If you have ever caught yourself cribbing about the state of education in our country, then think again.
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools and Learners in the UK Andrew Adonis told the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference of leading private schools that
... in some 800 secondary schools, fewer than 30 per cent of 16-year-olds achieve five or more good GCSEs including English and maths.
Adonis does not mince words when he says that
The waste of talent and potential isn’t acceptable. Parents rightly expect better, and so must we as educators and government.
What Adonis says is right, but perhaps he is only looking at the results of a problem without looking at the cause of the problem. For instance while earlier knowledge was difficult to obtain, today knowledge is all around. Technology has made it possible to access knowledge about almost every subject. Students therefore no longer need teachers to only impart knowledge - they need someone to help them assimilate that knowledge and help them use it. The challenge to teachers is not so much what to teach as it is how to teach.
An added challenge is that many students come from varying cultural backgrounds. This can be both advantageous and disadvantageous, depending on how one sees it. It can be advantageous because now teachers can use the knowledge of students as a learning/teaching resource. It can be disadvantageous because some students will suffer from a cultural gap when it comes to language use in the classroom, or amount of previous knowledge about a subject.
For instance, how many of our standard five students from India would be able to do trigonometry without much effort if they are sent to a UK school? Or take an American child now studying in the UK, for sure that child would be suffering language pains thanks to the difference in spelling words in American and British English. These are just few instances of why students could be facing difficulties in learning. More research is required to find out the cause for such poor state of affairs in education.
The statistics present a sorry case for education in the UK. However, educationists need to seriously ask themselves whether the needs of education have changed. Today’s children have a lot of resources within their grasp, but they have unique needs of how to use these resources. Unfortunately they are still presented with an outdated system of education that assumes that the learner is a blank slate. It’s time for educationist all around the world to rethink the way in which our youngsters are educated in schools today. It will surely reduce the frustration of both teacher and learner.
Adonis is author or co-author of six books, including studies of the English class system (A Class Act, 1997), the rise and fall of the poll tax (Failure in British Government, 1994), the Victorian House of Lords (Making Aristocracy Work, 1993) and a collection of essays on Roy Jenkins published last year. Andrew was educated at Kingham Hill School and at Keble and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford.
