Clickety Click Education Pays Off (28 May 1976)

On the day before my 68^th birthday (May 12), I went back to school.

That is to say, I sat in on a class of 11-year-olds while they did what passes today for the old “three Rs.”

I remembered my own schooldays – sitting at long desks, listening or not listening to a master as he stood at a blackboard and easel with a piece of chalk in one hand and a duster in the other.  On the blackboard’s pegs rested a cane which was used not for getting sums or anything else wrong, but for bad behaviour, real or only imagined.

That was an old C of E all-ages school of about 120 children all told.  This other school had started like that, but now it was a combined county first and middle school, (with)

There were 39 on the class register – 26 girls and 13 boys – of whom 37 were present, the girls shiny as new pins, but some of the boys already the worse for wear from pre-school footballing in the yard.  The 37 had IQs ranging from 76 to the 130s, with largely-corresponding attainment levels and I wondered how teacher could possibly give them all a fair do.

As was usual, the day began with maths. The children were told to get out their individual trays of books and materials.  They took them to their respective tables-for-four and without another word from teacher they got down to re-starting where they had left off the day before.

As the period progressed I realised that the upper threequarters were largely teaching themselves by instruction books and also by a couple of video-type machines, which had four pairs of headphones per machine.  Only when they were stuck did they queue up to teacher to ask questions like “What does alternate mean?” and “What does symefrical(sic) mean?”  They also brought their completed exercises and received either a “well done,” or information on where they had gone wrong.

I was impressed when a boy and a girl were sent out to measure the height of the school’s chimney stack by trigonometry while the 76 IQ child was still learning about units, tens and hundreds by means of little plastic cubes.  Teacher went round such strugglers and actually spent more time on them than on the rest.  I was told that probably a third of the class could have measured the chimney.  I was also told that a previous survey had shown that no child positively disliked maths, that eight were just indifferent, and that all the rest positively liked the subject.

After the break came the English lesson.  As regular readers will have realised, English was never one of my strong points so I awaited this with special interest.

It turned out to be a sort of personal game, in that you added up your own score at the end.

I took part and was handed a printed leaflet, headed in dark green ink.  It contained an article of about 1,000 words on what happened between two tribes in Africa before the Belgians took over and what could happen now the Belgians had left.

“Read that,” said teacher.  “Then answer the questions on the back of this separate sheet.  You have 30 minutes to do it in.”

So I read.  Then I turned to the questions – 35 of them.  They began with ten designed to show whether you had understood the article.  Then came some about which word the author had used to indicate so-an-so; then synonyms; and finally antonyms.

Having finished, I was handed a card on which the correct answers were printed.  I found I had made three errors.

“Right,” said teacher.  “Now I must tell you that these papers are colour-coded.  Most of the class are on yellows and browns.  The dark greens are the highest and yours was more for a 16-year-old than an 11-year-old.  But there are seven children in the class who have previously done a dark green in 30 minutes and you have taken 40 minutes, less five allowed for getting used to the procedures.”

Teacher did not say how many errors the super-seven had made.  But I myself, with over 50 years of professional writing behind me, was suitably mortified at not having scored 100 per cent.  However, I had got down to the brass tacks of modern schooling, which is more than most of its critics can say.  And my verdict is that in general the results are a sight better than those of my own schooldays 60 years ago.