The grave of academe

john doe

Declining Standards in Education

1. Teaching Maths In 1970:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

2. Teaching Maths In 1980:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or £80. What is his profit?

3. Teaching Maths In 1990:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £100. His cost of production is £80. Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Maths In 2000:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £100. His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Maths In 2008:

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of £20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers. )

6. Teaching Maths 2018:

أ المسجل تبيع حموله شاحنة من الخشب من اجل 100 دولار. صاحب
تكلفة الانتاج من الثمن. ما الربحل

Thanks to Bishop Cranmer..taken from his blog.

Serge Rabot

I thought no other country in Europe had sunk as low as we French have over the last decade. Well,British academic standards seem to have gone the same way as ours: down the drain.
Why don't they send every child aged ten on both sides of the Channel a copy of any post-grad diploma he/she wishes to obtain?
It would save a lot of taxpayers'money.
Whichever side runs the show,for more than three decades, social engineering has been tearing down the most valuable assets of our once efficient schooling systems.

Ian G

Not every child is above average. If you had seen some of the stupid answers I have seen, you would not be so condemnatory. Teachers have always taught to the test. No-one wants to fail. Examinations have been dumbed down. This is the Governments' fault. They want everyone to get above average results. This is statistically and logically ludicrous but it makes for great headlines. We now have teachers who themselves are the victims of several generations of dumbing down, even the lecturers are in the same boat. The few of us who are capable of changing things will need power, including disciplinary power, position and, yes, professional salaries before we venture back into the maelstrom that is modern schooling.

50% of everyone is average or below. To put it another way, half the world is not very clever and, of the other half, most of them aren't much better.

Herbert Thornton

Nearly 40 years ago, our son, then around 7 years old, recounted how his "maths" teacher explained the concepts of two dimensions and three dimensions.

First she produced a box and explained how it had three dimensions.

Then to illustrate the concept of two dimensions, she produced a rectangular piece of paper, saying that, unlike the box, it had only two dimensions - one from top to bottom and the other from side to side.

Our son raised his had and pointed out that just like the box, the paper had three dimensions, because it had thickness.

The teacher became very angry at this, and scolded him for being a trouble maker. Paper, she insisted, had only two dimensions.

And this was at a school in Canada.

Brian O'Connor

John Doe: I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But I thank you for your comment.

We 'mericuns have exactly the same problem, and, IMO, that problem stems largely from the teachers unions.

I'm not totally opposed to unions, but I do believe that by their very existence, unions have a conflict of interest. In the case of teachers unions, one loyalty is to education and students, and the other is to the union itself.

Unfortunately, at least in the USA, the unions have placed their own interests above those of the students.

There are several reasons why I believe as I do, but the most compelling one, at least to me, is how difficult the unions have made it to fire incompetent or morally bereft teachers.

Jim Clarke

Out of curiosity, I posed these questions to my youngest son. Because we live in Australia, he had to be told that the salt & sand were for icy roads, but that was the only clue I gave him.
His score was 100% correct.
He is 7 years old.

elixelx

Why are you people surprised by all this?

For years the Teachers' Training Colleges have been the spiritual and political homes of those who truly BELIEVE that the function of EDUCATION is not to promote Literacy and Numeracy, but to "CHANGE BEHAVIOUR"!

Dumbing Down indeed! Teachers were the frontline in the defense of society; they are now the trainers of suicide bombers!

elixelx

Dear John,

Really, the only question that remains to be answered is this: What kind of Schmuck sells A WHOLE TRUCKLOAD OF LUMBER for £100?

