Educational Elitism

Earlier this week I read in The Times that Cambridge University wishes to increase the required grades for undergraduate entry to A*, A, A from their current requirement of A, A, A when the new A* grade comes into effect in 2010.

The Sutton Trust, which campaigns to reduce inequality in education, said that using the A* would benefit only students at the best schools. Its director, Lee Elliot Major, described it as “another sign of the ever-growing arms race that defines the issue of social mobility – just as the playing field begins to level out for the less affluent up pops a new way for the privileged to assert their advantage”.

For me that quote sums up entirely the issues surrounding the way our education system is viewed. as the playing field begins to level out for the less affluent is another way of saying we've managed to dumb down the system so much that children who would have failed the GCE O-level can now get seemingly respectable grades in the GCSE allowing them to achieve the same results as their more intelligent peers. Which is wrong wrong wrong.

Mrs ff works as a teaching assistant, The Commuter's wife is a teacher, as is my sister, and I draw from their experiences when I say that the current system of targets and performance related pay has damaged the way our children are educated. The incentives to push the brightest children further have been removed by the obsession with conformity. Those students who are assessed as being good for at least 5 GCSE passes at grade C or above have less attention lavished on them than those who need help to achieve that goal. If a child has reached the minimum standard expected then they are virtually ignored in favour of the child that can be helped to improve a little and guarantee next year's pay rise. This isn't just happening at one state school; anecdotal evidence suggests it happens across the country.

It frustrates me enormously that to accommodate this philosophy the standard of GSCE (I can't be the only one who remembers the claim of one exam for every child that was used when the CSE and GCE were replaced?) papers are so low that my 10 year old daughter, still in primary education, can score a decent pass mark on the lower tier of a recent GCSE biology paper. I'll repeat that .. .. .. at 10 years old, without any formal secondary level education, my daughter passed that exam. If that is the level playing field that The Sutton Trust are referring to then I'd prefer that it didn't exist. If we don't push our brighter students to perform academically then we will have no new ideas, no new breakthroughs in medical and technological sciences save for those which come from abroad. And that can't be a good thing can it?

Back to where we started then and the idea whether universities should discriminate their intake based on ability. It is the only solution to ensure that we foster an admiration of, and aspiration to be, academically brilliant in our younger generation. The idea that 50% of our student body should attend university irrespective of ability is fucking dangerous. It doesn't reward hard work, it doesn't encourage learning, it doesn't encourage the ethics of struggle for achievement. Instead it devalues the hard work of the most studious individuals, it encourages thousands of young people to saddle themselves with massive amounts of debt, it devalues every degree issued by a British university.

I agree with and applaud the decision taken by Cambridge and hope that other universities follow suit. University should be the preserve of only the most intelligent, irrespective of their background or upbringing, and the sooner we return to that idea the sooner we will fix our broken education system.