Following from my recent post about falling educational standards in the UK, this post provides several explanations why standards are plummeting.
Firstly, at a recent parents' evening we mentioned that we are helping our boys to learn their times tables. The teacher said that: "it would make her life a lot easier if more parents did that." Sorry, but aren't teachers meant to be doing that? I know that when I was at junior school, in the 1970s, that our tables were drilled into us and to this day I know them all up to 12 x 12, even though I have computers, telephones and calculators that can do the job just as well.
The admission that teachers aren't teaching the times tables ought to surprise and shock most parents; such news ought to ring the alarm bells at the top of government. Sadly, successive Education Secretaries only seek to undermine the teaching profession and opt for the headline-making pronouncements.
As much as I am appalled by the amount of work that we have to put in to our boys' education I am not surprised and I don't blame the teachers.
Which brings me on to my second point.
A good friend is a junior school teacher and she has to run lessons as though dictated by Stalin himself. Such is the rigidity of the lessons there is hardly any time to actually provide any quality teaching. They have to set out the lessons' objectives before they teach; they then work through the learning objectives and then there is a plenary session during which time the children assess if they have learned the things that were set out in the list of objectives that were defined less than an hour before.
Take out 15-20 minutes from an hour for pointless objective-setting and plenary sessions and you can see why teachers struggle to impart any knowledge.
In this Orwellian nightmare of a teaching system I know one thing: that if we don't help our boys with their maths and English that they would fall behind and not because they're... now, what's the politically-correct phrase?... stupid.
If you have children from broken, violent or otherwise malfunctioning families then is it any wonder that we have a growing underclass of illiterate and innumerate children who are unlikely to ever work?
If Education Secretaries let teachers do their job, rather than getting them to tick useless boxes, then those children who receive no support from their parents might actually get an education and pull themselves out of poverty.
