Sounds about right

you are inconsistant,inconsistant,inconsistant,there i said it...in one sentence you talk of exams being dumbed down ,then in the next say kids are better off just knowing the basics,why? does their intellect frighten you so much that you need to have them kept down to your level of intelligence...you talk of "so called professionals" as knowing nothing yet you take the word of a "so called professional,with a plumb in the mouth" as gospel...you have selective thinking that is so blinkered.

their reading and writing is not down to the quality or lack of teaching skills...have you ever considered that maybe they just don't want to learn anything and spend the best part of school just bunking off?...and if such kids can't be bothered to learn or go to school,are they really interested in working?

There were always children who left secondary education being unable to read or write, even in the halcyon days of education that you hark back to. They swept roads and factory floors if unlucky and became tradesmen if they were lucky. The problem now is that many of those jobs have gone for ever.

My daughter's geography A level coursework was similar to what I did at university. There has been no dumbing down of education. Education is different now and children have different skills. They have far greater ability to work independently, doing their own research, than I ever had with my 'learning by rote' education.

Then maybe your child is at a good school.

Both of Mrs777's kids went to that very same school I have mentioned above.

I suppose it depends if you are lucky enough to have your child at a good school.

There are many though that are not....we should know.

But if they didn't they would be in danger of being labeled scroungers

It doesn't matter what the school is, the examining board sets the curriculum for all the schools taking its exams. The point is that the high levels of success that our children achieve throughout the country are being achieved in a curriculum that children of the 60s and 70s would have struggled with. Education has changed for a changing world.

and we did it without calculators

My Mum, bless her, was able to do quite complex mental arithmetic in the time it would now take most students to open their satchels to get their calculators out, let alone switch them on!!

A shopping bill will have been calculated to the last penny a'penny including food measured by cost/quantity with total recall at the till before the teller had sat down!

And she'd have the right change too!

Nowadays, give a shop girl (or boy) £22 for a bill totalling £12 (simply requiring a £10 note in change) and they look at you as if you're daft or simple!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/tories-promise-curriculum-shakeup-after-easier-exams-research-1914680.html

http://www.angryharry.com/esUKEXAMSGETEASIERANDEASIER.htm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-399707/And-dont-believe-exams-got-easier-.html

The middle link is really the one that sums it up.

IF the current system was working as it should....why does the curriculum change hugely on a yearly basis? A teacher that I spoke too last year told me that just when he gets used to one system, they change it to something else, and the whole learning process starts over again.

Also another major problem certainly at Bexleyheath school is the ammount of " supply " teachers they use.

There is hardly a day goes by when Mrs777's Daughter does not have a supply teacher for one of her subjects, and as she has stated...they tend not to teach them in the same way as they are used too with their normal teacher..so it just muddles them more.This is also her GCSE year too.

I have heard this is a big problem in a lot of schools now, where supply teachers are used on a big scale.

I've recently done another BSc.

This one was a lot easier to complete - not that the content was easier - just that with the internet and the spoonfeeding you get, as long as you do the work, it's almost impossible to fail.

What I did notice though, was that a lot of the schoolleavers struggled with basic math, simple algebraic manipulation that I learned when I was about 12, they couldn't do. They don't teach calculus now until A level - I learned that at 14 - even the A level math students struggled with stuff that I found simple.

As for written English, the standard was absolutely appalling - but as the structure/layout/english is typically only 10% of the mark for a piece of work, people were getting decent marks with reports that I would have chucked back and said hand it in when you've learned how to write properly!!

Dumbed down - you bet!! these days the emphasis is on all kids getting some GCSE's, in my day we did GCE "O" levels and the less academically able did CSE's. There was also an unofficial, but widely understood, league of difficulty for GCE boards that set and marked the papers - with the Joint Matriculation Board being held in the highest regard and the Oxford and Cambridge Board coming a close second.

In my day, around 90% plus was examination, these days it's 90% plus coursework (that goes for degrees too). I can understand the arguments viz coursework, but it means that anyone can get their work mentored prior to submission and keep improving it until they get the mark they want (assuming they start doing the assignment soon enough) -that's why I found this second degree easier to complete - though I would have preferred exams as it's less work overall as long as you go to the lectures/tutorials/labs and actually do some self study.

I don't have a problem with the internet/calculators/Pcs etc - none of which I had first time around - though scientific calculators were just coming in when I did A levels. We used log tables and slide rules, but at age 12, I was taught what logarithms were, how they worked and thus fully understood why the tables and slide rules worked and how to use them. Try asking an A level math student to define what a log is? all they know is that it's a button on the calculator.

It's easy to check if stuff has been cut and pasted off the net, you just put a sentence between quotes ("...xxx...") and paste it into a google search and if that exact same sentence exists, it will come up. We were drilled on acceptable use of the internet and indeed any source material - verbatim quotes are ok, appropriately referenced, but should not form more than 10% of the word count - the emphasis being on analysis and discussion with appropriate quotes and references. Some lecturers would automatically cap work at 50% if only internet references were used (even though this was in breach of the published assignment brief), their point being that we needed to display evidence of wider and more academic research than just google (haha, but using google books, I just referenced as if it was the book itself - i.e. publisher, edition, year etc - we used Harvard referencing).

Incidentally, we were marked down for referencing Wikipedia (but if you go to the bottom of a wiki article, there are the source references from the author(s) - and you can look them up on google books

IMHO it starts with the 3Rs (yes I know the spelling anomaly!) literacy and numeracy are the key to all subsequent learning. My kids could both read and write before they started school (as could I). With my kids I used flashcard games, alphabet jigsaws, number games, join the dots etc etc - all done in fun, never pushed to boredom, and with content appropriate to their development. I think the important thing was that I made the effort to play with them every day regardless of how long I'd been up and how much more work I had to do that day.

But when they started school, the teacher wouldn't allow them to have books with words in ffs!! I was told that they would be confused as the schools did Letterland, and that different phonemes for capital and lower case letters was far too complicated (my kids enjoyed Letterland, they picked it up in about 5 minutes, I bought the books).

Nostalgia's not what it was

But education standards have deffo gone down the pan in the last 30 years - and yet successive governments spin it to try and con us otherwise

Later in the same thread Kenty said, in response to similar points about Tesco's



Where have I implied any trade I've done Kenty? You've made assumptions. That's all. You seem to dislike the fact that my job has a high research content, which makes me prone to doing fact checking in threads like this. You've gone from denouncing me to admitting you know the square root of sod all on the topic in two pages - to quote the great Sid Waddell there's only one word for that - magic darts.