Education. Education. Education.
I can’t believe it. It’s an outrage. My world has fallen apart. Everything I used to believe in now stands in ruins.The unthinkable has happened. The Conservative Party has had a good idea.
Actually several.
This is from the Guardian’s coverage of the story:
A Conservative government would immediately overhaul the national curriculum in English, maths and science – and hand control of A-level exam content to universities and academic experts to end “political control” , the shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, said today.
Every child would get the chance to study all three science subjects – physics, chemistry and biology – separately at GCSE and there would be a return to disciplines such as geometry and algebra in tests for 11-year-olds.
The Tories would abolish the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA), the quango in charge of curriculum design, and benchmark the exams sat by children in England against those taken by young people across the world.
Outlining his plan in a speech to the annual conference of the Advisory Committee for Mathematics Education (Acme), Gove suggested that calculus be restored to A-level physics, and statistical concepts such as randomness and prediction – which have been key to understanding the financial crisis – be part of the GCSE curriculum for the brightest students.
“We will make a radical change to the way in which A-levels are designed,” Gove said. “We must ensure that A-levels are protected from devaluation at the hands of politicians. The institutions with the greatest interest in maintaining standards at A-level are those which receive A-level students – our universities.
“The individuals with the keenest interest in ensuring A-levels require the depth of knowledge necessary to flourish at university are our teaching academics. So we will take control of the A-level syllabus and question-setting process out of the hands of bureaucrats and instead empower universities, exam boards, learned societies and bodies like Acme.”
The national curriculum would be reformed to specify core knowledge “based on global evidence for what children can and should learn at different ages”, with changes to be introduced from September 2011.
Science would be divided into the disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology, rather than the hybrid headings currently used, which include “chemical and material behaviour” and “the environment, earth and universe”.
“When we reconstruct the national curriculum, we will ensure that it is built around a basic entitlement to study each of these scientific disciplines in a proper, rigorous fashion,” Gove said.
“We will ensure that each of the three basic sciences takes its place within the curriculum, in significantly greater depth and greater detail than now. Studying what has now become known as triple science should not be an elite activity but a basic curriculum entitlement.”
There isn’t much in this that I would disagree with. The only thing that makes me nervous is that abolishing the QCDA and handing over curriculum control to Universities may simply be a cost-cutting measure. I can see a strong possibility that we might have to take on this duty for free at a time when we’re threatened with big cuts in our research and teaching funds.
I’d also say that I think we’d be better off scrapping A-levels entirely – they’re damaged beyond repair, in my view. “Benchmarking” could be achieved quite easily by making British students take the International Baccalaureate.
These things aside, I would strongly endorse the statement that a proper science education should be an entitlement not a privilege. People might sneer at the reintroduction of geometry into the syllabus but I think it’s an excellent idea. Too much education these days consists of the rote-learning of snack thoughts in bit-sized factoid pieces. Too little involves nurturing brains to exploit their full potential to do things other than act as memory devices. Education is there to help people learn to apply rigorous logical thinking as well as exercising its creative problem-solving powers. Doing classical Euclidean geometry is a wonderful way to develop the idea of a mathematical proof and, in my view, cutting it out of the school syllabus was a very retrograde step and one that should be reversed as soon as possible.
We’ve been going backwards in science education for far too long. Educationalists have convinced our schools that today’s students are not sufficiently intelligent to do science or mathematics and must instead be content to reproduce it. That’s an insult to the intelligence of the younger generation and it means Universities have to do a great deal of remedial teaching before they can get on and do things properly.
I’m no Conservative, but there’s no doubt in my mind that New Labour lost the plot a long time ago so I think the Tory plans are to be applauded.
Not that I’m going to vote for them.
In the Dark 
March 2, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Voting for principles, ideas, beliefs, etc., is a whole lot better than voting for party political dogma.
I also would not naturally vote Conservative, but a good idea is still a good idea. We have to find a way of voting for ideas rather than political parties.
March 2, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Michael Gove is one of the good guys. I hope he has the guts to carry this though if they get elected. They would have to do this quickly to avoid having to explain several years of “record passes” taking place on their watch as being smoke and mirrors.
The move to giving universities responsibility for A-levels is very much a return to 1980’s when academics set the papers. One only hopes that the curriculum will be set by academics in a particular discipline and not the university education departments. I fear, however, the latter may end up taking place, in which case we can expect more “innovation” and “record passes”.
March 2, 2010 at 9:20 pm
“…there’s no doubt in my mind that New Labour lost the plot a long time ago so I think the Tory plans are to be applauded. Not that I’m going to vote for them”
I’d be interested in why not.
Nowadays I take seriously the idea that I vote for a person, and that the parties on the voting paper give me some guidance into what they believe. That is ironic in view of the monotonic increase in power of the party system, which I would love to see weakened – but I can’t think how, because MPs must be allowed free association.
