Is the Overly Examined School-Life Worth Living?

Civitas, 7 April 2009

The start of this year’s Easter school holidays has been accompanied by an outbreak of mass hysteria in the press concerning impending GCSE examinations. Nothing better illustrates the sorry state to which so much schooling in England has been reduced by the current obsession with them than the advice to candidates quoted in today’s Times. It comes from a professor at London University’s Institute of Education who reportedly said to them:

‘What is really important is that you do something actively with your knowledge. You need to boil it down to bullet points on index cards, because in an exam room you must have all that knowledge in concentrated forms.’

The same professor also reportedly warned parents of children about to take these exams not to convey any anxiety about them they might have, claiming it would be ‘likely to put their children off learning’. Instead, he advised children about to take them ‘to summarise their notes repeatedly, so that they are constantly engaged in processing the information’.

Good grief! Here is a professor of pedagogy, ostensibly concerned lest schoolchildren be put off learning, advising them to summarise their notes repeatedly and then characterising such manically repetitive summarising as ‘doing something active’ with knowledge.

When education correspondents of reputable newspapers can allow professors of pedagogy to get away with such counter-educational garbage without criticism, one knows our educational system has plumbed new depths of dysfunctionality.

The damage wrought to schooling by its over-domination by examinations was well described a century ago by a former chief inspector of elementary schools in England, Edmond Holmes, in a book written shortly after his retirement. What Holmes wrote on this matter  seems to describe exactly the anti-educational cramming to which so much schooling in England today has been reduced.

Our latter-day professor of pedagogy would be well advised to dwell hard on what Holmes wrote before making any further pronouncements on the subject. He wrote:

‘When the education given in a school is dominated by a periodical examinations on a prescribed syllabus… the child… has to think what his teacher tells him to think, to feel what his teacher tells him to feel, to see what his teacher tells him to see, to say what his teacher tells him to say, to do what his teacher tells him to do. And the directions given to him are always minute. Not the smallest room for free action is allowed him if his teacher can possibly help it… How to outwit the examiner is the one aim of both the teacher and the examinee; and as the teacher is presumably older, wiser, and far more skilful that the examinations game than his pupil, the duty of thinking – of planning, of contriving, and even (in the deeper sense of the word) of studying – necessarily devolves on the former; and the latter, instead of relying upon himself and learning to use his own wits and resources, becomes more and more helpless and resourceless, and gradually ceases to take any interest in the work he is doing, for its own sake; his chief, if not his sole, concern being to outwit the examiner and pass a successful examination…These … evils … will be greatly aggravated when the examinees are young children. For the younger the child, the more ignorant and helpless he is (however full he may be of latent capacity and spontaneous activity), and therefore the more ready he is to lean upon his teacher and to look to him for instruction and direction.’ [Edmond Holmes, What is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular (Constable, 1911), pp. 55-56]

It was not just in the publicly maintained elementary schools of his day that Holmes claimed that their need to prepare their pupils for examinations had exerted a deeply baneful influence. Not even the very best private schools had escaped being blighted by the same disease. He wrote:

‘The education given in the Preparatory School is completely dominated by the scholarship and entrance examinations at the Great Public Schools…. The education given in the Great Public Schools is similarly dominated by the scholarship and entrance examinations held by the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. The lines on which those examinations are conducted are in the main the lines on which the boys must be educated.

‘So far as the rank and file of the boys are concerned, it may be doubted if the word “educative” is applicable, in any sense or degree, to their work. Of the… great expansive instincts which are struggling to evolve in every healthy child [–the instincts to talk and listen; to act; to draw, paint and model; to dance and sing; to know the why of things; and to construct things], not one can be said to find a congenial soil or a stimulating atmosphere in the ordinary classroom either of the Preparatory or of the Public School. Four of the six – the dramatic; the artistic; the musical; and the constructive — are entirely or almost entirely neglected… The study of the “Humanities”… ought to train [the communicative instinct]; and the study of Science ought to train [the inquisitive instinct]… But in the case of the average boy, the study of Humanities resolves itself, in the main, into a prolonged and unsuccessful tussle with the difficulties of the Greek and Latin languages… [instead of being an exploration of] the wonder-worlds of ancient life and thought, and the Study of Science is, as a rule, a pure farce. [Science is, I believe, seriously taught in the Great Public Schools to those who wish to take it seriously; but, if taught, at all, it is certainly not taught seriously to the rank and file of the boys who belong to the “Classical side” of their respective schools. (fn.)]…

