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We Don't Need No Education
Two vignettes from different ends of the British education system. In the first, two lecturers in London's Kingston University are recorded urging students to game the government's ranking system by inflating the ratings they award their college.
In the second, Cambridge University has dropped its foreign language requirement in order to make it easier for state school applicants to find places in its colleges.
First, Cambridge, regularly rated as Europe's finest university, but dogged by claims that its entrance system favours the products of Britain's public (ie, private) schools. New Labour fires regular veiled and not-so-veiled warnings to Cambridge (and Oxford) to up their intake of state school pupils: The colleges protest that their intake reflects applications.
Cambridge has always demanded that applicants from all disciplines have studied at least one foreign language to age 16 (GCSE level). This requirement, its supporters claim, indicates a certain level of open-mindedness, roundedness and intellectual curiosity in applicants, even if they hope to study subjects where language skills are rarely necessary.
The trouble is, most state schools dropped the requirement to study a language until the age of 16 because students found it too difficult. The poor dears refused to do what every other student across Europe - and pretty much every nation in the world - do, and apply themselves to learning a language. Rather than say, "Tough: Get your heads down and study", British schools responded by dropping the requirement.
The ancient universities might have responded by saying, "Very well: We'll continue to take those 50 percent of state school applicants who demonstrate their brains by studying a difficult subject - bugger those who can't be bothered." But no: Under government pressure, Cambridge has relented and from next year, a grade in foreign language will no longer be a requirement for entrance.
This is modern Britain all over: State schools, wary of government tables, stop teaching subjects students are too lazy to study - and then expect that the laws be bent to accommodate them.
Your correspondent vividly remembers his (state) school teachers warning him and his fellow pupils that if they failed to learn foreign languages (French, German and Spanish were fashionable at the time), they'd be doomed. While English is more dominant than ever, students with ambition can learn all the above, as well as Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese - the current languages deemed necessary to secure a career.
At a slightly less rarified level, the government's ranking system for universities was thrown into comic relief with the release of an audio recording which featured two lecturers telling students to exaggerate the scores they awarded their college - otherwise their degrees would be "shit."
The Times reports that the two psychology lecturers told students that when government inspectors contacted them for their thoughts on their education in order to compile the National Student Survey of universities, they should bump up the grades. Kingston would fall in the rankings otherwise, and employers could become convinced that their degrees were worthless.
"Everyone else is doing it", the lecturers said, a claim backed up by the newspaper, which says,
"The recording came to light weeks after a top educationalist criticised the “widespread” manipulation of the survey by universities. In a letter to Times Higher Education in March, Professor Lee Harvey said that the NSS, which asks final-year students 22 questions about their college experience, was a “hopelessly inadequate improvement tool”. Examples of institutions encouraging students to provide good NSS ratings were rife, he added."
