Teaching to the test

Matthew Sinclair has an interesting post about getting a broad education. Having been to a state school he feels that he may have missed out on some of the things his privately educated counterparts may have enjoyed.

I just haven't had the same broad exposure and introduction to subjects beyond the exam, to the broader current of human knowledge, that many public school students have. I labour at remedying this but I'm starting from quite a distance behind.

He reckons that this is because many of his teachers may have been teaching to the test rather than seeking to educate the kids in their care.

Having also enjoyed the dubious benefits of a state education, I think he's right here. The other day, I was lurking at a home education forum where there was a discussion of how home-ed children who went up to universities couldn't work out why their schooled classmates only seemed to want  to know what was likely to be tested. Schooled children were just not interested in getting in-depth knowledge. They were, well, schooled, rather than educated.

Matthew quite correctly points out that we can probably deal effectively with this problem by extending the free market in education so that it covers all schools rather than just schools for the rich.

This point was also touched on briefly in a rather fiery exchange between DK and Dave Osler on Vox Politix the other night. Dave O seemed to think that education vouchers would further entrench the privilege of the wealthy (or words to that effect). This seems to me to be a completely bizarre argument. Making education for the poor and middlingly wealthy more effective is surely reducing the privileges of the wealthy. In the same way that most people can buy a car now (but the wealthy can afford swanky ones with leather seats and unuseable top speeds) we could have a system in which everyone got an education (as opposed to schooling) while the rich could afford a swanky one with top hats and stabling for Jemima's ponies.

If we sit back and ask what we want from the education system, the answer is that we want childen to get the broad knowledge of the world - "the best of all that has been known" - that Matthew and I didn't get. We can only give them this if we give them the same advantages - namely a private education - that the rich give their children.

Comments

[Kit]

The impression from my children's teachers is that they could not teach beyond the test. They are of limited academic exposure with their teacher training being the pinnacle of their educational experience. After all they are the product of this school system themselves.

[TDK]

Well as Mencken said "The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality"

http://www.ralphmag.org/menckenI.html

Therefore is it is of no surprise that a socialist like David O approves of this.

[Simon Clark]

I agree. Privately schooled people I know, even those who by their own admission aren't as smart as me (that would be the ones in a vegetative state) have a much broader knowledge and experience of, as perfectly described in your quote "the broader current of human knowledge". My state education taught me to pass a test. The exception would be my A level computing course where we did actually learn 'proper stuff'. Unfortunately this resulted in no one getting above a D.