Examination system fails the test of the times by R.F. Mackenzie

Free hand that let the rot set in - A reply by George K. McMillan

John Aitkenhead, Kilquhanity House, replies to George McMillan

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The Scotsman Friday, April 22, 1983
Examination system fails the test of the times
written by R.F. Mackenzie

Last week the Government announced a major reform of the Scottish examination system, which they hope will make secondary education relevant for all pupils. R.F. Mackenzie, former rector of Summerhill Academy, argues that all external examinations are the bane of a good education and a healthy society.

There are all the signs of a build-up to a crisis in education, the like of which Scotland has not encountered in the four centuries since John Knox staked out a claim for the education of the majority. The Oxford dictionary says that a crisis is a turning point, especially of a disease, a moment of danger or suspense. Dr Wyld's dictionary goes further. It says that a crisis is the decisive moment in affairs, life, fate politics.

In 1970, eminent American educationalists published a book entitled Crisis in the Classroom. It was the findings of a study by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and thoroughly condemned American school education. Subjects were not related to life. Teachers didn't ask why this or that was included in the curriculum. It was 'mindless'. A few years later Professor Lortie of Chicago, in a study called School-teacher, said that the US had ignored this attack (and other attacks) on its schools and carried on as if everybody was happy. 'The Academic community is traumatised and in a state of turmoil', says the 1982 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it is the function of administrators to play down the questions that people are putting to them.

Programmes for reform in Scotland and England have fared no better. The Advisory Council's report on secondary education (1974), written by Sir James Robertson, then rector of the Aberdeen Grammar School, said:

'The influence of examinations is three-fold. It affects the treatment of the examinable subjects themselves tending always to exalt the written above the spoken, to magnify memory and mastery of fact at the expense of understanding and liveliness of mind. It depresses the status of the non-examinable, so that the aesthetic and creative side of education, with all its possibilities for human satisfaction and cultural enrichment, remains largely undeveloped and poorly esteemed. And lastly, the examination, which began as a means, becomes for many the end itself. In the atmosphere created by this preoccupation with examination success, it is difficult to think nobly of education, to see in it the endless quest of man's preparation for either society or solitude. The cult of man's preparation for either society or solitude. The cult of the examination has proved all too congenial to the hard practicality of the Scot, and, in excessive concern about livelihood, the art of living has tended to be forgotten'.

These ringing sentences were echoed ten years later by A.D.C. Peterson in a Liberal Party publication, Liberal Education for all. He said that public examination requirements dominated curricula. 'Those who doubt this might care to look at the examination syllabuses and papers for the old school and higher examinations certificate of 50 years ago'. He asked, has 'any other feature in our social life … changed less in 50 years?'

London and Edinburgh have ignored Peterson's and Robertson's reports as much as Washington ignored Crisis in the classroom. 'It would be an exaggeration to talk of a crisis', said the chairman of the Scottish Examinations Board in a recent Scotsman article.

To a greater extent than most politicians realise, the crisis in education is intimately related to the crisis in society, and aggravates it. This article is written to indicate the closeness of the relationship and the extent to which the healing of society's ills depends on the abolition of the external examinations.

One reason for the failure of the French, American and Russian revolutions to achieve their political purposes was that they shunted school education into the side-lines. Like the study of motor mechanics or Greek vases, the work that went on in the classrooms was subsidiary, an issue of minor import, it didn't really count in the great world of political decision-making. Schools didn't matter all that much because the ideas of the majority of the people didn't matter all that much.

In, France, the U.S. and Russia, the dominant few wanted to maintain decision-making in their own hands without too much reference to the majority. Thus, what aimed to be major political changes resulted only in the replacement of one controlling minority by another. A new minority took over the seats and privileges of power. Cynically the French said; 'The more it changes, the more it remains the same thing.' France slid into the hands of Napoleon III, George Washington gave Tom Paine the brush-off and resumed at Mount Vernon the style of an English country gentleman; Lunacharsky's Ministry of Enlightenment was darkened by the clouds of Stalinism. The promise of Labour was similarly unfulfilled. On Christmas 1925 or thereabouts, the Reverend James Barr, a Glasgow MP declared in the North Kirk of Aberdeen; 'A new star has risen in the sky, the British Labour Party.' But that star, too, lost its brightness. A Labour elite appropriately maintained an elitist system of education. Harold Wilson told the middle-class voters, reassuringly, that the comprehensive school wouldn't be different from the English grammar school; and it isn't. They are dominated by the same examinations.

