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A deeply disturbing article
taken from The Business online which will prove difficult for Labour
and Conservative governments to stomach - employers will not be so
suprised - for many years they have been warning about the levels of
education encountered in recruitment drives.
This stupid nation
It is one of the most devastating indictments of British education ever
produced: a study of 10,000 children reveals that 11-and 12-year-old
children are “now, on average, between two and three years behind where
they were 15 years ago” in their cognitive and conceptual development.
In other words, their ability to think and reason has receded at an
astonishing rate since 1990.
Every so often, new research deserves to transform the way a generation
thinks about the world; this, from one of Britain’s leading
psychologists, fits the bill. To those who still refuse to admit that
educational standards in Britain are in dangerous decline, this
groundbreaking research will come as a devastating shock. To the rest
of us, it confirms what we had long suspected: British schools are not
just failing to meet the demands of the 21st century knowledge economy
in equipping children with essential skills, they are doing even worse
than they used to, with dire implications for the prospects of a new
generation of children in an age of globalisation and intense
international competition.
The new study, by Michael Shayer of
King’s College, London, soon to appear in the British Journal of Educational Psychology,
also reveals that the so-called “gender gap” has
disappeared, with the performance of both sexes deteriorating
significantly. Much of the collapse took place between 1995 and 2000;
but there was a further drop between 2000 and 2004 – so both Tory and
Labour governments are implicated.
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By analysing and measuring
intellectual ability using the most advanced
scientific breakthroughs about the way the brain functions, Mr Shayer,
one of Britain’s most brilliant psychologists, has demonstrated beyond
peradventure that children are regressing and becoming less capable.
His research confirms what many have long suspected: that the
much-touted and relentless improvements in exam results in A-levels and
GSCEs, far from demonstrating a rise in standards, are solely the
result of grade inflation, the product of easier questions and more
promiscuous marking.
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This is ground-breaking stuff, with huge implications not just for
British education but the country’s ability to compete and prosper in
the 21st century. So nobody should be surprised that it has been almost
wholly ignored by the British media: only The Spectator website (a
sister publication of this newspaper) bothered to follow it up
properly. Plain folk might regard it as a devastating indictment of our
increasingly frivolous media that it did not dominate every front page
and lead every news bulletin. But that would be unfair: the media had a
dying whale in the Thames and the sexual peccadilloes of minor Liberal
politicians to cover, obviously far more significant than a story that
raises grave concerns about the nation’s future.
Only this weekend, as The Business brings the research’s findings to
its elite readership, is the collapse in the ability of British
children beginning to dawn, with leading economists and business groups
warning that the collapse in standards will be devastating for
Britain’s ability to compete in the global 21st century knowledge
economy. Their concern is all the greater because Mr Shayer has no
political axe to grind: he is not associated with any conservative
think-tank and the money for his research came from the
government-funded Economic and Social Research Council, which resides
at the heart of Britain’s (failed) educational establishment.
Before he started his research, Mr Shayer was convinced it would show
that British children had improved; no wonder he calls his results
“astonishing”. His research does not explain why the collapse in
cognitive ability has taken place; it merely identifies and measures
it. He speculates that the lack of experimental play in primary schools
and the growth of a video-game and TV culture may be partly to blame.
While these trends have undoubtedly played a role, another factor must
surely be the decline in intellectual, as well as sensual, stimulus in
many schools and families. Regardless of the exact causes of this
cognitive decline, Britain’s smug, deluded and complacent educational
establishment, which continues to maintain that all is well in the best
of all worlds, must ultimately bear responsibility for this disastrous
development; and henceforth self-congratulatory ministerial claims of
rising school standards should be treated with the disdain they deserve.
By coincidence, the Shayer research was released the same day that new
figures showed China’s gross domestic product (GDP) overtaking
Britain’s for the first time since the 19th century Industrial
Revolution. The research and Britain’s relegation to fifth place in the
global economic pecking order are not linked – but they will be as the
21st century develops. It has become a cliché on the left and
right that advanced nations can only thrive in the face of competition
from China, India, Brazil and other rising nations if they fully
exploit the brainpower of their people; it is certainly true that there
is a strong relationship between education/skills and income/employment
– and that the link is growing even closer with the flight of
manufacturing from the advanced to the developing economies and the
spread of globalisation, technological progress and the knowledge-based
economy. But the Shayer research indicates – ministerial spin and
propaganda notwithstanding – that British education is wholly
inadequate to the demands ahead. Far from rising to the challenges of
the 21st century by educating more and more people to a higher and
higher standard, British education is actually in decline.
Some of us already knew this. The evidence, after all, has been around
for a while, though the education establishment has done its best to
bury it: of the 20% of British adults with the lowest skills, 50% are
economically inactive, though only 5% are categorised unemployed,
according to the Labour Force Survey, which means that massive numbers
are not even bothering to look for a job at all. Research from the OECD
reveals that a scandalously high 29% of Britain’s younger workforce
(aged 25 to 35) have no formal qualifications, against only 20% in
France, 13% in the United States, 6% in Japan and just 3% in South
Korea. Among the British as a whole, 35% have “low” qualifications; in
America, which (like Britain) also suffers from sub-standard secondary
education but enjoys hugely better universities, the figure is a much
healthier 12%. A mere 28% of the British workforce has “high”
qualifications, against 38% for the USA and Japan. Lord Leitch, in his
interim report on skills for the Treasury, concludes that 5m people in
Britain have no qualifications at all; one in six do not have the
literacy skills expected of an 11-year-old and half do not have
adequate levels of functional numeracy. Welcome to the stupid nation –
which we now know is becoming even dumber.
Great
Britain is paying a heavy price for “bog standard” comprehensive
education and the 30-year war against excellence in British
schools.
The main villains in this sad story are Labour politicians such as Shirley Williams, Anthony
Crosland, Roy Hattersley and their successors
– plus the dim-witted and monolithic educational establishment they
helped to create – all propelled by an egalitarian imperative which has
undermined standards and reduced opportunity for bright kids from poor
backgrounds; but the Tories have been complicit.
Now we can see that
the damage they wreaked on British schools is even worse than anybody
thought: most of us knew the school system had been consistently
dumbed-down; little did we realise that our children were also getting
dumber. |
If cognitive abilities continue to collapse (or just fail to improve),
Great Britain is heading for also-ran status in the economic stakes of
the 21st century. The Leitch review found increasing the literacy score
of a country by 1% raises GDP per capita by 1.5% and labour force
productivity by 2.5%.
The Shayer research indicates Britain is going
backwards, not forwards when it comes to education. The consequences
will be severe: an illiterate and innumerate workforce is disastrous
for a country’s scientific, cultural and economic health; a society
suffering from a collapse in cognitive ability in a knowledge-based
global economy, where cognitive skills are the most highly valued, is
in deep trouble. Britain’s schools need a cultural revolution if
today’s children are to survive in tomorrow’s global economy. Sadly,
nobody on the Left or Right is offering to lead it.
29 January 2006
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