my school days
...emember some of it. Surprisingly enough though, I have never been called upon to use the immortal statement, 'Alors! C'est la plume du ma tante' in sensible conversation and confidently expect never to have to in the future. My apologies go out to the French if I have spelt it incorrectly. Had it not been for that one school in the Surrey area then things may have been different, but we will have to continue to communicate in English unless, of course, you happen to have a photo of one of my Aunt's hats and write to me asking what it is. Ashford Grammar had given up the streaming system and which class you joined was decided by alphabetical order. This meant that I was separated from the friends I had made at my previous school. I knew a fair percentage of the people in my class from before but had never hung around with them as we had nothing in common. We were told that if we were not happy with the class we were put in then we could apply for a transfer. After two weeks I did, only to be told that I ought to give it more time and that it would be good for me to make friends with different people. After the Christmas holidays I applied once again for a transfer. They said that they would look into it but never got back to me about it. At the beginning of the Summer term I once again applied to be moved. They had obviously done some kind of study into my previous request as I was this time told that the class I was in had a higher academic level than the one that I was trying to transfer to. As it would not make educational sense for me to move, I would have to stay where I was and no future requests would be entertained. So much for the theory that getting rid of the streaming system would also get rid of educational bias in teachers. There were nine boys in my class altogether and, as I say, I had nothing in common with the other eight at all. For the first two and a half years I was largely isolated and subjected to mild bullying from the others. It never degenerated into violence and I always tried to give as good as I got, but it essentially had the effect of making me withdraw into myself. From being a fairly gregarious child I became mildly introverted and distrustful of others. My work was showing no signs of improvement and my parents had both returned from the first parent teacher open night not overly pleased. They went to the next one too, although that was to be their last appearance. They had got tired of introducing themselves to smiling faces and seeing those faces turn into expressions which clearly said, "Oh, so you're his parents, then." My mum did try to tell them where they were going wrong. She pointed out that I would always respond in a negative way to being force fed information and that only by making the subject interesting and then leaving me to discover the information for myself did they ever stand any chance of success. The teachers obviously thought they knew best, however. It is interesting to note that the only two teachers who did approach my education with this attitude were Mrs Barker and Miss Blanchfield who taught English and Maths, respectively. Sensing that I would learn better if unharassed, they tended to allow me wider latitude than the others. My eventual O level results were to vindicate the instincts of both these fine teachers and my mother over the rigid methodology practised by the rest of the teaching staff. My first end of year report I thought was quite good. I had come eighteenth of thirty-one and with the exception of Music and RE, most of my exam results had been suitably average. It therefore came as a surprise to me when my Dad went ballistic. I can understand his frustration. My education was closely following the pattern that his had twenty-five years earlier. He genuinely wanted me to avoid the same mistakes that he had made and thereby not having to take menial and boring office jobs on leaving school in order to slowly work my way up to the better paid and more interesting positions. Unfortunately, screaming and shouting at me was not the way to go about it. It was at this point that I largely gave up trying altogether in every subject other than English and Maths. Future end of year reports were to see me firmly entrenched in twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth position. The school noticed my further decline and called my parents in to discuss my dwindling potential. It was at this meeting that they divulged my 11+ result to emphasize why they were particularly concerned. They wanted me to see an educational psychologist and my parents gave their consent for this. I cannot remember how many sessions I had, but do remember that the tests I was subjected to included putting moulded plastic shapes into the correct holes and ordering sets of four drawings into logical order of occurrence. Tests such as this would be insulting to your average eight year old and it should come as no real surprise that he decided I was not thick but lazy. I wonder whether educational psychology has moved on any since those days. Even the addition of an extra category such as bored shitless would have been far closer to the truth. While I admit to a tendency to be lazy, this is always preceded by total disinterest. Near the end of my second year I was caught playing truant which made me realize that attempting to forge sick notes from my parents was a futile exercise. Half way through the third year I helped my classmates retrieve