Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The value of "qualificashuns"
I’ll copy here an editorial in February’s Construction Magazine about the new GCSE course being piloted in “Construction Management”.
Triffic Idea – but can we make a sugestion?
Wot a good idea the Construction GCSE is. As we report in our feature on pages 54-56, the qualificashun shood get kids intrested in our industry from a yunger age. At Ridgewood skool in Doncaster, one of 55 pilots, the department hed speaks of making construcshun “something to aspire to” for the top set rather “sending the idiots down to the craft department”. So it’s a shame that the exam board Edexcel doesn’t care if students are barely literate. Exams are mostly mutipul choice, but in a few instances when they have to rite anything, they’re allowed a hole range of spellings. Perhaps employers don’t mind, but we think it pays to know your “scaffolding” from your “skafoldin”…
Tongue in cheek as it may be, it says quite a lot about the way educationalists are on a different planet to the rest of us here in the real world.
Employers want young people they can employ. That means that when they leave school with their clutch full of qualifications that those pieces of paper mean that the holders are capable of a decent level of numeracy, literacy, and understanding based on a modicum of knowledge. What the editor of Construction Magazine parodies well in her editorial is the standards of written English of a good number of school leavers. Why should it be this way?
I am reading a book called “Class War” by Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools. He describes what he calls “the Blob” of institutional vested interest drawn from educationalists, lecturers in teacher training institutions, government advisers, and think tanks who live in a parallel universe where children should not be given the gift of knowledge and where teachers teach, but where woolly “interchangeable competencies” are facilitated by “learning managers” and the fragile ego of the child should be preserved by not constricting their thinking by outmoded notions of rules and strictures such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Let me give you a couple of exemplar quotes. The first is from Professor Tim Brighouse:
“In the light of research into the brain and theories of learning, teachers questioning techniques will have moved (by 2050) beyond traditional methods. By then we will be exploiting the alter ego dimension of teaching whereby they create an alternative persona to “unlock the mind and open the shut chambers of the heart””.
I am reasonably well educated and fairly intelligent, yet I do not have the first clue what Professor Brighouse is talking about, and I suspect that neither does he.
David Hargreaves, former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and former Professor of Education at Cambridge believes that “all sixteen-plus examinations must be abolished” so that the “comprehensive curriculum can be …reconstructed or revised from academic to social subjects and from the learning of information to the acquisition of skills”.
On the back of this thinking it is now “competencies” that matter in education and not knowledge. For example, from the proposed Competencies for Learning, students are expected to:
Understand how to learn, taking account of their preferred learning styles, and understand the need to, and how to, manage their own learning through life;
Have learned systematically to think;
Have explored and reached an understanding of their own creative talents, and how to make best use of them;
Have learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves;
Have achieved high standards of literacy and numeracy and spatial understanding
I’m not sure I understand what “spaitial understanding” is all about but I can concur with the need for high levels (if ill defined at this point) of literacy and numeracy. As for the rest of it, and understanding my own creative talents I can’t say I know the answer to that now I’m 33, let alone when I was a child. Equally can I say I have learnt systematically to think? No, but I have learnt systematically to think in some contexts, such as politics or my field of professional competence where I can ponder the logic of an argument. Thinking depends on knowledge and is context specific, so these grand global objectives are all pretty meaningless, yet they guide the thinking of those who manage our children’s school curriculum towards some sort of egalitarian ideal where “setting” and streaming are treated with suspicion let alone the anathema of selection and where exams are dumbed down to the extent it is possible that all “must have prizes” (to quote Mr Woodhead). The real world however differentiates the “can dos” from the “can’t” and it is the latter category who suffer most from the ideologies of the competencies over knowledge protagonists.
Without knowledge we are powerless in the world. We don’t know who we are or where we come from when we teach history as a relative concern. That void of understanding where our society comes from is what fuels separatism and extremism in society. Gordon Brown talks of teaching “Britishness” in schools, but this somewhat misses the point. What schools ought to teach is knowledge. Knowledge of literature and the grammatical structures of language so that school leavers can read and write to an acceptable level. Knowledge of mathematical logic and the ability to do basic arithmetic without the need for a computer or a calculator. Knowledge of history with facts, figures, dates, and occurrences so that children understand the course of events that led to the formation of society as we have it today. Knowledge of places and economies as well as the physical processes of the geographical world. This knowledge is what employers wish for in school leavers as the building blocks to train and develop their staff. It is worrying when the government now expects business to do the job of schools and educate young adults to basic levels of literacy and numeracy when they begin work. Is 11 years in school not enough to be able to teach children to read, write, and add up?
Sadly the answer to that question is all too often no. I recently advertised for an administrative post where the basic requirements alongside managing a diary and a filing system were to draft correspondence in a coherent and structured way that I would be happy to sign off without fear of embarrassment. Of the graduates who applied for the job there was more than one applicant whose standard of written English was little or no better than the parody of the opening editorial.
If elected to Milton Keynes Council I will be keeping a close eye on the standards in schools and watching the LEA to ensure that there is discipline in the classroom and an emphasis on educating in the traditional sense of the word to push our schools towards helping every child reach their true potential and not be blighted by a culture of ignorance.
