Education Row... Heard It Before (29 October 1976)
Every now and then a major row blows up over the subject of education. It usually happens in times of economic stress. This is hardly surprising. Those holding the public purse-strings look round for costs that it might be possible to cut. The education service is costly. Its product is comparatively intangible.
So it comes under immediate scrutiny. This sets the ball rolling and before long come charges that standards are declining and that we ought to be getting better value for our money – today more specifically in the matter of “numeracy” in primary schools and “maths” in secondary schools.
Curiously enough, all this really dates back to the 1880s and 1890s, for it was a major economic crisis in those years that largely enforced the setting up of a general rate and tax-funded education system in this country.
Previously, cheap wheat from abroad had devastated our agricultural economy. Now it was the turn of our industry also to suffer from foreign competition. America and Germany were beating us to a frazzle with cheaper and better goods. Both in our own home market and throughout the Empire. It just couldn’t be allowed to go on.
Representatives of various hard-hit industries were sent to those countries to see how it was being achieved. All came back convinced we were being beaten by superior technology and that our archaic education set-up was largely to blame.
In face of this, our system was revolutionised. Old educational factions were overridden to meet the imperative need and in due course American locos were no longer hauling London’s tube trains, nor American boots shodding threequarters of a million of our working men.
Yet there were then, as always, people who believed that things had been done better in the old days. Thus in 1908, a local writer declaimed:
“Not only in Fenny Stratford, but throughout the county, Aylesbury and its administration of the Education Act has become a bye-word in the mouths of men.
“We have got schools – ‘Provided’ and ‘Non-Provided’ – which are costing far more to maintain now than they did as Board Schools and Voluntary Schools, and in face of the greater expenditure there is less efficient, less capable and less competent management, together with, in many instances, a lowering of the standard of the instruction imparted . . .”
Reading that, you can almost hear somebody calling out: “Scrap the lot and bring back the Dame Schools.” Yet in some quarters today similar things are being said about the Butler Act of 1944.
Numeracy and maths have always been a problem to at least half the child population. Conversely, most teachers can tell of children who were brilliant at maths and less than average at everything else, including literacy.
I remember the Principal of the former Bletchley Park Women Teachers’ Training College commenting regretfully on the number of students sent to her who were almost bereft of maths. They had not been in the hands of today’s so-called long-haired trendies. For that was 20 years ago and the students were then aged 18 plus.
Hardly any method of teaching could be worse than the old blackboard method my generation endured. That was of use only to the middle third of the average elementary class. It was too slow and boring for the brighter third and too fast for the remaining third, who fell so far behind that they ceased all effort.
Finally, another experience of mine that might be cogent. The raising of the school-leaving age from 14 to 15 was recommended as long ago as about 1933, at which time I was working in Bradford. A few young reporters were sent to get comments on the recommendation from various people and I was assigned to a certain knighted textile manufacturer.
Seated at a solid mahogany office, this solid, moustachioed, gold-watch-chained figure granted me some thoughts, which I duly took down.
I had put my book away and he was showing me out when he stopped, nudged me in the ribs, and said:
“After all, old chap (!) what’s the good of teaching ‘em until they’re fifteen when you and I know half of ‘em will never be anything better than lift boys.”
I was appalled. For by that criterion I myself, but for the grace of God, would have been among the lift boys!
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