Anton
March 2, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Euclid’s Elements – the world’s most enduring school textbook, having been used unchanged (apart from translation) in an unbroken tradition stretching across continents for some 2400 years, from about 300BC to about 1900.
Anton
March 2, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Anton -wow- I learned the Elements at primary school in about 1980, from a very old-fashioned teacher, who in retroespect proved to be the second-best teacher I ever had (I won’t name the best becuase that might induce ego-tipping in Cambridge :). I wonder if we did a random sample of 10/11 year olds now, how many would be learning Euclid in a run-of-the-mill state primary school? And how many then?
Of course the other thing we learned from the Greeks is “Young people these days…” As an avowed scietist I often have to ask myself how much of my despair at today’s students’ knowledge of physics is because of my own middle-age, and how much of it is objective? Obviously my gut feeling is the latter… but how can we University teachers quantify it?
March 2, 2010 at 10:35 pm
I’m very impressed by how bright today’s students are, but also dismayed by how little confidence they have in using their brains for anything other than remembering things. There’s no question in my mind that science and mathematics education in schools has been made nonsensically dull, but I want to make it clear that it’s not the fault of the students but the fault of those that have decided that they can’t be challenged.
My reply to Anton is that I won’t be voting Conservative because I don’t trust either of the main political parties. The Tories may have produced some good ideas on education, but that’s not enough. There are too many other things I disagree with.
March 2, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Garret: I’d say don’t try to quantify it, for there is more to knowledge than can be captured in numbers. Trust the experts – that means people like yourself, who have to take what the schools put out. If there is a consensus among your colleagues that things have got worse then I’d accept it as fact. But don’t despair; provided that universities can still put out the same percentiles of their input with degrees as good as before then it doesn’t matter too much if students enter with less knowledge and catch up in a longer university course. Admittedly they would be up to speed a year older than before, but they’d probably have enjoyed it.
I hope Peter won’t mind if I borrow an inch of his blog to recommend a truly superb book: “Mathematics and its History” by John Stillwell. Incredibly clear summaries of what the Greeks did in maths, area by area; then fast-forwarding to when Greece was superseded, often in the Renaissance; and summarising what has been achieved since. When I gave a talk on ancient Greek maths to a mixed audience of classicists and mathematicians – a real challenge – it was a mainstay.
Almost certainly the oldest unproven conjecture in mathematics is that there are no odd perfect numbers (ie, numbers that are the sum of their factors, such as 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14). The concept of perfect numbers was known to the Greeks, for Euclid proved that if (2^n – 1) was prime – now known as a Mersenne prime – then (2^n – 1) * 2^(n-1) was perfect. This is obviously even, and Euler showed some 2150 years later (!) that every even perfect number is of this form. But nobody, from Euclid onward, has proved either that odd perfect numbers exist (ideally by finding one) or, conversely, that they don’t exist.
Anton
March 2, 2010 at 11:41 pm
Peter,
Agreed re the students not being culpable. We haven’t helped by advocating slogans such as “Physics for fun and profit” – a proposal which actually appeared in Physics World, to which I objected. Physics can generate both of those things but it is FOR neither of them. It is about mastery of certain technical skills, which is often difficult but for which the payoff is the deep satisfaction of learning something about how the universe works.
Thanks for the reply re Tories. I don’t trust either of the big two parties myself, but if still in N Shrops (a move is possible) then I would vote for the incumbent (who happens to be Tory) because he did a lot more than he had to in order to get a friend out of a jam. If party affiliation was all the info I had then I’d probably vote UKIP.
Anton
March 2, 2010 at 11:48 pm
A lot of this is not actually new – children already have the ability to study separate sciences, although admittedly it is generally only offered to the brighter students (or those in fee-paying schools…) – the “dual science” GCSE is the mainstream qualification for thse students who don’t intend to do A levels in science. So in that sense, Gove isn’t offering anything very new or exciting in science education. And A level maths still includes calculus, although there are A level modules that can be taken that mean a student can avoid too much exposure to it.
Working with school and university students on a regular basis, I’m always impressed by their ability to rapidly locate information – it’s true that they may lack some of the more traditional “facts and figures”-based teaching that most of us over 30 received, but they do have great abilities in the IT side of things that allow them to learn (self-teach) a lot of things very quickly. I’d say most modern school students have a broader but shallower grasp of maths/science than us “oldies”, but they have such a huge potential to access data these days, it seems to me that we should be changing the way we teach science to adapt to how they learn. Throwing the curriculum responsibility back to universities (which ones? how will they agree?!) strikes me as a cheap fix, and probably not the best idea given that the course design etc. might then be left to those who last experienced school in the 60s/70s…?
March 2, 2010 at 11:54 pm
I agree with Anton Garrett that Stillwell’s book is wonderful. I came across it accidentally some years ago, and could not put it down.
