Another day, another down-beat headline about education.

‘Schools told to improve or close’ screams the BBC headline. ‘Almost one in five secondary schools in England is to be given a warning to improve exam results or face closure.’

This comes hot on the heels of the latest controversies surrounding the introduction of Diplomas to replace/supplement (no-one seems to know which) traditional A-levels. These diplomas ‘could spell disaster’ for the education system, a leading academic has warned. Some universities seem to back the diplomas, while the more prestigious are preparing to set their own entry tests to differentiate between well-qualified degree applicants.

One thing is clear. As Telly Savannas (almost) put it in Kelly’s Heroes, “This ain’t an education, it’s a circus!”

My own experience of high-school education was disastrous. Most of what I’ve learned in life has come through my own subsequent efforts. But now, as an educator, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on what a better system might look like.

1. Gaining paper qualifications should not be the goal of the educational experience. If it is, we will succeed only in producing pupils who are test-passing machines, good to neither man nor beast. Testing should be a means to some greater end. Always.
   
2. It’s not good enough to throw bits of information at pupils. They need to be told why the information is important, what the context is, how it fits within a bigger picture. Otherwise there’s no reason for them to care.
   
3. The traditional distinction between theoretical and practical, or academic and vocational, is utterly bogus. To truly understand something we must know how to use it. Meaning is application, as simple as that. (Read your later Wittgenstein if you don’t believe me.) This will NOT lead to dumbing down, but more rigour and reflection.
   
4. Instead of teaching subjects, let’s teach skills – interesting and useful abilities. These skills should apply to the different areas of life that we’ll discover once we leave the cloistered classrooms of our misspent youth. I’m talking about the sort of skills we learn in workplace training and management programmes (communication skills, time management and planning skills, problem solving and decision making skills) as well as the evening-classes we attend to fill in the gaping holes left by traditional education (financial literacy and entrepreneurship, thinking and study skills).
   If these are not taught overtly, they are not taught.
   
5. Teachers should be made to employ the latest methodologies on accelerated learning, multiple-intelligence theory and learning styles to tailor their teaching to the needs of the students. Guess what? We do not all learn in the same way. I thought I was ‘thick’ for years because traditional teaching methods didn’t do it for me. I had to earn a PhD to excavate this inferiority complex.
   
6. I tend towards the notion that boys and girls should be educated separately for at least part of the time. Boys are doing poorly at school now, while girls are flourishing. The whole course-work orientation of modern education is geared towards the more mature and conscientious girls; boys favour competition, but care less about grades. I go one step further, to say that girls are an incredible distraction to boys at school and their presence also heightens the myth that ‘it’s not macho to study’.
   
7. Career guidance should play a larger part in education from earlier on. Now, it’s tacked to the end of the academic life-span. It should be central. Otherwise we’ll keep producing students with interesting but useless arts degrees or qualifications that don’t equip them to get where they want to go. Career classes should involve personality and strength profiling so students can discover and exploit the differing talents they all possess. Achieving this is one of the major sources of excellence and fulfilment in life.

Some of this is controversial, I know. I’m willing to hear a good defence of traditional education. But you’d better make it persuasive!

Last 5 posts by Allen Baird, Partner

• No More Heroes? #2 - March 10th, 2010
• No More Heroes? #1 - March 3rd, 2010
• The Politics of Depression - February 22nd, 2010
• Class, Race and Sex In Education - February 15th, 2010
• How To Be Fearless - February 10th, 2010