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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Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 04:22 am (UTC)We did units on mythology, weird science, Latin, dinosuars, library science (interesting as I went to work for a library six months later), and pretty much anything else we found interesting. We went to the library all the time, and got to read whatever we wanted. America's dismal education system is part of the reason so many families are using homeschooling now.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 04:43 am (UTC)High school, overall, wasn't that bad. It was actually a huge self-esteem boost to me, having more people around, and not being stuck in the same hole for another 4 years. But homeschool definitely has benefits, if you can swing it.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 11:34 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 05:17 pm (UTC)It wasn't the greatest art class (no photography, no design, only minor bits of art history, and I admit I was chaffing at it the last year or so I started getting into web design) but at least it was something.