As in Britain, schoolroom work in France and the U.S. and Russia is examination based. The examinations come first. Most other things are sacrificed to gaining the certificates. When I first went to Aberdeen, the education committee told me that they were disappointed that Summerhill was taking so little advantage of the ski-slope they had built beside the Dee. I asked for volunteers to learn. Sixty pupils put down their names. But in the following week, 45 withdrew their names. Since they would be absent the same half-forenoon every week, teachers said they would be risking their O-grades or Higher chances, and parents said they couldn't take that risk for the sake of ski-ing. The 15 who remained were those who weren't aiming at the exams and were therefore expendable.

But the liabilities of the examination system go deeper than that. Teachers are under Cpressure to gain results, and pupils memorise the acceptable, mark-earning answers in history, literature and even in science where the pressure sometimes leaves insufficient time to do the experiments, because experiments can be crude and inconclusive and time-consuming. Dictated answers are neat and convincing and economical of time, more efficient. Some pupils are told: 'Repeat the experiment until you get the right answer.' Schools shouldn't be places for giving the right, acceptable answers, centres of indoctrination in conformity. They should be centres of inquiry, encouraging pupils to ask questions, giving them practice and skill and confidence in articulating their dreams and hopes and doubts.

Moreover, the examination pressure obscures meaning. Much of what is said in classrooms is not understood. The temptation for the examination seeking school is to 'cover the ground' and get results. But real understanding is the product of a slow metabolism which transmutes the raw material of knowledge into nourishment for the spirit. A child wonders and hesitates and dreams, and then one day comprehends. That's what culture means. To short-circuit experience, the teacher and text-book use abstract terms which for the pupils are boring and meaningless because these pupils haven't had enough experience of life to identify the myriad concrete details that adults lump together under on generalisation.

One result is that educationists get into the way of under-estimating the intelligence of the majority of pupils. 'He hasn't the capacity for abstract thought,' is a common dismissive phrase. Dr Margaret Donaldson in her book, Children's Minds, says its not so much that the children give the wrong answers; the trouble is that educationalists haven't learned to frame their questions clearly enough. She challenges one of the major assumptions of our society. 'The issue is whether we must accept it as inevitable that only a small minority of people can ever develop intellectually to a high level of competence. I believe that we do not have to accept this.' I have never heard a revolutionary idea so quietly expressed. It is revolutionary because it queries the basis of school education and implies the possibility of a society in whose government the majority can participate actively and intelligently.

There are signs that more people are escaping from the inhibiting effect of their education and asking questions that the school smothered. I went through my schooldays under the impression that my queries and inability to agree with the teacher or sometimes to comprehend what he was saying were invalid. I should adjust my thoughts and feelings to fit the norms, which, he led us to believe, were those of all right-thinking, sensible, normal people.

Questions of all kinds are surfacing in many countries, eroding the basics for what looks like a sure-founded consensus. How come that millions of children starve while Scottish students get holiday jobs in France gathering, weighing and burying in the earth tons of apples and tomatoes? If we can go to the moon, why should we regard famine as an act of God that it is beyond our power to cope with? 'DIY' has a wider applicability than kitchen furniture.

It is as if the majority were becoming intellectually awake and stumbling into crude, bewildered questions leading to the wild surmise that we could achieve more if we set ourselves to it and that the few who have hitherto guided us are less with it than our parents and schools brought us up to believe. Our Scottish history is the story of experiments in trust. We put our trust in the king and the nobles to see us through. Then we transferred our trust to the Covenanting Kirk and its ministers. Then we re-allocated it to Parliament, hoping that what ministers of religion had failed to do, Cabinet Ministers could accomplish. When we discovered that the assumption of Cabinet Ministers that they were uniquely capable of directing the lives of the majority was as unwarranted as the divine right of kings, we began to realise that we have only ourselves to fall back on, to disentangle ourselves from the crisis in which the dominant few have landed us. As Margaret Donaldson said, the majority can develop to a high degree of competence. And therefore a new onus is put on the school. The success of democracy depends on whether the school can prepare us adequately to take over our heritage.

All the disparate questions which this surge of uneasiness is raising in us converge into a fundamental inquiry. Since we have become dubious of the pronouncements of all authorities, including those of the venerable philosophers, we have to confront alone the question, 'Are we quite sure that we are spending our brief time between two eternities to the best advantage?' And that question in turn raises a graver charge against the examination system.

