Our local superstar Kate Winslett has just scored a double whammy at the 2009 Golden Globes. Way to go, Kate... I hope this inspires our local council to come up with a better tribute than the "Winslett Place" they named in her honour a few years ago. This is a dreary development of apartments on the Oxford Road, two miles west of the town centre. I loved a recent interview which probably won't win her many local fans. She mentioned that she has no trace of a Reading accent, despite being born and brought up in the town. She attributed that to coming from a theatrical family, who tended to speak better.....ouch!I recently saw her in one of the award-winning roles, "The Reader". So strange to see a superb, largely German, cast all speaking English. So rare to see a film with illiteracy as an important theme. That point seems to have been buried in most comments on the movie, who concentrate on 1) she plays a former concentration camp guard and 2) she takes her kit off (yet again) for some highly suspect sex scenes with an underage boy.
The Nazis have moved into the dustbin of history, but illiteracy lingers on, despite the truckloads of money poured into public education. It is a plague afflicting many people's lives, even if it doesn't push them into confessing to war crimes, as Kate's character does in one of the most baffling scenes in cinema history. The effect on most people is a life of blighted opportunity, restricted careers and, in a surprising number of cases, a descent into crime. It is so taken for granted by the prison authorities in Britain that one of the first things a prisoner undergoes on entering prison is a basic literacy test.
It is not just basic literacy where the British education system continues to fall down, although that is obviously the key to just about everything else in education. A 2008 story in our local "Evening Post" described how 10 and 11 year old pupils at a highly regarded primary (elementary) school had passed the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examination intended for 16 year old pupils throughout the country. No great surprise there. The sample questions printed were plainly of a mathematics standard which I was taught at 9 or 10 or even earlier. E.g. "Write the number two thousand and seven". Excuse me....after 11 years of compulsory education, this is the level expected at age 16???
To compound the confusion, this was the GCSE paper at "Foundation" level. There are three levels offered - Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced. On checking the specimen papers, it was obvious that "Advanced" is a completely different examination with questions more appropriate to a 16 year old. But "Foundation" sounds more credible than "Childish" or "Joke". But the grades offered for these wholly different examinations overlap. The highest you can get at "Foundation" is a Grade C (allegedly by answering 67% of the joke questions correctly), where the "Advanced" paper allows you to achieve up to A* level. The fact that there has to be an A* grade higher than the traditional A speaks volumes about grade dilution.
Friends who are involved in local education as voluntary school governors explained this joke examination away as the consequence of the schools' anxiety to keep pupils "engaged" with mathematics for as long as possible. They need to give even less able or motivated pupils something to aim for. This smells of utter desperation on the part of the teaching profession. The compulsory school leaving age goes up to 18 by the year 2016 - i.e. pupils starting high school in September 2009 will have to serve a seven year sentence, without hope of remission. So how are the luckless teachers going to keep the unmotivated motivated until 18?
Part of the problem is that teachers, pupils, parents, politicians, educational bureaucrats, the huge educational ancillary industry (such as textbook publishers and examination boards) and much of the commentariat have a strong interest in pretending that such worthless qualifications mean something. £75 billion pounds ($140 billion US dollars) is spent on public education in Britain each year. If money talks, £75 billion pounds gives an overpowering scream, drowning out most of the alternative voices. But they're not fooling anyone else, least of all the universities and employers who accept the products of 13 years of state education.
The "Evening Post" story had a wickedly funny twist. The local councilor who highlighted this educational fiasco was quoted as saying (in more than one place) that he did not think these 10 and 11 year old pupils were "proteges". I assume that he meant "prodigies", but no one noticed the obvious mistake - certainly not the journalist or editor who are supposed to be professional users of the English language. If the adults are semi-literate, what hope is there for the children? (Remember "Billy Bathgate", where Dustin Hoffman's dimwitted gangster made exactly the same mistake? But he was supposed to be an exemplar of pig ignorance.)
And we are talking about competence in English and Mathematics, the only subjects of practical relevance for the majority of the population. Only a small minority will find a practical application for their years of studying science and languages, much less history or geography. And even this more academic minority will be utterly dependent on the accurate use of English and Maths.
Some of the consequences can be seen at University level, with universities forced to provide remedial classes for new students to teach them what they should have learnt years earlier. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read the flyer for mathematics workshops at Reading University. It was displayed on a large notice board and invited students who were having problems with statistics, calculus, percentages and basic arithmetic. Admittedly Reading is not the top university in the land. But it is a serious institute of higher education and research. How on earth do you bluff your way in here if you can't do basic arithmetic or percentages?
