The idea that GCSEs are not rigorous does a great disservice to those who have them or about to have them, and to the teachers who are equally hard-working. There seems to be confusion between developing an education programme and an academic masturbation which is founded in nostalgia. I’ve always had ‘issues’ with the education budget being used for the upkeep of listed buildings of the Cambridge colleges – such spending should come out of the heritage budget, meaning that the money is fully spent on teaching, lecturing and research. Likewise, Michael Gove’s yearning of O Levels is back to the 1950s. It would be a retrograde step which would be extremely dangerous for education.
Education is about a balanced curriculum. To this end, if we could swallow our pride, a broad-based education akin to the International Baccalaureate may not be a bad idea. There are some fundamentals we need to address – people specialise too soon, and too many people are written off by the end of GCE A levels if they do them. The nostalgia about mathematics is ill-founded, as an extensive training in mathematics only hyper trains the parietal cortex part of your brain. It is much better that a rounded curriculum teaches other parts of the human brain, including attention, perception, memory, planning, decision-making, social cognition and emotion. It’s obvious isn’t it? This doesn’t mean parrot-learning rhymes and poems, or learning a method how to work out the tangent to a sphere in 3D. This means using your brain, and interacting with other people.
Whilst I don’t quite share some aspects of the argument, @charonqc is utterly correct in warning over the hypereducationalisation (sic) of programmes. Such hypereducationalisation is not edifying – and quite often common sense has gone out of the window. However, I do share with @colmmu and @vidalandreas that the key to successful learning is learning how to learn, and how to access information and analyse it cogently. You don’t need a superbrain to do this – we virtually all have access to the internet. Innovation should be pervasive in all aspects of education – this means that learners interact with one another. After all, whilst law firms look for teamwork as a competence, wouldn’t it be rather nice if the education system rewarded team ability as well as individual ability?
For too long, the outcome of education has been an outcome of how well you have been educated. I don’t think it matters how you test the learning objectives, whether this be coursework or written examinations. If you subject a learner to an exit exam of 3 hours duration only as a rite of passage inflicting intellectual pain, and because you believe in ‘rigour’, there is something fundamentally wrong with you. This is what Michael Gove and the Conservatives wish to do, and I wish all the parties follow the lead of the President of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, and Nick Clegg to avoid a two tier system where some students will be forced onto a scrapheap. Good for Clegg and Farron on their decree nisi in 2015 from the Tories. What I think has been incredibly commendable is how they have proved themselves in providing a stable government – I just happen to believe that the Liberal Democrats would be wonderful if they were allowed to implement their own policies, that’s all. @DavidAllenGreen and several others are completely correct in my view to voice concerns about how competition amongst exam boards may not have worked thus far. Turning the clock back decades a few decades favouring the few is not the answer – but a solution which recognises the aspirations of the many hard-working students is.
