As Private Eye demonstrates ad nauseum journalists have shorter memories than just about anyone. We are in exam result time, so it is traditional at this time of year for papers to write stories about how the exam results are better than ever, accompanied – in the Daily Telegraph at least – by pictures that suggest that only women take A levels. Politicians then proclaim that these results do not mean that exams are easier, but, au contraire, that pupils are working harder and teaching standards are higher.
In a little over two months these same newspapers will then write slightly smaller stories on the inside pages this time – and this is also now traditional- that university lecturers are having to give remedial spelling lessons to the latest undergraduate intake.
No one ever seems to question how it is possible that the same the people, who in June wrote the best exam papers the country has ever seen, are, by October, barely literate.
This paradox has intrigued me for several years now. Every academic I come across I ask to explain it to me. Many, like my friend the recently retired, eminent art historian, explain it in terms of ‘grade inflation’ which has been going on unaddressed for years such and that the absurdities that must arise from not attending to it are now manifest for all to see. Another friend of mine, a highly respected professor of astrophysics, has a different view. “The best,” he says, “are as good as they have ever been. The rest are hopeless.”
This is a much more fascinating take. On one level is it is a comment on the obvious outcome of the contemptible, but largely unchallenged Blairite belief that being seen to be educating people is the same as educating them. On other levels it raises a whole host of questions, not the least of which is why are educating people anyway. On the level of the individual it is a stupid question (but not an unconentious one as we shall explore another time) but, at population level it really isn’t. Let us consider Dr Malthus.
For example in an industrial world of gradually increasing productivity it takes fewer people to achieve the same amount of work. This is fine when the population is increasing at a rate that creates demand for more people to do these tasks for the increased population - food manufacture for example. It is not fine in a technological world of huge productivity increases whereby one electronic innovation can supply the several and various needs of everyone. One is faced with the possibility that there are just more people than there are tasks to do. Let’s not call this unemployment, which a term used to describe generally short term imbalances in the supply and demand for labour. This is materially different.
In the 1990’s I had a spectacularly unsuccessful dotcom business with a friend. One year we were offered a marketing undergraduate from the University of North London as summer placement. We gave her a project and the poor girl sat quietly behind her PC for three days before we realised that she had done nothing whatever. She had not understood the brief and was not capable of understanding the brief. She was totally out of her depth and terrified that we would realise. How she thought that a complete lack of output was not a bit of a clue I do not know.
The sad fact was that she was not undergraduate material, but, under a university funding system that rewarded numbers, it had suited someone to tell her she was. I have nothing but contempt for the low life admissions tutor employed by the third rate excuse for an educational establishment that is the University of North London. They were playing with the girl’s whole life for nothing more than their own short term funding convenience. It makes me angry still to think about it. In fact at the time it made me so angry that I wrote to the Guardian’s education correspondent to vent my fury. Melanie Phillips, for it was, she wrote back to sympathise. That was, of course, in the days before she became the swivel-eyed loony’s swivel-eyed loony.
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