Who thinks the UK's educational system is delibaretly teaching stutends to a low level?

Question

Is it beacuse less people are wanted to be working as politicians?

What I mean is that I used to live in Bulgaria and in the English Year 8 is like Year 5 in Bulgaria. What do you think?

Answer 1

I do especially in spelling

Answer 2

There is a definent problem with our educational system, but not by some conspiracy. Society has not placed a great enough emphasis on education, parents and community appear not to care about quality of education, many quality teachers are leaving the profession, and there is too much inane politics involved at every level of education administration. The in past year, I has read newspaper articles of several administrators and teachers having their jobs threatened, not because of low academic performance but because of issues dealing with school athletics. Where is the priority of the parents and school boards towards the school systems? This is in a state that averages less than 17% voter turnout in school board elections; I researched this in graduate school last semester. Teachers and their unions have railed against "No Child Left Behind", complaining about the unfunded mandates it incurs. However, the law only costs schools when they lose federal funding by not achieving quality test scores. The same state teacher union that vocally opposed the law has had no problem with unfunded mandates from the state athletic association. The athletic association has made several mandates to schools requiring additional coaches and higher certifications for all coaches; this means the school has to hire more coaches and give teaching positions to coaches over more qualified teachers. The athletic association's guidelines for coaching requirements include 9 college credits in athletic/PE classes; the state requirement to teach social studies (where school place the coaches) is 6 credits in the field. Most college freshman have 6 credits of social science after one year! If schools have more coaches and fewer quality teachers, the education of the students often suffer. Administrations do not want to look bad, so they lower standards to keep the graduation rates up. Then you have students entering college totally unprepared. I witnessed this first hand as a graduate assistant: nearly half of the freshmen class had a failing grade. Most students could not take a test that was not multiple choice, few knew how to take notes in class, and less than dozen knew how to study for tests. They were real good at looking things up on wikipedia, but not much less. BTW. Chemicals are added to water to treat it. Like chlorine is added to water in a swimming pool, fluoride and bromide are used to treat drinking water. The Navy uses bromide resin cartridges to treat potable water distilled from sea water. If the water is not treated, bacteria and other organisms in the water will survive. Don't drink fluoride treated water and see how often you have to go the bathroom.

Answer 3

Erm, if you are going to ask a probing question like that, spellcheck it first! Otherwise you'll sound a little hypocritical.

Actually, when you compare us to similar (socio-economically) countries, we fare quite well. The newspapers love attacking education as it is the one sector people have all been through and have emotive responses to. Being through school, however, does not make one an expert; first, because memories are never 100% truthful, but blurred by time. Second; in the same way that having an operation doesn't make you a doctor, being on the recieving end of schooling doesn't give you a PHD in educational theory.

Newspapers can represent teachers as angels or demons easily (as we all remember them) thus making for high sales and votes for the politicians they support. Interestingly, the Daily Mail (one of education's greatest critics) requires a reading age of 10 to understand and usually contains 10-30 spelling errors per issue. So much for their high horse!

Answer 4

They don't teach to a lower level, but the system is very flawed. It caters particularly to a very limited number of learning styles. In spite of the fact that every teacher is taught all about different learning styles and how people respond in different ways, the system just does not allow for individuality. Consequently, our education system fails all those people who do not learn in the way currently in use.

Answer 5

I disagree. I live in Swaziland and at my school we use the British system of learning and we do British exams and the exams are extremely difficult and are at a much higher level than the American system (I know this because some schools here do the American system and fail to write the British exams)

Answer 6

Not at all, I did my O and A levels 30 years ago and seeing the effort my daughter has to put in on her A levels puts my efforts to shame, all I had to do was turn up for an exam

Answer 7

Are you being ironic?

Honestly, I think that teaching at a low level is a by-product of trying to be cost effective and inclusion. It is politically incorrect to say that some pupils are more able than others, and as such, everyone suffers.

Answer 8

not at all. my daughter is in year six and her teachers are expecting her to get level 5 a's in her Sat's this year. because she has the ability they have said they want to push her more so she doesn't waste it. i also think it makes the school look good the higher the grades the students get.

Answer 9

I have to say that it failed some when it came to spelling. Didn`t it?

Answer 10

in your case they would have a good argument...