Sarah

I’ve been a lecturer at six universities (3 ‘old’, including Cambridge, and 3 ‘new’) and have no problem, in principle, with making some allowance for candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At Cambridge there are plenty of brilliant students but I was also aware of several students (from very good schools) who were admitted because they got excellent A levels and performed very well at interview, but then plateaued, never really making further progress, or getting beyond the mid 2.1 level. They had already been given every opportunity to fulfil their potential and simply didn’t have any further to go.
At new universities I’ve seen people reach the same level at the end of three years – but from a very different starting point. I can think of one student who had been told she should give up on A level study but (through hard work and ability) eventually got a really solid 2.1 despite being distracted by family pressure to accept an arranged marriage. I can think of another woman, a mature student with no family history of going to university, who was the worst student in the class in the first year but who similarly worked up to a high 2.1 standard after 3 years.
Those two students probably got Ds and Es at A level. If I were an admissions tutor at a top university I’d certainly want to consider whether someone from a similarly (comparatively) deprived background with 2 As and a C might have more potential to get a first class degree than a straight A student who had been to private school.
It would be useful to see some research tracking the outcomes of students who receive ‘allowances’ because of their backgrounds, comparing their degree results with those of the cohort as a whole.

Mike

I sent my 1950's 'School Certificate' to Oxbridge and they gave me a 1st Class Honours Degree!

Ian C

From a leading competitor in the world economy to third world in two generations. This has been aided and abetted by the mass media whose prime purpose is money making now (which it can most easily do by operating at lowest common denominator level) instead of perpetuating the market through the necessary self imposed restraints and investment for the longer term.

In the meantime, we should bear in mind that the politicians we elect reflect the society we are. Once elected they then try to meddle with (among much else) the future of the nation - the education system, especially. It is easier for them to homogenise it than to recognise the complexities of human requirements and the subtleties required in educating future generations. So they dumb down the education system and now we have one generation of dumbed down teachers dumbing down the next generation. In these circumstances, Government must be pulled out of education, as it is now an active malign influence.

Until parents can manage the education of their offspring for themselves (as those in the private sector have a chance to do) it will bring the country into inevitable and rapid decline. We are all sitting and watching it, feeling utterly helpless at watching this slow and inevitable car crash.

This is a very good example of why Labour is in trouble more than anything else; it is one of those very many items that they professed concern about. And their solution? Like everything else, their solution was more of your and my (and lowest earners) hard earned money, with absolutely no more clear thinking and intellectual awareness of the true nature of the problem. And then they played politics with the exam system, the teacher training system, teachers pay, the curriculum, food, etc. etc. etc.

Will the Tories be any better? It is a sad day when all you have to say, about something so crucial to the country’s future, ‘ they cannot possibly be as bad as this lot’ as the most positive utterance. We are in real trouble if they do not get extremely radical on arrival in government, and this more than anything is why we need an early election, because children cannot wait for their education.

Ian C

Sarah
We can empathise with what you have found in your career. But that cannot be to admit that: -
a) It is therefore obviously right to engineer entry in this way and thereby deny entry to someone who passes the selection criteria on straight merit and
b) That it is anywhere near possible to be consistent, if it is a policy with merit.

Egalitarianism, if it has merit is surely two- way? To justify such engineering can only be fairly done by interview of all students by non-biased selection panels with pre-determined criteria for selecting one student with ‘potential’ over another with the qualifications - not remotely possible, let alone with a (disastrous) 'target' of 50% of all going to higher education.

In short egalitarian engineering, logically, can become nothing but the opposite of what it states is its purpose to be - discriminative not egalitarian.

Once more it is a reflex action introduced to cure the failings of the rest of the education system and sold to an electorate as a ‘progressive’ policy. It is more of the smoke and mirrors used by those to disguise their wider and fundamental failings.

Nick Kaplan

Sarah, whilst it may be possible to find some empirical evidence to show that “someone from a similarly (comparatively) deprived background with 2 As and a C might have more potential to get a first class degree than a straight A student who had been to private school,” this could in no way form the basis of a selection process for university entry. This is because all empirical evidence would necessarily be general, whilst in reality some people from underprivileged backgrounds might have potential whilst others will not. As there is no way to sort out those that do have potential from those that don’t one can only make a judgement on what is currently known, i.e. how the individual did at A-level and, most importantly, how they performed in an interview. Selecting people purely because empirical studies may show certain groups on average have a potential to perform better in the future than they are performing now, will necessary lead to selecting some who don’t deserve to be chosen and worst of all rejecting some who genuinely do deserve to be chosen.