The GCSEs are Dead, Long Live the EBacs

So it’s finally happened, when it comes to examination Gove’s put his money where his mouth is, and his foot on top of both.

Yes the GCSEs are doomed, at least for maths, science and English, and I don’t expect the plans to extend this new English Baccalaureate to be deterred by anything as sordid as results when there is good old fashioned Tory dogma at stake.

Apparently the Baccalaureate will be assessed by one huge exam at the end of the course, which is two years barring future changes.  According to that spineless mass of gibbering jelly, Nick Clegg, these changes will

“raise standards for all our children”, but he added that it would “not exclude any children”

Well that’s very reassuring, because his record on education is just so reliable isn’t it?

But really, isn’t it the whole point that children are going to be left behind? Isn’t that what Gove and the Tory’s have wanted all along?

I may be delusional here, but I was under the impression that the problem with GCSEs, at least in the government’s eyes was that we had too many children passing and that that was devaluing the whole system. Surely then this is Gove’s aim, to reduce the number of children passing so the academically qualified becomes an elite, filled with people like him who can afford good schools and private tuition if the unqualified teachers provided by the academies aren’t up to scratch.

This is my problem with the Conservative and by extension the Coalition (because-really-what’s-the-fucking-difference) approach to education. It isn’t that they’ve chosen the wrong solution to an evident problem, a la the economy; they’ve invented a problem where none exists.

That isn’t to say that our education system is perfect, it really isn’t, but the problem has always been that there is too much importance given to exams. As I’ve said before, students aren’t taught about the subject, their natural curiosity afire with the drive for knowledge, they are taught how to pass exams. What key points to bring up when discussing those poems you don’t care about to tick the boxes in the checklist the examiner has. Show your working, because that will get you marks, doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing just do this to these numbers and you’ll at least get half marks. Don’t know what cumulative means? Doesn’t matter. Don’t know why algebra is important? Who cares, just get all the Xs on one side and the Ys on the other because that’s what the examiner is looking for.

Ah those magic words, the answer to every schoolboy question.

“Sir, why should we do it this way?”

“Because that’s what the examiner will look for.”

Education shouldn’t be like that, it should be about awakening a desire for more and better knowledge. Channelled curiosity. But according to the Conservatives it is in fact a market, the economy of grades.

Because you see, your knowledge only has value in the light of other people’s ignorance. To the Tories the fact that most people don’t fail suggests that it is impossible to fail, and if there is no failure then success is meaningless.

Actually this is a pretty good window onto Tory thinking.

For being rich to mean anything others must be penniless.

For being well fed to mean anything others must be starving.

For your nice house to mean anything others must be living under bridges [link].

For your voice to matter others must shut up and do what they’re told.

FUCK THAT!

A Surfeit of Latin

So I saw a notice in my subscription box saying that the Pope was worried about Latin use. Naive and optimistic as I am I assumed that Ratzinger was concerned that the eternal and universal (for that is what Catholic means) might possibly have stuck to Latin, a two thousand year old dead language of interest only to antiquarians and roman tour guides, for slightly too long. Perhaps it had finally got through to the top the hierarchy, by the well-known trickle-up effect, that bloody no one speaks Latin anymore! It doesn’t surprise me that attendance is falling off if you only tell the pews “same time next week” in gibberish.

Alarmed by a decline in the use of Latin within the Catholic Church,

Oh.

Ah well, maybe expecting the church to become more modern might be rather silly.

Pope Benedict is planning to set up a Vatican academy to breathe new life into the dead language.

This is much more like the church we know and despise, not just suck in the medieval age, but determined to drag the rest of us there with them.

Apparently Pope Palpatine

Vader quote, not Palpatine… Ack!

is alarmed by the fact that Latin use is falling, even in the Church. I mean really, this is outrageous! Priests modernising? Not stuck in the past? We must put a stop to this!

Another thing that sticks in the Pope’s craw is the translation of delocalisation (obviously not a word in Latin) as delocalizatio. Apparently this is too easy to understand though.

it simply makes Italian and English words sound Latin, rather than being more creative with the language

Quite right, it’s not as though the Church is here to help its followers or explain things to them. You would think, with Church attendance the way it is the Pope would be more concerned with making the Church more accessible, rather than cutting it off behind layers of obsolete arcana and dead verbiage.

You might say this isn’t particularly important, and you might be right, but this approach is emblematic of the whole sorry, shambling mess that is the Catholic Church.

My Piece on A+

I don’t suppose I’ve ever been a ‘dictionary atheist’; I’ve always thought that atheism had to be either an expression of something (scepticism, humanism, disaffection etc.) or a wake-up call and path to something. A lot of people disagree though. I’m not sure why they disagree, but they do, they’ve attacked what they see as ‘mission drift’ which as far as I can see consists of atheists talking about anything other than religion or other superstitions. Misogyny should only be discussed when the Catholic Church is doing it, bad science is something creationists do not us, feminism is a dirty word, as is patriarchy. Because apparently positing a conspiracy where men deliberately plot to oppress women (even though that’s not what the patriarchy is) is insane, but claiming that evil priests are lying to children (even though many of them sincerely believe they are acting for the best) is perfectly self-evident.

