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UK: Remember those useless A-Levels? The people who took them now run the country…
Peter Hitchens
If you want to tell the truth in modern Britain, you need to be very patient. More than 20 years ago, I discovered just how badly English school exams had been devalued and hollowed out. I had suspected it for some time, and had noted the dilution and then the gutting of the old O-level back in the 1970s, and its 1980s replacement by the feeble GCSE. But direct evidence came my way that showed me the change was disastrous.
Proper knowledge was no longer required. In fact a child who had real, deep knowledge of the subject might actually be penalised for going off the script. The new exams were more like tests for Scout badges than the punishing papers I had taken in my own schooldays.
And the grades that were being issued were like 1920s German billion-mark notes – with a face value that bore no relation to their real worth.
I began to say so. I was immediately attacked for being unfair to the children involved. I was told sternly that they had all worked very hard for their worthless bits of paper, and shouldn’t be discouraged by cruel newspaper columnists. Actually, I don’t doubt that they had worked hard. The boring slog needed to prepare for these tests was hard without being useful, the educational equivalent of the treadmill.
No wonder so many schoolchildren were being drugged to make them sit still, with official encouragement, with pills almost indistinguishable from illegal amphetamines – the perfect way of getting someone to endure tedious tasks, if you don’t care what happens to their bodies and brains afterwards.
Bit by bit, the truth oozed out, though never officially acknowledged. Grandiose plans to ‘toughen’ exams were produced by Ministers – a tacit admission that they were too flabby.
Universities began to offer remedial courses – now common and known as ‘foundation years’ – for entrants who were simply not ready to cope with college. Others checked the records and found that grades simply no longer meant what they used to. And employers increasingly hired Eastern Europeans who had been to proper, disciplined, knowledge-based schools, instead of semi-literate British school products who didn’t know it was important to turn up on time. This was in spite of the fact that the Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians mostly spoke poor English.
More and more I think it was our failed schools and fatherless homes that led to this wave of migrant labour. If our own young people had been as brilliantly educated and well brought-up as the official announcements said, why did nearly a million of them linger among the jobless (‘not in employment, education or training’, as the phrase goes) while Poles arrived to do the jobs they should have been doing?
Well, after two decades of lies, we now have the absolute proof. Just 54 per cent is required for an A grade in this year’s OCR maths A-level exam. Remember that this includes the over-rated private schools (which only look good because the comps are even worse) as well as state schools.
You don’t need a maths A-level to see what that means. And if maths, where it is clear what’s right and wrong, is judged so feebly, imagine what it’s like in the softer subjects.
Will anything now happen? No. Our teenage Cabinet (and Shadow Cabinet) are made up almost entirely of people who are themselves victims of the educational catastrophe of the 1960s, and know no better. As we shall see during the next few months.
SOURCE
USA: Top 25 Public Colleges 2019: The Best Education For $30,000 Less
Although public colleges do not dominate the Forbes America’s Top Colleges List — only a quarter of schools in the top 100 are public and less than half of the overall list is made of public institutions — public schools provide some of the most accessible and high-quality education in the country.
More than 5 million students attend the public colleges that make America's Top Colleges List. The average in-state cost of attendance for the public colleges on the America’s Top Colleges list is nearly $30,000 a year less than private colleges on the list: $25,759 compared to $57,128.
Unlike the top liberal arts schools, there is no central hub of prominent top public colleges; the most notable public schools are spread evenly across the country — there are nine in the West, seven in the South, five in the Northeast and four in the Midwest.
The top two spots are the same as last year, going to the University of California, Berkeley — one of the most selective universities in the state’s system — and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which has the highest research expenditures among public universities.
Although many of the top public schools remain the same as the 2018 rankings, there is much movement within the list. The biggest jump comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology — known for its strong engineering programs — which moved up seven spots to No. 13 of the top public colleges.
Gallery: Top 10 Public Colleges 2019
All five of the nation’s military colleges remained on the list, but the United States Naval Academy and the United States Military Academy switched spots to No. 3 and 4 respectively this year. The University of California, Los Angeles moved up two spots, bumping down the United States Air Force Academy one spot to No. 7. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, College Park and University of Wisconsin, Madison moved up one spot, while the University of Washington, Seattle moved up three spots. The College of William and Mary, the University of Georgia and the University of Texas, Austin dropped two spots each and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Florida dropped four spots each. The University of California, San Diego and Santa Barbara dropped one spot to No. 19 and 20 respectively, and the University of California, Irvine and Davis switched spots to become No. 21 and 22 respectively.