a football from another gang of kids at the school who had taken it from them. Due to this they decided to accept me and treat me like a human being in future. Wow, thanks chaps. Most of my creative energies in the third year were devoted to devising a method of playing truant without being caught. It was obvious that I would have to be present at morning and, preferably, afternoon registration and so needed to try to consider which teachers would report my absence. My plan was put into action in the fourth year and, carried out sparingly, appeared to work fine. One teacher did report me missing but I managed to convince my form teacher that I had not felt well and gone home, while making a mental note not to miss any more lessons with that particular teacher. By the time the fifth year started I had managed to effectively create a personal timetable which was a subset of the official one. I cannot seriously believe that I was not receiving the implicit help of the teaching staff by them ignoring my absences in preference to me attending their classes. My end of term report, that Christmas, even contained my best ever Engineering grade. It consisted of one word, satisfactory, and was accompanied by a C+. I had not actually attended a single Engineering lesson that whole term, preferring to spend my Wednesday afternoons at the local cinema. Regardless of all this, the career advisor was horrified that I was planning to leave school after the exams and would not consider sixth form college. His main argument was based around the unemployment figures which had risen alarmingly in recent months. He was convinced that things would improve in the job market over the next two years and that I would not only be better qualified for the wait, but would also then be job hunting in conditions of full employment. History has shown his assessment of the situation to have been a touch optimistic. Unemployment had not at that time touched one million. Two years hence it would be far higher and however many ways the Tories devise to massage the figures, it seems unlikely to ever return to that kind of level in the foreseeable future. Thus I left school and entered the big wide world in the gloriously hot summer of 1976 during which I would discover two things before getting a job. The first was how to sign on. The second was the Sex Pistols. By no means the worst experiences of school that anybody has ever had, but it can be seen that the school system failed me as it does many others. What is more telling is that for all the lessons I missed and the information I refused to absorb, I have never missed any of it. Even the more esoteric mathematical functions that I did learn at the time have been long forgotten. The fact is that most of what passes for education in this country, and I assume elsewhere, is largely irrelevant to life itself. It can make no real sense that most of your energies expended during at least eleven years of your life will prove to be totally wasted. It is not until you reach university level that anything remotely relevant to the workplace will be learnt. It would be counter productive to the stick and carrot process (not to mention privilege and power) for too many people to be privy to what pass for 'management skills', which is why you are vetted by the school system with irrelevance before being allowed access to more useful knowledge. Having said that, you only have to see the early efforts of many smug graduates in their first management positions on leaving university, to realize that experience and common sense can never be taught. School also operates as a filter for industry. Your exam results will largely dictate what kind of experience you will be able to gain at work. The experience they allow you to gain access to, will dictate where the invisible ceiling is positioned in your working life. It is possible to break through that ceiling but not without much effort and luck. You will certainly need to play by their rules to stand a chance, regardless of the amount of effort you put into it. All this stems from a system of schooling which if I were to give it the title of education, would be akin to redefining It's A Knockout as an Olympic sport. Within this system however, there is very little choice when it comes to exams. If they were not conducted at school, then they would be routinely carried out by employers before you were even given an interview. This has often been done in areas such as computing, where applicants far outnumber available positions, but is becoming far more widespread since schooling in the UK stopped gradually declining and went into freefall. The huge rises in unemployment figures and the pointlessness of a GCSE exam which nobody fails have only accelerated this trend. While I agree with the 'trendy liberal' view that everybody shuld be judged on their individual merits and not by arbitrary exam results, they totally fail to see that business will not often give people an opportunity to show their individual merits unless they can obtain a certain degree of examination success. Tinkering with the existing system only has the effect of making those in power devise more methods of selection. Only in a society where power and privilege have been eradicated fully can true meritology ever be realized. Which brings me loosely to the Labour Party's abolition of the 11+ exam and State Grammar Schools that took place in 1974 and 1979, respectively. Their case was: · That it was unfairly advantageous in life to attend a Grammar school rather that a Secondary school, regardless of your eventual examination results. · That you should be disadvantaged by an exam taken when eleven years old was unfair. · That resources were unfairly distributed between the two in favour of Grammar schools. · That Grammar schools attracted a better quality of teacher which accentuated the unfairness of it all by making it more likely that you would get good results in exams. The list of perceived inequalities went on and on. Their solution to the problem was abolition. As covered earlier, with regard to political-speak, it was put forward as the only solution. To cap it all, they renamed what had been known as Secondary schools with the quite remarkable euphemism, Comprehensive schools. Obviously, the predecessor of political correctness was as laughable as its modern offspring. The criticisms of Grammar schools as voiced by the then Government and most sixties radical thinkers do not really pass inspection, however. Although I did badly in my exams I found getting an office job no problem at sixteen, once I had learnt interview technique to some degree. It is possible that prospective employers were willing to afford me more latitude than somebody else who had only passed two O levels at a Secondary school. It was certainly often commented on in a positive way at interviews, and while this is hardly conclusive, I am willing to accept, purely for the sake of argument, that there is a slight advantage in being able to write Grammar school on your application forms. The advantage does not last long though, as once you have had a job, your performance at work takes on a far more important aspect than what school you attended. The main advantages to be gained are by way of contacts, generally only possible in a private Grammar school or at Public school. The 'old-boy network' was not a major consideration in the State sector. Entry by a single exam at the age of eleven also seems unfair and does not take into account late developers or those who have fallen behind due to extended illness or similar. This could have been easily rectified by adding an optional 12+ and 13+ to the exams at those ages. If handled correctly, then it would have been possible for these two extra exams to be packaged as confidence boosters rather than branding the entrants failures if they did not pass. I have no real way of checking the claim on resources so will have to take their word for this, although if resources was meant to refer to human resources then it combines with the next item, that of teacher quality. If, as I suspect, Grammar schools paid higher salaries than their Secondary cousins, then obviously they would get first pick from the available applicants. From my experience, however, I would guess that of all the teachers that I came across at Grammar school, only two or three would have realistically been able to teach in a Secondary school without much change to their attitude. Most seemed happy to assume that the pupils in their class were nothing but sponges who would absorb all the knowledge thrown at them regardless of the fashion it was imparted in. Very little effort appeared to be made to actually make the subjects interesting, an essential requirement in lower or mixed ability classes if you are to achieve anything. I think that with their comment about teachers, the Labour Party were being rather insulting to teachers in Secondary schools as they were not comparing like with like. As the group with the least academically minded pupils, it is only to be expected that they would attain a lower rate of exam passes when you consider that the state still feels it necessary to teach academic subjects to people with neither the talent for, nor any real interest in them. In my opinion, those who did well at State Grammar schools did so because of a natural aptitude for absorbing information and more in spite of the teaching methods used there rather than due to the teaching staff. The criticism of Grammar schools which appears to be the most repeated today in debates on the subject, I have left until last as it is possibly the most ludicrous of all. The rough gist of it is that by failing the 11+, some children then see themselves as failures and consequently underachieve for the rest of their lives. This would not be the case if parents and teachers did not treat it as such an important and essential event. Raising the standards in Secondary schools would have helped here too, but the easy answer was to abolish it completely. Government and politics being what they are the easy option proved too tempting, especially as it could be managed to make it appear compatible with left wing dogma. The upshot of this, of course, is that instead of suffering one disappointment at the age of eleven, less academically minded pupils are now constantly reminded of their position as failures with every lesson, every test and every end of year exam as they repeatedly end up lower than those students who they would not have been directly compared to under the old system. Also, by having completely mixed ability classes it was hoped that the best would encourage the slower learners to try harder. This is incompatible with reason. In order for them to keep up, the teacher has to progress through the subject at a slower rate which breeds boredom in those who are more capable in that particular subject. If official ...