How to be a Student: Part Two

Some private-school teachers, even some head teachers of private schools, are heard to describe their pupils as 'students'. The nomenclature is universal in comprehensive schools.
If this was just a sop to awkward teenagers, to boost their egos and attract their attention, it would simply be inappropriate.
If it were imposed by the grauniadistas as a politically correct description, the conformity of the teaching profession with it would simply be pathetic.
But it is much more serious than that; it is much more detrimental to the state of the nation and a disaster for the economy.
It is an unambiguous and transparent declaration by the comprehensive schools' classroom staff that they long ago ceased to do the job for which the public believes it is paying them. Those staff accept being descibed as teachers, and they are paid as teachers: but the great majority do not perceive their duty to be to teach. They purport to facilitate the self-learning process of their 'students'. But those 'students' do not have the anatomic maturity of brain, the worldly understanding or the range of knowledge that is necessary to devise their own learning programme or process. 'Experiential learning' that is unstructured and unguided produces only ignorance and anarchy: so [against the protests of the 'teaching profession']the schools are required to coax a cohort of their charges to meet the minimalist requirements of a National Curriculum and to enable a sufficient proportion to reach the final stage of in-school examinations with a result that is considered satisfactory for university entrance.
Schools that lie within affluent residential areas are blessed with parents who have a concern for the quality of their childrens' education, who ensure that the home assists in their education, and thus enable those schools to attract staff who will teach for at least a portion of each working day in a realistically disciplined environment. These schools send disproportionately high percentages of their output into higher education and real craft apprenticeships as compared with what are openly recognised as 'bog standard' schools; but most of them abjectly fail to develop the least-able and least-socialised of their entrants.
Some schools prepare no-one for university entrance for years until their 'failure' is recognised and they are 'put in special measures' or disbanded. Other 'sink schools' in socially mixed areas are able to combine with exceptionally committed families to enable a few candidates annually to achieve acceptable terminal results. This is done at the expense of allowing a very significant group of children - in some cases, a majority - to end their school careers functionally illiterate and innumerate, undisciplined and unattuned to adult society, sociable conduct or employment.
Where everything seems to have gone wrong, it is extremely difficult to see where to begin to put it right, but the longest journey begins with the first step. The first step for the schools system is simple: teachers must call their charges 'pupils' and seriously review their work in the plain meaning of those terms. 

How to become a student

One of today's 'shock headlines' in the UK is a report on university admissions that shows that several universities have failed to meet targets for 'fair access'.  'Fairness' in this sense means 'making places available for students with inferior results in the qualifying examinations whose relatively poor scores can be attributed to the inferior quality of the schools that they have attended'. The quota system means that students who gain satisfactory results at good schools could be disadvantaged to the extent that they do not get into their preferred universities.

The problem is principally ascribable to the fact that Britain has three parallel schools systems. One group is schools where the great majority of pupils have the cost of their education paid by their families [though almost all such schools have some scholarships for a few children from less-affluent homes]: in most such schools teaching methods are traditional, discipline is firm and there are ample resources for science and sport and out-of-class activities: many such schools are residential so that they offer a total educational environment.

Second there are a few districts where the local authority provides different sorts of schools: traditional grammar schools which are day schools with most of the attributes of private schools; a few technical schools; and 'secondary modern' schools with a less-demanding curriculum. Selection between the three school types is made at a set age - often eleven years - usually by examination.

Third are comprehensive schools, providing the only education that is available for the overwhelming majority of children over eleven years. While some of these have excellent standards of teaching and discipline, the majority do not. An establishment of politically-correct writers, university Education professors and head teachers has wantonly ignored [or actively denigrated] the example of private and grammar schools. In most comprehensives lax discipline is commonplace and this ensures that disruptive and arrogant children can deny their colleagues any serious educational opportunity. 'Hard' subjects - notably mathematics, serious science, modern and classical languages - are largely ignored in favour of simplified generalised 'science' and 'vocational' subjects like journalism, film, elementary psychology and book-keeping.

Good universities concentrate on 'hard' subjects that are likely to benefit the economy most, as well as giving their graduates the best employment opportunities. It is a simple coincidence that entrants from private and grammar schools are prepared to undertaken 'hard' courses, while most comprehensive school leavers are not qualified to embark upon them without special extra coaching within the university; which is an extra cost of their attempts at 'fair access'. The best - and most popular - universities make very serious efforts to achieve 'fair access' targets, even at the cost of diverting resources from developing the best students to remedial work for the 'disadvantaged'. Every move for greater 'fairness' has a tendency to remove resources from the education of the best-prepared students, regardless of their access route to university: and this conspires to reduce standards and thus the future quality of the national skills base and thereby disadvantage the economy.

Almost everybody in the university system agrees that remedial work is needed in the ethos and standards of comprehensive schools: but that issue is put by politicians and self-styled educationalists into the 'too-difficult' tray; so the chosen 'solution' to a real national problem of educational opportunity is to reduce the quality of the best universities and thereby further reduce the future competitiveness of the country.