This summer grades have
fallen slightly in Britain's schools. Top A-level marks are
down by 0.4%
and GCSEs fell by the same amount a week later. At first sight,
this does not appear to have the potential to generate all that much media
heat. Perhaps we could for once have a
little calm: after all, the annual carnival surrounding those joint spectres of
grade inflation and dumbing down has taken a sabbatical. The first fall in GCSE grades since their
introduction? This may be nothing more
than the year of the blip.
Still, if less than half
a per cent does not sound alarming, remember that the effects are personal and
often raw. Individual futures are at
stake and schools are far from immune. One
head described the day after results this year as ‘the darkest day in my time
as a school leader. We fell off a
cliff’.
Following several days of
rising discontent the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, felt sufficiently moved
to declare: ‘my heart
goes out to those students who sat the exam this year’. The anger registered on Twitter (see #Gove) was far from abated by this remark. One commentator described Gove as ‘a swollen
bollock of a man’. From this pretty unique
anatomical perspective, the offer of his heart seems relatively minor by
comparison to the bollock, if not a little insulting to its recipient.
Standards! Standards!
That is the repeated refrain of the chief inspector for
England, a word that almost everyone else repeats when caught short in the
public eye (having been asked to proclaim what indeed it is about education
that they are so committed to). This
year and despite the slump, the fixation with standards
continues: Is our examination
system measuring these standards correctly?
Is it fit for purpose? Is it
rigorous enough? Or credible
enough? Is our examination system
raising standards or are our standards falling?
Where do we rank in relation to the rest of the world? Are standards slipping? Are we about to slide
into a small but surmountable depression or something deeper? As with all ethereal concerns, these standards are by their very nature unable
to be questioned. And if you have the
temerity to challenge the dubious value of their pursuit, you may find yourself
swiftly labelled as being against education, or even for being a lover of failure: ‘Where is your faith in the little ones?’
Underlying this debate is
an ideology from which we all suffer, the ethic of improvement. The
implicit assumption behind much educational thought seems to be that we have
come to sit astride a unilinear upward curve of educational enhancement. There is only one path to success and we are
already on it (or we know what we must do to return if we stray into the gloom;
so-called failing schools appreciate this only too well). There is a flat denial of the fact that there
may exist several paths, many of which could be more desirable than our own, some
making no reference to standards at all.
The presumption that this singular route to improvement upon which we
all march is so straightforwardly true, correct and proper as to be rationally
unassailable, is combined with the perverse idea that examinations can then measure
what might count as quality along this scale of success. It is a beguilingly simple formula.
But when the heart flutters most upon the
day that examination results are revealed, when we find ourselves getting most
worked up as one stretch of education comes to an end (rather than before or
during), should we not doubt the whole endeavour? Could it not be that the heart education
currently helps to nurture has been profoundly misled? When Gove offered his heart as a
reconciliation to the hearts of others, he was speaking of a dark and barren
place. The organ with which he seems
concerned, the educational heart, is at risk of becoming little but a hollow
muscular pump in pursuit of nothing but its pulse.
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