time or often even the third time because of the mistakes. (Please bring back one chance exams, no repeats and no course work to reflect the real working world) It isn't going to make any difference to me but it isn't fair on today's children. Why should they have to have second best to what my generation had?

I am finding that there is something very peculiar going on with some parts of the teaching profession. If challenged over why children today are so far behind my generation in terms of maths and language skills they immediately attack the person making the criticism. How does that solve the problem for the children who are being taught badly now? I actually don't care what I can't do or what I don't write correctly but I do care about the people who are not being taught well now because they will get a life sentence from bad education.

There is not enough personal responsibility going on in the teaching profession at the moment.
The situation is that anyone who has taken GCSEs and then A levels have themselves taken the dumbed down version of UK education. Before the introduction of GCSEs anyone who gets an A at A level now would have got an E in the past. You could not get a place at university on a prediction of 3 grade Es at A level. You needed a predication of at least 3 Cs. That would now be 3 A**s now which doesn't exist.

So if you believe that all teachers should be graduates in order to be fair to the children you are teaching that means that anyone who gets less than A*A*A* at A level should take personal responsibility and not go into teaching in case you add to the problem we have already got in some parts of the education system.

There appear to be people who don't care enough about the education of children who do enter the profession without good degrees from top universities.

More of your utterly invented nonsense! Matriculation for university was always two grade Es at A Level (from the point that the A Level was introduced).

Your assertion that modern grade As are equivalent to an E when you were at school is also nonsense. There has been some grade inflation, but not the level that you claim. Your equivalents are entirely based on your utterly subjective opinion and nothing more.

ValiantSon

Cakeguts wrote: »

What worries me most about all of this is that if you complain to a service company's customer services they will try to improve or apologise for their mistakes. If you complain about teaching standards you can guarantee that you some teacher somewhere will launch an attack at you personally as if your opinion is not valid despite all the evidence that it is. I don't care about these personal attacks because they show up what is wrong with the system. So far I have not had any teacher ask how they think that they could improve the education that they are offering. It is all about them and what they think about me.

You haven't provided any evidence for your knee-jerk right wing invective!

ViolaLass

I don't understand why all the issues you perceive are the fault of teachers and teachers alone. Teachers are an important part of the system but they are far from the whole.

Arklight

ValiantSon wrote: »

More of your utterly invented nonsense! Matriculation for university was always two grade Es at A Level (from the point that the A Level was introduced).

Your assertion that modern grade As are equivalent to an E when you were at school is also nonsense. There has been some grade inflation, but not the level that you claim. Your equivalents are entirely based on your utterly subjective opinion and nothing more.

I wouldn’t bother. There was an entire thread he started demanding that all other than the top 30 universities be shut because he can’t understand why anyone with less than 4 As at A level would benefit from Higher Education.

Within this he also argued unceasingly that an A in the modern A level is the same as an E in the old O level system. He additionally has some very odd opinions about HNDs, and believes that Americans spend a minimum of 6 years studying for a bachelors degree.

He is either fundamentally unable to understand the education system of any country post 1962, or is a world class stirrer.

Arklight

economic wrote: »

Then there are a lot more !!!!!! and low iq people then i thought.

Yes, there certainly seem to be. I think you should take an IQ test. And no, the one on Facebook that had 5 questions and rewarded you with a picture of a cat wearing a graduation gown doesn!!!8217;t count.