Simon Jenkins wrote that this morning, in the Guardian.
He's right.
In one of his annoyingly good articles (annoying because he can also write such nonsense) this wisdom stands out from much else that is very good. I suggest going and reading it, here.
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I’m afraid that Simon Jenkins is developing a habit of writing ‘annoyingly good’ articles, Richard – as my pile of printouts over the last year can testify 🙂
This one is particularly good, though, and also pertinent to me, being someone who was also told at secondary (modern) school by the teacher who acted as (so called) careers adviser that I’d never make much of myself and therefore my future employment prospects were ‘either a factory or in the army.’
While he’s right about “computing, economics, law, the culture of the body, the history of community and the state of the environment” and in his appeal for ethics and common sense, Jenkins’ sideswipe at Maths (which he obviously didn’t ‘like’) and Latin and his failure to mention modern languages is just as out of touch and fogeyish as Gove is and Arnold was.
“Arnold still lives, with maths and science in place of Latin and Greek. Pundits are wheeled out to “prove” them either vital to the economy or, if not, then “mind-training”. For millions of children, maths has replaced corporal punishment as subject of the phrase, “It never did me any harm.” Algebra and geometry are a liturgical creed, to be recited without question.”
After eleven years of trying to get FE Engineering students of 16 to 18 up to A Level standard Maths I can assure you that for many an A grade in GCSE Maths is just about adequate to get you through a Tesco checkout or to check your payslip, but grade C (the minimum to get onto a BTEC or NVQ in Engineering) leaves most unable to use fractions, decimals or do even simple mental arithmetic. For far too long ‘Computing’ has meant just learning to use applications, not learning how to create them. Ethics is often understood to be a place east of London where they make a reality TV show.
Jenkins seems to suggest Maths and Science shouldn’t matter so much in the modern world. Dead wrong. We need less of the ‘either-or’ thinking Jenkins and Gove exemplify and, not simply more relevant curriculum, but just a whole lot more quantity and breadth of learning. British education suffers most not from striving for excessive depth, in places excess shallowness, and admittedly from increasing irrelevance in others, all of which it randomly achieves, but crucially from excessive narrowness, insularity and lack of ambition on the part of commentators, curriculum setters and learners alike.
We need Maths AND Modern Languages, Science AND History, Latin AND Algebra. My Canadian secondary education included all of these to beyond GCSE and in some parts beyond A Level standard. I still use them all, including the Latin to underpin my understanding of contracts I enter into and the law, (who studies Law without any grasp of Latin?) and for general literacy, the Algebra to get to grips with my mortgage payments and savings rates, Chemistry to read modern food, drink, cleaning product and pesticide labels intelligently, Physics to understand which walls I can and can’t knock out in my house alterations, General Maths to manage my online banking and savings, Geometry and Trigonometry throughout my previous career as an architect, and buying carpet or redesigning my garden, French and Italian when I go on holiday, Welsh when I go to visit my mother, and most of them to enable me to qualify as an Architect and Lecturer, make three forced but successful career changes from architecture to senior construction management to lecturing, and finally my knowledge of History to actually know, inter-alia, who Matthew Arnold was.
And guess what. ‘None of that did me any harm’. I still have used and still use them all!
No learning ever harms, only that which is either lacking altogether, too shallow, too narrow, out of date, or a disastrous blend of all four failings. British secondary education does include instances of all four.
Jenkins and Gove both need to wake up and smell the coffee. British education does lack ethics and common sense, but it and its economy are in a mess mainly for a lazy cultural excess of ‘entitlement and/or expectation’ from top to bottom of the social class spectrum, and a consequent cultural lack of educational ambition across the board.