Speaking at an EIS conference at Galashiels in 1884, the chairman of the Glasgow School Board said; 'This is the age of examinations.' At an Aberdeenshire primary school I was ordered to use my left arm to cover my examination script, so that my neighbour shouldn't 'copy'. You could be belted for helping your neighbour. Co-operation was out. But the spirit of co-operation persists among Scottish children. They like helping their neighbours. I think the life-support of co-operation is beginning to attract us again. French Foreign Minister Cheysson, interviewed on BBC-2 recently, said: 'We are in one of these times in history when there are changes of gear.' It was a good metaphor because, under the impetus of the competitive race, our engines are labouring, and we should change down from a fiercely competitive to a more leisurely co-operative tempo.

The possibility that there is something wrong in basing almost the whole of secondary education on external examinations is not one that commands itself to the educational administrators. When the exams are seen not to work, they react by devising a still more convoluted system of exams, new certificates, one of them at foundation, general and credit levels and the other made up of modules. And similarly when corporal punishment is abolished, they concentrate on other punishments. The possibility doesn't occur to them that it's the requirement to drill dull information into unwilling heads that forces teachers to use punishment and distorts education. The abolition of the examinations would reduce the need to make schools punitive institutions.

Like any other monopoly, the examination industry advertises its product to present it in the best light, entertains the Press and defends its own interests (its employees, its control over the secondary school), and it will maintain that education will disintegrate if loosened from these ties. Supporting the exams is the textbook industry which benefits largely, both at home and in the Third World, from the assured sale of large numbers of uniform textbooks based on recurring examination questions.

There are, of course, arguments in defense of the present system. The universities will ask how else they are to select their students. Many of the major decisions of life depend on a balance of advantage, and in this balance the examinations have been weighed and found wanting. They inhibit change in our institutions. Westminster is too set in its ways, too defensive of its usage's. That's because its members were brought up in schools which perpetuated a log-jam of ideas. I know of no single measure that would do more to release the flow of initiative in our society than the unblocking of ideas in the school, the abolition of the external examinations.

R.. Mackenzie - The Scotsman Friday, April 22, 1983

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The Scotsman – Tuesday May 10^th 1983
Education Forum

Free hand 'that let the rot set in'

George K. McMillan, assistant rector-in-charge, Perth Academy, replies to the article by R.F. Mackenzie on examinations, which appeared in The Scotsman last month.

WHERE, O WHERE has the hard-headed Scotsman of legend and story gone? Back in the dear, dead days apparently beyond recall. I can, clearly remember being surrounded by elders whom I could respect and trust – men of integrity and commonsense, with both feet firmly planted on the ground and a no-nonsense, down-to-earth – and generally successful – approach to all problems, even monster crises such as the Second World War.

Where have they all gone? Meanwhile, Mr R.F. Mackenzie and too many like him are all that Scotland – and Britain – is left with to call the tune and to influence – for the worse – the ideas of our youth and the shaky policies of our leaders.

R.F. has been chuntering on for years about the evil effects of the traditional Scottish education system with its insistence on the 3 R's and a rigid examination process. He still continues to blame all our educational and social ills on the bad old ways.

One would have thought that even the blinkered R.F. and, perhaps, even his more muddle headed imitators would have realised by now that what is wrong with Scottish education and our present-day society is not that we are still sticking rigidly to a system which worked admirably in the years before 1939. it is the too-radical changes of the wrong kind which have done the damage.

The rot started when the reformers were allowed too free a hand in the immediate post-war years. They were given so much rope in 1945 that they have well-nigh garrotted the once very much alive and kicking, very much admired education and social system which we were proud to call Scottish.

Of course, there were faults. Neither our schools nor our society were perfect, but it was utter insanity to take the whole system apart and undermine it so drastically that it is now in a state of collapse.

We did not have hordes of delinquent teenagers in 1939. Our prisons were not filled to overflowing. Serious indiscipline in our schools was unheard of. Teachers could teach and children could learn in an orderly, civilised, friendly atmosphere. The picture painted by Mr Mackenzie and the spokesman of STOPP bears no resemblance whatsoever to the schools in Dundee, Kincardineshire and Perthshire where my very happy schooldays were spent.

There was a perfectly sensible organisation of schools and classes so that the high-flyers could be taught at a speed and to a degree in keeping with their intellect and enthusiasm. Junior secondary schools were not dumping grounds for the dunces and no-hopers. Pupils attending junior secondaries had the opportunity to study a wide range of subjects including business studies and a foreign language, to gain local authority leaving certificates which were valued highly by local employers and to go on from there to higher and further education either at the academies or at the technical or commercial colleges.