As I said I don’t know why people disagree, I could hazard a few guesses but this isn’t the place. I will say though that I think we started to believe our own rhetoric. Think back to the good/bad (delete as appropriate) days when atheism was basically the ‘four horsemen’ writing books and debating, it was often said in these debates that atheism just means ‘lack of belief in god’ and that the speaker couldn’t represent all atheists. All of which was true, but for a lot of people we started applying this to capital-A-Atheism, or movement atheism if you prefer.

How did that work? What was the ‘movement’ about? Separation of church and state? Just saying “we exist!”? All worthy causes I’m sure, but this can’t work as a movement, people who agree on one thing can’t work together if that’s all they agree on. Yes we got Surly Amy and Greta Christina and Matt Dillahunty and JT Eberhard and we had Hitchens. But we also got The Amazing Atheist and Thunderf00t and Elevator-guys and people who take up-skirt photos and DJ Grothe (on a bad day). These people aren’t working for the same thing.

So I’m glad for what Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson, Ophelia Benson, Surly Amy, Greta Christina have done (and the rest of the FTBorg I don’t have time to mention). I’m glad they stated the obvious about harassment and found a way to make the dipshits among us nail their colours to the mast. I’m constantly astounded at the level of abuse they get, and amazed by the bile they can weather. They’re doing so much more than I can, or probably ever will, and I’m so sorry for that.

But I can say this; thank you. Thank you for taking so much flak, thank you for doing what we all should have done so long ago. Thank you especially for Atheism+, somewhere where we can have the discussion we always should have been having; how we can make this world better. Because it’s the only one we’ve got.

Thank you for reminding me what atheism means.

The Great GCSE Slump

So, the proportion of students getting A* to C grades in GCSEs this summer has fallen for the first time in the twenty four years since this systems inception. And people are rather upset by this.

Ok let’s unpack this a bit; how far did the grades fall by? Well not much as it happens, according to the BBC 69.4% gained A* to C grades this year compared with 69.8% in the summer of 2011. A fall of 0.4% is not particularly significant a change, indeed the fact that there has been no fluctuation in the proportion of A* to C grades gained, only constant rise, is cause for concern in and of itself.

But leaving aside the question of grade inflation, the fact that this has caused a stir is interesting in and of itself. The most humanitarian, and constantly touted, grudge is that the exams taken in the summer were graded more harshly than those who took exams in the January of this year, breaking any notion of the GCSEs as means for comparison within a peer group with a sickening crack.

Not helped by this is the over emphasis that is constantly put on grades which, so it is said, are the key to every child’s future; from sixth form to university to your eventual career, results are everything. Not whether you enjoyed yourself, not whether you were enthused by the very act of learning, not even if you came out with more skills and wisdom than you went in. No your success is determined completely by your ability to regurgitate a year or two of repetition and rote learning in an hour and a half.

Exams do not asses how students are taught, students are taught to pass exams, and there is the source of this ‘grade inflation’.

Then into this china shop that is the education system comes the wild-eyed orang-utan Michael Gove. Already the education system has been battered by the rise in tuition fees for universities and horrifically crippled by the introduction of unqualified teachers, now Gove is going for the exams.

I should mention that Gove hasn’t been shown to exert any political pressure on exam boards, nor has anyone yet claimed evidence of him doing so, and frankly I doubt there ever will be. But I am sorry, when I can use my fingers and less than thirty seconds of google’s time to find endless examples of Gove as the shadow secretary for education saying that exams in the past have been “devalued” and that there has been a “deliberate lowering of standards” then this issue is already politicised and anyone can see which way the current establishment is blowing. Gove wants things the way they were, when if you couldn’t learn your Latin or hire a tutor you were out of luck and universities were the preserve of the elite while the rest went up chimneys or down t’pit.

Incidentally Gove himself went to Oxford, like so many others in the present government. Also like those in the present government he is rather well off, with wealth of a million pounds in 2009 according to estimates by the New Statesman. I doubt his children will fail exams no matter how inept they may be, not when extra-curricular tuition is so affordable.

This upset about a fall in exam grades is not motivated solely by compassion for those children who waited till the summer to take their exams (though I wish it were that humanitarian), it is a reaction due entirely to the disproportionate importance placed on these exams by all parties in desperate need of a metric to judge their own misguided policies. In this the real essence has been lost, the process of learning, the heart and soul of the education system, has been replace by the end exam result, a relatively unimportant series of statistics.

Iceland I Am Inside You

So I’m on holiday in Iceland, a strange place you may say, but really somewhere where the weather is guaranteed to be cold and/or wet is a relief at the moment.

Heathrow was horrendous as always, but not insufferable. I actually managed to get through security without setting off the metal detector with my belt, or shoes, or teeth or whatever. Now I have flown three times, well six if you count the return journeys.

Weary travellers, we rest in Keflavik, a town which looks like Ikea was asked to design a suburb in the ‘50s. We continue on to Akureyri tomorrow, flying on a Fokker 50 (no giggling) where hopefully we will find things to do.

Personally though, we’re going whale watching later in the week, if I see only one whale this trip will have been a crowning success.