Comment from Andrew Peterson
Time: February 23, 2008, 9:18 pm

Orals to be dropped/amended ‘because they are too stressful.’
Excuse me? Tests are supposed to be stressful, i.e. hard or difficult, to guage how much a person has learnt and the ability to use that knowledge, how much s/he can remember and how quickly s/he can think
If students are mollycoddled to this extreme, how on earth are they going to survive in the real world?
Our children are being taught how to tick boxes and pass tests so the government can boast about ‘ever-improving standards’.
What rubbish. You can now pass an English literature exam without having read a single book cover to cover. How will that ever instil an interest in reading for pleasure? It’s ages since dictionaries and calculators were first allowed in language and maths exams respectively, so you can give an answer without having to show how you got it. Several recent surveys have revealed widespread, appalling ignorance of major people and events in British history. Why? Because very few schools now have the time to teach British history in a coherent, meaningful way once they have covered the rise of the Nazis, the two World Wars, the depression years, Indians and/or civil rights movement in the USA, the French and Russian revolutions…
This is criminal. We are creating a generation of ignorant, narrow-minded people in the mistaken belief that we are ‘helping ‘ them! We are doing far, far worse in several key subjects than most of our competitors in the developed world. If that’s ‘ever-increasing standards’…
Exams are definitely getting easier. So much so that universities have to waste valuable time on cramming courses to bring students up to the level they should have reached before they left school. ‘Ever-increasing standards’?
The government/establishment’s attitude seems to be ,’You don’t have to remember anything-just tick the box. You won’t have to do anything at all difficult. Oh no, that would never do! We’re afraid of being prosecuted for infringing your human rights and anyway life beyond school is one long easy ride. We just get you used to that in advance.’
They are so, so misguided. The generation they have so shamefully let down will in turn treat their children in the same way. It has to stop!!
Do I have an axe to grind? No. I did OK at school; I wasn’t a star pupil. I have worked in secondary schools. I have no children, but I am concerned for the future of family and friends. Many of them are sending their offspring to independent schools to avoid the mess described above. The government’s spiteful class war agenda means those schools are being forced to prove their worth or else lose their charitable status. It’s so, so sad and so totally unnecessary. I can’t wait to vote this government out at the next election; the question is ‘How much more damage will they do before they wake up to the error of their ways?’