Walk or web?

It is possibly slightly shameful that, when I dropped my laptop onto my bare right foot yesterday morning before work, I was more concerned about whether or not I’d broken my computer than whether or not I would be able to walk without crutches. The pain was excruciating but my priorities lay elsewhere. A brief incident, admittedly, but a frank symbol of my continued internet slavishness.

News just online is that 49% of secondary schools in the UK are rated ‘satisfactory’ or below, with ‘satisfactory’ roughly equal to ‘not good enough’. This raises several hundred questions but the one rattling loudest around my almost-empty skull involves the concept of ‘good’ when it comes to schooling. I have no doubt that my (expensive) education would have fallen into the ‘excellent’ category. In the year that I took my A Levels, we were top of the small schools league table, with something like 98% A-C grades. In addition to the academic sphere, we had excellent drama and music facilities, relatively pleasant surroundings, myriad opportunities and I made several friendships there that may last a lifetime.

But in conversations over the past few years with some schoolmates, we have admitted that our education was not all it was cracked up to be. Yes – most of us left at 18 with top grades and flew into excellent universities. Like racehorses, we had been trained how to pass exams but, when released into the wild, had about as many survival skills as Red Rum in the New Forest. Our general knowledge sucked big time – mine is still a source of almost daily embarrassment. It was only when I took my MA in 05/06 that I learned anything about major political and ideological concepts. Our geography is, almost without exception, appalling. Our historical knowledge concentrated on particular periods defined by the exam syllabi – outside the Second World War and the Trades Union Act I had huge swathes of murky half-knowledge that, over a decade later, is only just starting to brighten. Politically, we had no clue, although it’s possible to argue that we weren’t missing much.

My point, and I’m fully aware that it’s not a new one, is that good grades do not equal a good education. I fear that we suffered because we were girls – because, both at school and at home with our families, we were not expected to have opinions and knowledge in the same way that boys were. This may be massively over-simplistic, but I’m not alone in having these suspicions. Exams should remain a part of education, of course: I’m fully up for the International Baccalaureate which pushes six or seven subjects at 18 rather than three or four – this would help provide a bit more breadth to young adults. But there’s a lot more to life than exams – and until the league tables take other things into account other than grades, the system of judging education will be unhelpful and ultimately negative, breeding more generations of miserable failures versus swots who’ve cribbed exam essay titles to regurgitate at speed – but who couldn’t name the leaders of the three major political parties, or tell you whether Elizabeth I was alive at the same time as Shakespeare without watching a Tom Stoppard film. Which is how I worked it out.