The 11 plus, and a small education rant
Feb. 3rd, 2004 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlThe BBC were running a mock-up 11-plus (standardised government test, taken at 10 or 11. The top 25% of pupils get entry into grammar school), to see would the population at large pass it. One of the questions:
What is the odd one out:
1. Dog
2. Cat
3. Television
The answer is 'Cat, because both the others need a licence.'
Really. Putting trick questions on exams is mean, don't they realise this? And it is a trick, because 'needing a licence' is an artificial distinction. the natural distinction is between living (dog and cat) and inanimate (television). I passed my eleven plus, and that was a decade ago or so. I knew a lot less stuff then. I'll bet that they just made up mickey mouse questions so that they could support abolition of the test.
I am, actually, in favour of academic selection, although ideally the seection would be between 'those who want to learn' and 'those who are only here because it's illegal not to be'. Nothing is more frustrating for an intellectual gifted child than the democratically applied education, where the whole class is held back to the lowest common factor. My classmates were still stuggling with long division while I was at an age capable of trigonometry and differential calculus (thirteen, incidentally). And conversely, it must have been humiliating for people who struggled and swotted to do stuff that I achieved with the minimum effort. There is no way that you can teach a diverse collection of children the same material at the same age without bringing the class to the standard of its lowest member.
I think that there should be more choice. Teach everyone to be literate and numerate, but by twelve or so, it's going to be obvious who's suited for academia and who isn't. What's the point of torturing fourteen-year-olds with Latin and Shakespeare when they're intending to be electricians? Why must all pupils do sports, even when they have the hand-eye coordination of your average zombie? (Exercise is all very well, but there's nothing worse for the purpose than organised sport if you're utterly useless at it. The opportunities for misery and humiliation are endless. And if there are six different sports on offer, then for pity's sake, let the child play the one it's reasonable at, instead of forcing it to suffer through all six!)
What, tell me, is the point of forcing tone-deaf kids to play the recorder up till the age of fourteen? What is the point of Eng Lit? Forbidding the books probably would be more effective than forcing children to write essays on them. (My experience was that being forced into precocious literary criticism killed all possibility of enjoying the actual book. I might have liked Macbeth had I met it outside a classroom, and my GCSE English Lit put me off Jane Eyre for years. The books I enjoyed most were the set texts of older pupils which I had cough borrowed cough from the store--I always did put them back, though--and read when I was meant to be doing something else.)
What is the odd one out:
1. Dog
2. Cat
3. Television
The answer is 'Cat, because both the others need a licence.'
Really. Putting trick questions on exams is mean, don't they realise this? And it is a trick, because 'needing a licence' is an artificial distinction. the natural distinction is between living (dog and cat) and inanimate (television). I passed my eleven plus, and that was a decade ago or so. I knew a lot less stuff then. I'll bet that they just made up mickey mouse questions so that they could support abolition of the test.
I am, actually, in favour of academic selection, although ideally the seection would be between 'those who want to learn' and 'those who are only here because it's illegal not to be'. Nothing is more frustrating for an intellectual gifted child than the democratically applied education, where the whole class is held back to the lowest common factor. My classmates were still stuggling with long division while I was at an age capable of trigonometry and differential calculus (thirteen, incidentally). And conversely, it must have been humiliating for people who struggled and swotted to do stuff that I achieved with the minimum effort. There is no way that you can teach a diverse collection of children the same material at the same age without bringing the class to the standard of its lowest member.
I think that there should be more choice. Teach everyone to be literate and numerate, but by twelve or so, it's going to be obvious who's suited for academia and who isn't. What's the point of torturing fourteen-year-olds with Latin and Shakespeare when they're intending to be electricians? Why must all pupils do sports, even when they have the hand-eye coordination of your average zombie? (Exercise is all very well, but there's nothing worse for the purpose than organised sport if you're utterly useless at it. The opportunities for misery and humiliation are endless. And if there are six different sports on offer, then for pity's sake, let the child play the one it's reasonable at, instead of forcing it to suffer through all six!)
What, tell me, is the point of forcing tone-deaf kids to play the recorder up till the age of fourteen? What is the point of Eng Lit? Forbidding the books probably would be more effective than forcing children to write essays on them. (My experience was that being forced into precocious literary criticism killed all possibility of enjoying the actual book. I might have liked Macbeth had I met it outside a classroom, and my GCSE English Lit put me off Jane Eyre for years. The books I enjoyed most were the set texts of older pupils which I had cough borrowed cough from the store--I always did put them back, though--and read when I was meant to be doing something else.)
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 07:22 pm (UTC)I mean, it didn't deal with slow maturers, it certainly didn't work fairly as between the sexes (there were approximately the same number of places at the girls' grammar as at the boys, but, before correction, "sex-blind" grading of 11 plus papers put 2/3rds more girls over the "baseline" pass rate, so in fact in order to make the numbers work you had to score higher as a girl than as a boy to make the cut; this was because of relative maturing and the selection of 11 as the age).
And actually, I do know a number of electricians who attend Shakespeare plays for fun, you know. And what people want to do at 14 is very frequently not what they end up doing.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 07:47 pm (UTC)As for Shakespeare, I don't think Eng Lit makes anyone want to attend Shakespeare plays. It puts it all into category 'school, therefore crappy' instead of 'fun, because I like it'. I mean, was there any point in my suffering music classes when I'd much rather have been doing maths?
Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 07:53 pm (UTC)Music I do have some sympathy about, though. My most prized school report came from my music teacher and read simply, "Her attitude borders on the contemptuous". My second favourite was the slightly kinder games report who said, in an effort to be charitable, "She has made progress on a trampoline "[to which I mentally added, "She was last spotted bouncing through Birkenhead and on her way to Wales"]
Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 11:30 am (UTC)Don't think I'm a scientically trained boor who thinks fiction is a waste of paper. ;-) I read constantly as a child, I even read books of criticism for pleasure as a teenager, and
I like analysis. But for some reason I had an allergy to Eng Lit. The class killed all those pleasures because it forced them. I found some of my GSCE essays in the attic recently, and for an intelligent, widely read 15-year-old, they really are dire. (Macbeth is ambictious. You can see this by the way he wants to kill Duncan so he can be king. [Original spelling preserved, but fortunatly there's no way I can reproduce the handwriting.])