Colin McCabe chides Charles Clarke

EducationGuardian.co.uk | News crumb | Why exams are failing children: "Students now arrive at university without the knowledge or skills considered automatic in our day. But the students are bright and willing and I think that there would be little difficulty in accommodating this change with considerable additional teaching in the first year of university courses."

This open letter to the education secretary is interesting; not least because I suspect that it unwittingly reveals part of the difficulty in all this talk about assessment and exams. The part I've quoted gives the game away: the students are bright and willing [good to acknowledge that because indeed they are for the most part]; so far so good. but they arrive at university "without the knowledge or skills considered automatic in our day". Despite all the good things this article has to say we see the heart of the problem, and I do agree with Prof McCabe that there is probably an overkill of assessment and that there should be room for intellectual growth.

So, what's the issue? "In our day" -in other words there is a harking back to a period which signally failed the majority of children and young poeple because it was elitist and tacitly maintained a hierarchical view of society which deprived those from the 'wrong' backgrounds or with different learning styles of the best opportunities to develop their intelligence and skills. I know -I was one of those kids consigned to a place in society where my abilities would not be encouraged or grown, and that consignment was done when I was eleven.

"Without the knowledge or skills ..." which appears to place the blame for the state of affairs with the kids or with the pre-university education. But hang on a cotton-picking minute ... what is actually happening here is that the pre-unversity sector is responding [however imperfectly] to the idea that assessment should be criteria based and that education should be more than learning to write essays in a particular style. Perhaps the real issue here is that university teaching and teachers are not up to the new job of enabling learning [and come on: we know that university teachers are often chosen for their research ratings not their ability to develop others]. They want it to be like they grew up with, what's familier and what means they don't have to adjust to much [and at one level I can't blame them]. In other words they are implicitly, probably unconsciously, trying to maintain an elitist system because it has already favoured them and it would be easier to generate more of the same. And they'd like the great British tax-paying public to pay for it -in other words the people who have been failed by it would pay the lion's share to maintain it. Perhaps this is somewhat unfair on many, but in the present climate I do feel that a strongly stated opposite case should be put.

The old A levels are held up in this letter as good: I went through that system and I know that much of what we did by preparation was not what prof McCabe seesm to think, and ideed much of what went on in undergraduate courses likewise was about rote learning: except that the learning was of memorising lines of argument supported by memorising quotes. I'm not convinced it was laways thinking for ourselves; mostly it was learning arguments that would win good marks. The only real skill it taught was that of spotting which lines of argument were best deployed for which kind of question; the key skill was analysing the question. I think that what I wouldd want to say is that perhaps it is time to recognise that there are lots of different ways to express analytical skills and they can be faked to some degree under the traditional system as well.

What you end up with under the traditional system is a lot of people who have a limited set of skills of analysis and argument suited to a university environment and traditional university curriculum, but what if the university curriculum is too narrow? And what if the methods it by historical 'accident' has come to favour for discourse are too limited to draw out the potential of a diverse and gifted population? Then we need to stop putting the cart before the horse. I don't think that means putting the simple economic needs [and who defines that anyway?] of a country in the driving seat, I think it does call for a fuller vision of education than a narrowly defined traditionally academic excellence and than the simple meeting of skills gaps in the economy. In Christian terms it is about 'the glory of God is a human being fully alive' [Irenaeus -a former Bishop of Lyons]: human potential being encouraged and allowed to blossom to the benefit of all and all creation.