GCSE and all that

Today’s talk is all about GCSE results.  What do they really mean, and are our children being properly prepared for the future?  By themselves the statistics are confusing.  “Why can’t it be like it once was?” pine those too young to remember the days of separate GCE and CSE.  But go back further to their grandparents’ generation, to the days of the Higher School Certificate taken only by a tiny proportion of young people; how well educated were they?

In an article entitled “What should every school-leaver know” published in the TES in September 1948 sixty items were listed.  These were not specific to any subject, nor were they examined, and they were intended for every school-leaver.  How well would you do on some of these?

• How to buy, take care of, and wear clothes to the best advantage; darn socks and mend boots.  How to clean a room, make a bed, use an iron or light a fire.
• How to behave at a concert, a church service, in a railway carriage or at meals.
• How to grow and store ordinary vegetables so that there is an all-year-round supply.
• How to mend a frozen pipe, a blown fuse, a blocked-up drain, a leaking tap, a broken window, a smoking chimney or an over-flowing WC.
• How to read an ordinance survey map and use rail and bus timetables to plan a journey across the British Isles.
• How to get the best out of a police, the postman, the doctor or the refuse collector.
• What to do about a stranger asking the way, or a person who is quite destitute.

You may no longer need (as they did in 1948) to know “how to kill a rabbit or a chicken humanely,” but what about “looking after public property – e.g. library books”?  And then, perhaps the most demanding of all, “how to detect ordinary tricks of crooked thinking – e.g. suggestion, tabloid thinking, rationalisation, emotional language, confusion between ‘or’ and ‘some’, arguing from selected instances, begging the question, illegitimate extension, or false analogy.”

So how well did you do?  Did you achieve 95%, 70%, or were you just stumped?  Does that mean you should go back to school and take more GCSEs, or does it remind you that there is far more to education than what can ever figure in exam results?  If so, perhaps you are now seeing more clearly the limitations of league tables, and why the instant sound bytes of politicians resemble the staff who were trying to reorganise the deck chairs on the sinking Titanic.

See Parts Three, Six, Seven and Eight of the Briefing Paper and Action 1

This article is tagged: Education, GCSE, wisdom.