What's the point of education?

I am unconvinced that all the criticism about education in the UK is totally justified. Sure, the records show that there is a lot of bad teaching in sink schools, but a lot of it must be down to bad parenting and little monsters who won’t learn and can’t be disciplined. As my old dad used to say ‘You can’t educate pork’.

I read a piece that compared GCE maths in 1970 to a present-day exam question. The 1970 question was incomprehensible to me, it was that difficult. The current question quoted was ‘Write 50,000 in words’. To check this I looked at a book of specimen questions for today’s maths GCSE. They were too damn difficult for me!

Some of the commentariat seem to think that there was a Golden Age when discipline was strict, teachers were competent, and bright little boys and girls went on to Grammar School, fame, and fortune.

My experience 60 years ago is that certainly discipline was far stricter than now, with corporal punishment, and the ultimate sanction of expulsion at the sole discretion of the Headmaster. Teaching ranged from mediocre to inspired.  One afternoon per week was compulsory and competitive games, and another afternoon was set aside for more cultural pursuits, such as chess and amateur dramatics. None of my set achieved much in the way of fame, but many went  on from working-class backgrounds to university, the services, and the professions.

In my own case, it was a mixed bag. For some reason I was taken out of the 4th Form and put in the 6^th. I thought I was Jackthe Lad amongst 18 – 19 year old men who were awaiting National Service before University or whatever, and went to the pub at lunchtime. Educationally it was all a bit much because at one and the same time I was taking ‘O’ levels which were not taught in the 6^th Form, so that was self-study, together with ‘A’ levels. I scraped through everything, but I still believe that I left school only half-educated.

The one big advantage is that in those days you were educated for education’s sake (whereas at the secondary moderns you were factory fodder), the Aristotelian concept of knowledge being in itself inherently satisfying, and not just the busy acquisition of facts to get a good job but the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake.

Now education is directed at the work-place where it has manifestly failed; it is now widely recognised that the main cause of youth unemployment is not the shortage of jobs but the mismatch between what the employer needs and what the schools offer.