Triffic Idea – but can we make a sugestion?
Wot a good idea the Construction GCSE is. As we report in our feature on pages 54-56, the qualificashun shood get kids intrested in our industry from a yunger age. At Ridgewood skool in Doncaster, one of 55 pilots, the department hed speaks of making construcshun “something to aspire to” for the top set rather “sending the idiots down to the craft department”. So it’s a shame that the exam board Edexcel doesn’t care if students are barely literate. Exams are mostly mutipul choice, but in a few instances when they have to rite anything, they’re allowed a hole range of spellings. Perhaps employers don’t mind, but we think it pays to know your “scaffolding” from your “skafoldin”…
Tongue in cheek as it may be, it says quite a lot about the way educationalists are on a different planet to the rest of us here in the real world.
Employers want young people they can employ. That means that when they leave school with their clutch full of qualifications that those pieces of paper mean that the holders are capable of a decent level of numeracy, literacy, and understanding based on a modicum of knowledge. What the editor of Construction Magazine parodies well in her editorial is the standards of written English of a good number of school leavers. Why should it be this way?
I am reading a book called “Class War” by Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools. He describes what he calls “the Blob” of institutional vested interest drawn from educationalists, lecturers in teacher training institutions, government advisers, and think tanks who live in a parallel universe where children should not be given the gift of knowledge and where teachers teach, but where woolly “interchangeable competencies” are facilitated by “learning managers” and the fragile ego of the child should be preserved by not constricting their thinking by outmoded notions of rules and strictures such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Let me give you a couple of exemplar quotes. The first is from Professor Tim Brighouse:
“In the light of research into the brain and theories of learning, teachers questioning techniques will have moved (by 2050) beyond traditional methods. By then we will be exploiting the alter ego dimension of teaching whereby they create an alternative persona to “unlock the mind and open the shut chambers of the heart””.
I am reasonably well educated and fairly intelligent, yet I do not have the first clue what Professor Brighouse is talking about, and I suspect that neither does he.
David Hargreaves, former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and former Professor of Education at Cambridge believes that “all sixteen-plus examinations must be abolished” so that the “comprehensive curriculum can be …reconstructed or revised from academic to social subjects and from the learning of information to the acquisition of skills”.
On the back of this thinking it is now “competencies” that matter in education and not knowledge. For example, from the proposed Competencies for Learning, students are expected to:
Understand how to learn, taking account of their preferred learning styles, and understand the need to, and how to, manage their own learning through life;
Have learned systematically to think;
Have explored and reached an understanding of their own creative talents, and how to make best use of them;
Have learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves;
Have achieved high standards of literacy and numeracy and spatial understanding
I’m not sure I understand what “spaitial understanding” is all about but I can concur with the need for high levels (if ill defined at this point) of literacy and numeracy. As for the rest of it, and understanding my own creative talents I can’t say I know the answer to that now I’m 33, let alone when I was a child. Equally can I say I have learnt systematically to think? No, but I have learnt systematically to think in some contexts, such as politics or my field of professional competence where I can ponder the logic of an argument. Thinking depends on knowledge and is context specific, so these grand global objectives are all pretty meaningless, yet they guide the thinking of those who manage our children’s school curriculum towards some sort of egalitarian ideal where “setting” and streaming are treated with suspicion let alone the anathema of selection and where exams are dumbed down to the extent it is possible that all “must have prizes” (to quote Mr Woodhead). The real world however differentiates the “can dos” from the “can’t” and it is the latter category who suffer most from the ideologies of the competencies over knowledge protagonists.
Without knowledge we are powerless in the world. We don’t know who we are or where we come from when we teach history as a relative concern. That void of understanding where our society comes from is what fuels separatism and extremism in society. Gordon Brown talks of teaching “Britishness” in schools, but this somewhat misses the point. What schools ought to teach is knowledge. Knowledge of literature and the grammatical structures of language so that school leavers can read and write to an acceptable level. Knowledge of mathematical logic and the ability to do basic arithmetic without the need for a computer or a calculator. Knowledge of history with facts, figures, dates, and occurrences so that children understand the course of events that led to the formation of society as we have it today. Knowledge of places and economies as well as the physical processes of the geographical world. This knowledge is what employers wish for in school leavers as the building blocks to train and develop their staff. It is worrying when the government now expects business to do the job of schools and educate young adults to basic levels of literacy and numeracy when they begin work. Is 11 years in school not enough to be able to teach children to read, write, and add up?
Sadly the answer to that question is all too often no. I recently advertised for an administrative post where the basic requirements alongside managing a diary and a filing system were to draft correspondence in a coherent and structured way that I would be happy to sign off without fear of embarrassment. Of the graduates who applied for the job there was more than one applicant whose standard of written English was little or no better than the parody of the opening editorial.
If elected to Milton Keynes Council I will be keeping a close eye on the standards in schools and watching the LEA to ensure that there is discipline in the classroom and an emphasis on educating in the traditional sense of the word to push our schools towards helping every child reach their true potential and not be blighted by a culture of ignorance.
# posted by Sherington Tory @ 1:37 PM 