Statistics might be a different matter. I can imagine someone applying for a Psychology degree course on the grounds that it looked like a soft option and then finding to his horror that it involved some statistical analysis. (Sociology was an even more mercilessly derided subject. In the bathrooms at the University, a graffito above the toilet roll holder explained: "Pull here for Sociology degree".)
In fact the situation is even more dire than the above "Evening Post" example might suggest. Only 58% of the high school population achieve a "C" pass in both GCSE English and Mathematics. And the "C" grade is probably of a standard which would constitute a bad failure in any other high school examination system in the world. So 42% of pupils cannot even achieve a bad failure in a joke examination in the two most basic subjects, including the only language they have ever spoken - or ever will speak.
One high school in Bristol found that 40% of its 13 and 14 year old pupils were functionally illiterate and drew the blindingly obvious conclusion: it was pointless teaching these pupils French or biology or any other highly desirable subjects. What limited resources the school had needed to be focused on getting the students fit to survive in the most menial work situations.
The failure of education is not just a disaster for the world of commerce and industry. Some years ago the driving test was changed so that it involved a substantial theory component tested by a simple written exam. This was plainly a catastrophe for the subliterate and illiterate. The driving test used to involve only enough literacy to read a number plate (as a crude eyesight test, not a literacy test) and answer a few questions about road signs. Now even a simple written test became a Mount Everest of impossibility for a substantial minority. The theory test can be taken in numerous languages, but there is no "illiterate" version. Not surprisingly, the number of people taking the driving test plummeted from 750,000 a year to 600,000 - a decline suspiciously close to the rate of illiteracy (20%). Are there fewer drivers on our roads than in 1998? The roads are more congested than ever and the number of cars continues to increase. Plainly more and more people are driving without licenses and getting away with it.
Yet the number of road deaths is at an all time low, which suggests that the "tougher" driving test with its written exam was just another bureaucratic waste of time and money. Basic human instincts such as self-preservation are probably a better safeguard of public safety. Also, the police are forced to admit that, with 20 million vehicles on the road and an overstretched police force, the chances of anyone being caught driving without a license are very small. The only way such miscreants are likely to be caught is if they are pulled over for speeding or are involved in an accident. So, perversely, having no license is arguably an extra incentive to drive safely and avoid drawing unwelcome attention to yourself.
The police were forced into this admission of impotence when a young man drove his decrepit car into a lake about 50 miles north of London. Three little children, all under 5, in the back seat drowned. But the driver and his girlfriend (the children's mother, who had produced the children with the help of two other guys) both survived. To a rancid old cynic like me, this looked like a very convenient way to get rid of three inconvenient children and I am sure that the same unworthy thought occurred to the police. But they couldn't pin anything worse than "causing death by dangerous driving" on him. Of course, he had no driving license, any more than than he had a marriage license. Similarly he had no insurance, no roadworthiness certificate for the car (bought cheaply as an insurance write-off after an accident) and no road tax certificate for the car. In response to the media hubbub over the fact that this driver had been on the public roads undetected for years, the police could only state truthfully that they had very little chance of catching such unlicensed drivers.
But illiteracy imposes yet another handicap on the poorly educated. Driving a van or a taxi was one way of earning a living if you had no educational qualifications. Nowadays, if your employer insists on seeing a valid license before he lets you drive one of his vehicles, you are immediately denied the job.
A dedicated teacher explained part of the problem: If children have a chaotic and unhappy home life, they will never learn anything at school, no matter how well the lessons are prepared and how enthusiastic and competent the teachers might be. As ever, there are some teachers who should plainly not be working in the profession and blight the learning of hundreds of pupils. But parents are the first educators of their children, as Catholic educators have always emphasized. This is not just a matter of dogma; it is plainest common sense. The fact that 40% of the pupils at that Bristol high school were illiterate comes uncomfortably close to the figure for marital breakdown and the number of children living in one-parent homes. Bristol has some of the best schools in the country and some of the most desirable living areas on the planet. But, as a port city, it also has its share of grim inner city neighbourhoods with high rates of family breakdown.
Obviously there is huge variation within such "average" figures. Some schools in Reading, as I pointed out in an earlier post, achieve a Stalinist 95 to 100% of passes at GCSE level. But then schools such as the Abbey School and St Joseph's Convent are fee paying. If you are a child of divorced parents, your mother and father have been financially badly damaged already and all the less likely to afford the fees. Also both these schools are religious foundations which at least pay lip service to the ideals of Christian marriage. If you are paying $21,000+ per year to educate your child, you are seriously motivated about education (or at least certification) and will take a serious interest in his/her progress. It is a case of multiple good influences all blowing the same way, unlike the underclass where all the multiple bad influences blow the same way.
