My friend Katy had a couple of rants yesterday (here and here) about the current education system and the damage that politicians are doing. This is by way of a comment to those posts, so maybe you want to read them first?

Essentially I’m with Katy. Teaching kids has been f***ed up since Harold Wilson abolished Grammar Schools. (It’s odd how so many things in this country which are buggered up go back to Harold Wilson as the root cause!)

I remain of the view that kids have to learn the basics to be able to go on and understand the next level. And with times tables the best way to do that is by rote — it has to be got into heads first. Yes, it’s boring (but so is much of life; deal with it) and it doesn’t mean you can’t engage the kids along the way. Once the basic tables are being established the kids can start to understand the patterns in numbers etc. as well as have the ability to do mental arithmetic. The problem is that no-one ever explained why mental arithmetic was useful — like have you got the right change?

Phonics as a reading system sounds like an absolute load of horse shit to me. Just as phonetic alphabets and so on were before it. Why teach the kids one stupid language only to get them to learn something else when they want to read a book? Just do it properly the first time! They need the rudiments of punctuation and sentence structure as they get older, but early on (under 10?) they need to be able to express themselves with the right words — so vocabulary and spelling are important. Yes, to achieve that you have to engage them. Then as they are older they can start to understand the need for punctuation etc. But WTF does it matter about subjunctives and whether chairs have gender? It doesn’t unless you’re going to be a “professional linguist”. This is where school lost me with French and Latin — I just did not see the point of all these arcane complications, nor the point of learning “something foreign”.

I just wish that politicians would stop meddling in things they don’t understand and listening to half-baked theories. If they spent half the time they spend on useless “initiatives” on sorting out the economy etc. etc. we wouldn’t be in half the mess we are. Government keeps changing what is taught and the way it is taught. But industry tells us the kids coming out the other end aren’t fit for purpose. Maybe there’s a connection?! Because it’s all “Emperor’s new clothes”. This is why I didn’t go into teaching (I saw what my friends were doing and knew I’d fail because I’d tear it limb from limb) and it’s why I won’t be a school governor again.

The education I received in the 50s and 60s wasn’t perfect by a long way. But even for the less able it was a damn sight better than most kids seem to get now. Schools then were far too good at finding our what you couldn’t do and playing on it. They mostly still are. Try engaging with the kids, find out what they can do — and I don’t care if it is maths or music or sport — and help them build on it. But at the same time you do have to give them the basic “3 Rs”, otherwise (a) how do you find out if they’re any good at them, (b) they have to be able to function, at least minimally, out in the world, and (c) it’s no use having good ideas if you can’t communicate them accurately to other people.

Let teachers teach. They know what they have to teach and they know how to adapt their methods to different types of child. They know what the kids should be achieving at various ages. It isn’t an easy balancing act and the fewer wobbles (aka. politicians) the less likely you are to fall off the tightrope.