When I assembled a group of teachers aged over 35 at my local comprehensive school (which, despite being in the home counties, deals with children from very difficult as well as privileged backgrounds), I was struck by their honesty about what has been gained and lost since they were at school.
They started by justifying how they do things now—but with enthusiasm rather than defensiveness. "The education experience has become more exciting because learning has become more active." Students, I was told, are encouraged to find things out for themselves, which allows them to understand things in more complex ways than if they are spoon-fed.
These teachers did not accept that students should have to learn vast quantities of factual information, as opposed to learning where to look for it. I pressed them on the risk of ignorance: "How can you understand history without some basic knowledge about what happened when?" I was relieved when a history teacher conceded that core knowledge has sometimes been neglected in the past, and assured me: "We have come back to a respect for facts." But she wanted her students as far as possible to discover information for themselves. At present they are looking at evidence to decide the strengths and weaknesses of King John. I hope that along the way they learn that he signed Magna Carta and lost most of England's possessions in France. I suspect that good teachers ensure this happens, but with others it can be hit and miss.
But having defended some tenets of modern education, they admitted that, in a desire to ensure that weaker students are not put off, the education system now puts on a "nice" face. Learning is made as entertaining as possible. And the potentially risky quest for relevance was brought home to me by my 12-year-old daughter recently when she said that a boy in her maths class had asked, "but how will the slope and the intercept of a graph help me in later life?"
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of today's education is that everything is broken down into small chunks. The teachers asked themselves whether education is mistakenly "going with the flow" of the internet age and short attention spans, rather than trying to challenge it: "Students today would simply not be able to cope with the three-hour exams that we experienced."
There is a risk of insufficient challenge for the most able students. "The brighter kids… aren't getting some of the focus on the finer points of learning that they used to," one teacher said. "But we do have lots of extracurricular activities that do stretch them." In other words, clever minds are being trained less systematically in concentration and higher levels of abstract thinking. This ties in with Michael Shayer's finding (see "Are children getting dumber?") that on some analytical and logical tasks, less than half as many students get the highest test mark now as did in 1976.
For children at the opposite end of the spectrum, the teachers were optimistic: "We give up on children far less readily than we used to." The government's slogan "Every Child Matters" has penetrated thinking. This has particularly benefited some children who get enough out of their compulsory schooling to squeeze into further education and perhaps acquire a useful skill. On the other hand, the one in four young people who have still not acquired a basic entry-level qualification by age 19 (five good GCSEs or vocational equivalent) has not changed in the past decade.
The most tricky dilemma, said the teachers, was how to ensure that every child is helped to achieve without reducing the ambitions of the whole system. Failing to correct students' spelling is a bugbear of my generation, who perhaps see it as more of a sin than we need to—because the habit was drilled into us. "I've seen spelling and punctuation deteriorate terribly in ten years," admitted one teacher. "We often don't correct spelling because we worry that children who are bad spellers will become demoralised." But if letting mistakes go becomes too much of a habit, some young people are in for a shock when they enter a less forgiving adult world.