I am perplexed by the discussion of putting geometry back into the curriculum. Do you really mean that students in the UK don’t learn geometry? My kids (aged 9 and 10) study these things now, to a surprising degree of detail – once in a while I hesitate to recall the exact difference between a rhombus and a parallelogram and to count the number of axes of symmetry. They also learn several methods of arithmetic, which can be annoying if you know your own favorite one and have to learn new ones in order to review a child’s homework. Of course, learning a variety of methods is a good thing, since it is closer to the spirit of mathematics and allows each student to adopt his/her favorite method, ie, the one which makes the most sense to him/her. The only problem can be in failing to become proficient in any of the methods, but testing can help take care of that. It is great to see how young minds receive new concepts and incorporate them, how sad that the light of insight is dimmed by circumstances, or by policy.
March 3, 2010 at 12:02 am
Paul: I’ll grant you that there should be no desire to return to facts-and-figures based learning. But whenever was mathematics taught like that anyway? The ability to retrieve and organise information quickly and efficiently is of course an essential skill which current methods do nurture, but it is no substitute for creative thinking and problem solving which current methods stifle. This is what humans can do that computers can’t. Not yet anyway.
Michael: The mathematics curriculum indeed contains only trivial amounts of geometry (Pythagoras and a few other things). I don’t know who decided to take it out, but they were profoundly wrong.
March 3, 2010 at 12:06 am
Even at university level I felt that subjects were being taught as equations to remember, rather than on fundamental understanding. This was true of at least my first three years at a decent university (the blogger’s former), although some subjects lend themselves to being more easily memorised than others. I understand that universities have to try to cover as much as possible in the first year or so (“combined science for undergraduates”), but surely choosing a smaller number of topics and rigorously exploring them would be a more worthwile route?
March 3, 2010 at 12:17 am
Mathematics has been well described (going back at least as far as GH Hardy) as the science of pattern. Pictures and equations are complementary to each other. In the maths of spaces (specifically), this means geometry and algebra are complementary to each other. It is not an either/or. As David Hestenes put it, “Geometry without algebra is dumb! Algebra without geometry is blind!”
March 3, 2010 at 12:21 am
I can see that there’s a lot in there that’s superficially appealing, and I say that as a university physics academic, but I don’t really like it – and that’s not just based on my instinctive dislike of the Tories. I do like the idea of promoting a good science education, but this old idea that Physics Chemistry and Biology are the normal modes of natural science is not one I agree with – why not “chemical and material behaviour” if it is done rigorously and all bases are covered. I don’t think universities should have control, either. We don’t do examination terribly well, I don’t think, and we are subject to political control as much as an independently set-up exams board.
I can sort-of agree with some of what he says, but I’d rather rip it up and start again, than go back to what we used to have. It wasn’t all so wonderful.
March 3, 2010 at 1:04 am
Just quickly to second Peter’s very important point: the students are indeed just as clever as they used to be.
It takes a couple of years in the best cases to free them from the “teach to the test” mindset; the weaker students never escape this despite the most intensive effort. And yes, given that this is Peter’s blog and he has shown the rest of us exemplary honesty on many topics, I’d go so far as to say that the latter point particularly applies to many Oxbridge students who chose physics at Uni simply because it was their best subject at high school and just want to be here for the label.
They have been sold a video game, and when they arrive and have to do the math, they can’t cope.
Physics is fun, but it is hard. This has to be acknowledged somehow. I’m personally thinking hard about this at high-school level – I’m not just whinging, and I think that while we’re probably logically entitled to say “it’s the schools’ fault”, that’s not going to advance things…
Sorry if that’s so grouchy. Had a bad day with QM today…
1/sqrt(2)[ | 😦 > + | 🙂 > ]
March 3, 2010 at 9:24 am
Phillip,
In my judgement, Owen Paterson MP got involved with my friend’s case because he felt an injustice was being committed, not because he wanted my vote and my friends’s. I want people like that in parliament. Of course my judgement could be wrong, but it’s my vote so that’s my problem.
If anything other than PR is not democracy (as you suggest) then the Greeks who invented democracy were not democratic. Reductio ad absurdum?
Where the German system *does* have it over Britain is in the relative strength of local government over federal. Decntralisation of power is a good thing. How ironic that Britain originally went centralised as part of war planning 70 years ago, and never really undid it.
Anton
March 3, 2010 at 10:27 am
Phillip,
I approached Owen Paterson because he was (and is) MP for where I live and for where my friend lives. Had I approached another MP I would (rightly) have been asked if I’d tried my own MP first. He made his concerns very clear to some people to whom he had personal access which I didn’t. That is what personal representation is about.
We’ve done this before, but the logic of your position is to have referenda on everything. Why not?
Anton
March 3, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Phillip,
Had Paterson proved unsympathetic then he would have lost my vote even if I aprroved of his party. Plenty of people vote in elections against an incumbent whose party they prefer, if it is generally known that the incumbent has proved corrupt. So it cuts both ways.
BTW, I’ve never seen “integer” used in modern English as an adjective for somebody who has integrity. Is it in Shakespeare?
I think you are not in favour of PR rather than democracy. Perhaps we should define the D-word before going any further.
Anton