Wednesday, September 27, 2006

The Educational State We're In

Would the Rod Liddles and the Carol Sarlers of this world, who so eagerly defend the educational value of school against home education, be happy to explain the following?

Also from the same article, we have Chris Woodhead, former head of Ofsted, reported as saying:

"We know that millions have been spent on this problem so why does it continue? Why do we still have so few 16-year-olds that pass English and maths?"

Could one of the reasons be that the former chief inspector of schools makes grating grammatical errors himself?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you really want to argue in their terms, though? Does it really matter if you have the expected literacy and numeracy skills?

Carlotta said...

No, not really. But that maths test was seriously easy and one would imagine that people would be likely to encounter problems they could not solve in this complex world if they couldn't deal with that.

Tim said...

While I am not sure precisely what is entailed in the official test, I think it does matter.

As Carlotta says, the level of this test is trivial. If it is representative, then someone who can't pass it is not equipped to deal with day to day life.

Anonymous said...

Someone that can't pass a maths test at 16 is not equiped to deal with daily life/ the complex world? Are you bloody serious? What kind of maths does one really need to get by in daily life that is not profession dependent? Give me concrete examples. Isn't maths a skill you can trade like any other? Would you likely think you had to know how to draw at a certain "essencial" level?

So I don't have a profession, but I manage to get in the illustration business I won't need any bleeding maths, not even basic addition. I assure you.