I could not help feel both elated and depressed in 1996 when I saw my Canadian friend Helen reading a simple story book with her two year old daughter. The little girl was being raised in Athens, so she was going to be naturally bilingual in English and Greek, and her mother and grandmother were working to make her trilingual in English, French and Greek. Obviously any child of the English underclass (such as the drowned trio above) was already at a hopeless disadvantage compared to Helen's daughter. And that is long before they even started school. What hope have you when your parents have no interest in education and you have no stable family support, with your mother bedding a string of transient boyfriends (who might also take the opportunity to bed you)?
From time to time you find an asinine article in one publication or another arguing for the abolition of private schools in the UK, always in the interests of "equality" and "fairness". Apart from the fact that such a ban would be in direct contradiction to European human rights legislation, the articulate middle classes would always find one way or another around it, not least by redoubling their efforts at informal education.
The most powerful education is of course personal example. Some years ago a local Indian woman became Local Hero for the day when she fought off a robber at her convenience store, despite being five feet nothing tall. She was not going to work 16 hours a day to have her money taken by some moronic thug. In passing, the article mentioned her four children. One was going to be a lawyer, another an accountant, another a doctor..... You can hardly accuse the British of discrimination in favour of the Indian minority. Their very visible success, like that of Jewish and Chinese minorities in Britain and elsewhere, is down to familial attitudes to education and hard work. Years ago I spoke to a teacher who described a Chinese immigrant visiting the school to check on his child's progress. In his halting English, he asked anxiously about his child's behaviour and his respect for his teachers. The teachers were astonished at this line of questioning, as the lad's behaviour and politeness were always impeccable. When reassured on these points, the father said: "That is good. Now we will talk about his work...."
In comparison, there is no place in the future for a substantial part of the British population. The only place for the English underclass in the legal European economy of 2030 would be washing Helen's daughter's Mercedes (no sane person would let them service its brakes or engine) or hoovering her apartment. But the Albanian underclass in Greece would be doing those jobs anyway. And that is assuming that a more motivated class of menial workers had not invaded Europe from Asia or Africa. No wonder so many will be forced into drug dealing, prostitution, pornography, burglary or any other illegal way of survival.
Part of the solution is already blindingly obvious. So much money is poured into public education that it would make more sense to give every child a voucher, redeemable at any school of the parent's choice. One educational writer claimed that educational expenditure per child is already over £9,000 ($16,000) a year, EXCLUDING the monstrous bureaucratic overheads of local educational authorities and the Department of Education. Paradoxically, at such levels of public expenditure there is no longer any justification for public schools. Every school should be private, cutting multiple knots simultaneously. Parents would be free to apply to any school they deemed suitable for their child: large or small, single sex or coed, religious or non-religious, with particular emphasis on maths, sports, music, languages, etc ( I wonder how many would opt for an explicitly atheist school???). No need to go cap in hand to a local education authority and fill out an impertinent application form, hoping that your child does not get forced into one of the substandard schools.
Plainly, as I noted in an earlier post, most of the vested interests above would oppose such a reform. But experience elsewhere, in Sweden, Holland and parts of the US, show its practical superiority in terms of parental commitment and academic achievement.
Yet this could only be a first step in achieving "better results", the tiresome obsession of much of the British middle class and media professionals. What are "better results" worth if it is just a higher percentage of pupils achieving higher scores in exams of doubtful credibility? The only worthwhile results are the eternal ones.
Far more important than the obvious academic deficit in the British underclass is the moral difference of wholesome example in family living and moral development. Helen's children would be raised in a stable loving home with two parents plus a network of grandparents, uncles, aunts and family friends who were not into drug dealing or other criminality. Most importantly of all, they would be raised in the knowledge of God, go to a private Catholic school in Athens and be surrounded by an overwhelmingly Christian culture.
A voucher chance of a proliferation of Christian schools, including innovative and imaginative styles of teaching free from central restraint, might be one huge step in recreating a civilised culture in Britain. It would certainly not be a sufficient step by itself. The cultural influences outside school walls are just too powerful at present. But it would be a significant ray of hope for many children whose present chance of a good career in any field is as remote as their chance of winning two Golden Globes....
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