The newest arrival to the 2019 top public college list is the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO. Given the prominence of recruiting more students into STEM majors to prepare them for STEM-related occupations, the school is dedicated to ensuring that students are industry-ready; according to the Pew Research Center, one in three college-educated workers majored in a STEM field, but only about half of STEM majors have a STEM job after graduating. With specializations in engineering and applied sciences, students at the Colorado School of Mines have the opportunity to work with faculty on research during their undergraduate careers, and 88% of graduates have a job in the industry or go on to pursue graduate degrees.
The Forbes 2019 Public Top Colleges are:
25. University of Georgia (No. 99)
24. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (No. 98)
23. Colorado School of Mines (No. 94)
22. University of California, Davis (No. 88)
21. University of California, Irvine (No. 87)
20. University of California, Santa Barbara (No. 84)
19. University of California, San Diego (No. 79)
18. University of Texas, Austin (No. 76)
17. University of Florida (No. 70)
16. University of Wisconsin, Madison (No. 69)
15. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (No. 68)
14. United States Merchant Marine Academy (No. 66)
13. Georgia Institute of Technology (No. 65)
12. University of Washington, Seattle (No. 64)
11. University of Maryland, College Park (No. 63)
10. United States Coast Guard Academy (No. 53)
9. College of William and Mary (No. 47)
8. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (No. 45)
7. United States Air Force Academy (No. 43)
6. University of California, Los Angeles (No. 38)
5. University of Virginia (No. 33)
4. United States Military Academy (No. 32)
3. United States Naval Academy (No. 24)
2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (No. 20)
1. University of California, Berkeley (No. 13)
SOURCE
Australia: Top private schoolheadmaster defends privileged students and single sex schools
Timothy Wright, the head of Shore School, also defended his students against those who judged them because of their privilege. "I don't think it's right, as some people do, to say that because you come from Cremorne, you must be somehow a morally bad person," he said.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Herald ahead of his departure from the North Sydney school, Dr Wright spoke of the benefits of single-sex education for boys.
Dr Wright will step down at the end of 2019 after 17 years at the helm of Shore, and 34 years in education.
Shore, an Anglican school, is now in such demand that parents wanting to send their sons there must either be old boys, or lodge their son's waiting list application on the day of his birth. One family has sent their sons there since the 1890s.
Despite fears among some of his high socio-economic parent body that anything but a university degree amounted to failure, Dr Wright said the notion that everyone should get a degree was a "complete fallacy".
He has often encouraged his students to think about an apprenticeship as an option, as they head into an increasingly uncertain job market. "We would not get as many boys going into trades as I would like to see," he said. "I'm pretty confident [artificial intelligence] won't replace plumbers."
Shore costs up to $33,000 a year, and 83 per cent of the school's students are from the top quartile of advantage. But Dr Wright said parental wealth did not inoculate his students against difficulty, and was irritated by the assumption by some that their wealth was a character flaw.
"That sort of attitude that sometimes crops up really annoys me on behalf of these boys," he said.
"I know them. I love them. I do not understand how people can possibly take that attitude towards them. The boys are privileged, and it's not their fault. It's what you do with your opportunities in life that I think you are responsible for. [Wealth] will give you certain advantages, yes, but it does not protect you. Some of my boys have some pretty wicked problems."
Having taught in both single-sex and co-ed schools, Dr Wright said a boys' only environment gives the students a freedom they might not feel if girls were around. "One of the things you'll notice is boys in boys' schools sing," he said.
"They don't, by and large, in co-ed schools. You'll find senior boys out there still playing handball." Girls often master language more quickly than boys, so "there are some real advantages for boys in an English curriculum that meets their needs."
Despite being a chemistry teacher, Dr Wright is passionate about reading. "The more we can get kids reading, the less work you have to do in educating them," he said. "A lot of well-read people are fundamentally self-taught."
He worries about the quality of some modern young adult and children's books. "To some extent I believe in the canon - I realise that's almost an heretical position," he said. "The notion that you are just reading words on a page, and a Campbell's Soup ad is just as worthy a form of text as Joseph Conrad, I'm struggling with that. I do agree that some [young adult fiction] is just churned out.
"I think the same thing with a number of children's books. There seems to be a flood of books [about] bottoms, farts and all the rest of it. I'm not sure that once you have read one or two of those, there's a whole lot more to explore."
Unlike many other private school principals, Dr Wright has resisted the temptation to expand Shore's numbers. He cannot speak for his successor, but believes there is a "sweet spot" at around 220 students per year.
"It's not like Coca Cola - you can't scale the experience of a school," he said. "It's like many complex human organisations, just to double its size doesn't mean you get twice as much of the quality."
About 26 per cent of its students are sons of old boys, but in the next decade the school may also open to the sons of old girls, as girls have been able to attend the K-2 campus in Northbridge for more than 15 years.
SOURCE
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