‘Not one, then, of the expansive instincts of the average boy receives any training during the nine or ten years of his school life; and as, in his struggle for the “Pass” degree of his University, he will follow the lines on which he has been accustomed to work in both his schools, he will go out into the world at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, the victim of a course of education which has lasted for fourteen years and cost thousands of pounds, and which has done nothing whatever to foster his mental or spiritual growth.’ (pp. 183-84)

Even in the case of the brighter students who went on to read for Honours at Oxbridge, as Holmes had did with great success, he went on to observe that specialisation in Sciences or Humanities, plus the need to prepare for examinations, ensured that they would end up less than fully formed and with their interests in things of the mind largely killed off by their education in all to many cases. He wrote:

‘A heavy price has to be paid for the growth of the specialised faculties [– the inquisitive ones in the case of Science graduates; the communicative one in the case of Humanities graduates. (D.C.)]. If Science is to be seriously studied the student… turns his back on history, on literature, on philosophy, on music, [and] on art; … his training has been the reverse of humanising… The case of the “humanist” is different. The subjects he studies appeal to many sides of his being… But alas! the shadow of an impending examination is always falling on his humanistic studies, nullifying the appeal that they make to him, and compelling him to look at them from a sordidly utilitarian point of view…’ (pp. 187-88)

Despite middle-class university educated parents today knowing all these things about an education system which remains very largely much as Holmes described it in his day, save for the tentacles of the examinations Octopus having now spread to all its regions, they still typically remain desperate to put their children through the ordeal of such a mind-numbing examinations-dominated schooling for the sake of their being able to get them into one of the better universities, paying if they can afford it for them to attend a good public school beforehand.

Why?

Holmes supplied the answer in something he wrote about such schools and about Oxbridge that still remains true of them and always will so long as they remain safe from the clutches of those envious-minded egalitarians who would deny their benefits to anyone if they cannot be provided to all, something which they most certainly will never be able to without a social transformation on an almost unimaginable scale.

He wrote:

‘It is true that in all the Public Schools a certain amount of informal education is done through the medium of Musical Societies, Natural History Societies, Debating Societies, School Magazines, and the like; that the discipline of a Public School, with its system of School and House prefects, has considerable educational value; that the playing fields do something towards the formation of character; [and] that the boys, by exchanging experiences and discussing things freely among themselves, help to educate one another…

‘In the older Universities, as in the great Public Schools, many valuable educative influences are at work outside the lecture-room… The “atmosphere” of Oxford and Cambridge does much for the mental and spiritual development of those who are able to respond to its stimulus… It is because Oxford and Cambridge educate their alumni in a thousand ways, the worth of which no formal examination can test or measure, that they stand apart from all other Universities.’ (p.186 & fn p. 216)

Maybe our latter-day professor of pedagogy is aware of all this and is merely urging this year’s GCSE candidates to compose personalised ‘fact-sheets’ and commit them to memory merely to help them get into Oxbridge.

Or, maybe,  he is just one of the many current educational apparatchiks who go along in the charade.

Certainly, were, I like he,  dean of a Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy at a prestigious centre of teacher-training, I would have thought twice before going along with the lie that the current examination system has anything to do with the acquisition of knowledge and the awakening and maintaining of genuine interest in learning.

Roll on the Summer Holidays I say, when my children’s schooling will briefly cease obtruding into their education, to adapt a famous saying of Winston Churchill’s.