Mr Mackenzie must have lived in a very different country from the one I experienced as a boy. I attended a Dundee primary school and secondary school where I rarely saw the belt used and I can remember the few times I deserved it and got it. There were subjects I liked better than others, but I rarely found lessons a bore. My parents both came through the state system in Aberdeen and Dundee. Both had fond memories of school and the many fine teachers they had. Both also had a far sounder grasp of the basics of English language and the practical application or arithmetic than even the most intelligent products of the present primary school system.

What on earth happened to R.F. that he has this enormous chip on his shoulder about traditional education?

Learning can be an exciting voyage of discovery, but there are – as in all voyages – long periods of routine and – dare I say it? – drudgery which must be suffered so that the exciting goals can be reached. By all means inspire the budding violinist by letting him hear what can be achieved by a Menuhin or a Kreisler, but you must also make it clear that that perfection cannot be achieved without hour upon hour, day after day, month after month of constant grinding practice.

So it is with normal school education. There is no use trying to pretend to children that learning to acquire complicated skills can be achieved in an amateurish, dilettantish fashion. The teacher must inspire, but he must also instruct and eventually compel to work.

And what about the employer? What about the general public's right to know that the products of the education system are competent in the skills they are supposed to have acquired?

To follow R.F.'s arguments to their logical conclusion, there should be no examinations, no certificates at all. So we should turn out doctors and dentists who have not been put through the stiffest tests possible to ensure they will not maim their patients for life? What utter rubbish!

R.F. and the tribe of educational and social reformers who have mushroomed on the long suffering body of Scottish education and society in the past 40 years can be likened to a fungus disease which has been allowed to take hold on a perfectly healthy tree. The tree is now very definitely ailing and in grave danger of rotting away altogether. There is still some life left, but it won't last much longer. Meanwhile, instead of dealing with the disease by cutting away the offending growths, our misguided keepers of the educational and social garden are hacking away lustily at the roots of the tree itself.

As our situation worsens, social, educational and economic, our so-called experts put the blame for all our woes on the very people and the very system that alone could save our country from disaster.

Mr Mackenzie is an intelligent and a fair man. How is it that he cannot recognise the pure gold that was the Scottish education system of the past, the strong spiritual values of the Scottish people of 50 years ago and the solid down-to-earth, commonsense approach to life which I once regarded as a heritage we could never lose.

I just fail to understand how this present crisis could have occurred. How could we have allowed our nation to be taken over by a bunch of misguided reformers and pseudo-humanist free-thinkers and disbelievers who have brought us to the brink of disaster, if not over the cliff altogether.

If there is anything worth while left in our education system and in our society, it is no thanks to our educational mentors, to our inspectors and advisers, our central committees and Government departments. What still remains of value is what the experienced classroom teacher and traditional-style bobby, social worker, minister and magistrate have managed to salvage and hold together in spite of all the myriad changes imposed on school and society by the army of do-gooders who are slowly squeezing the life out of a once proud, hard-working, inspired and cultured race.

I keep hoping for the swing of the pendulum. Mrs Thatcher held out hope that at least some section of our society still had some sense left. But it needs more than just pussyfooting around with a little assertion of authority here, a little return to commonsense there.

Children attend school not just to be amused or even inspired, but to be taught and trained in the arts of living in a civilised society. Their minds must be opened to the joys of wonder and discovery, but they must also learn to cope with life outside, to respect the rights of others and to live easily and comfortably within certain prescribed limits. Why should it be difficult for children to learn to keep their hands off other people's property and to try to keep their environment beautiful? Harsh training is not necessary to ensure that they can be trusted not to do damage or to steal when left to their own devices. Firm but fair discipline was the old way and it worked. It could do again, given half a chance by the airy-fairy idealists and protesters among us.

If only – if only! – we could call back to life the solid citizens of our childhood. I am not thinking of the middle-class, of the wealthy, or the landed and the privileged. I am thinking mainly of the strong-minded, clear-thinking, often very well educated products of the once honest and hard-working lower classes in Scotland – the masons, the joiners, the farm labourers, the mechanics, from whose ranks we eventually drew our teachers, ministers, bank clerks, council officials and civil servants.

As I write, I can see their faces now and their looks of utter amazement and incredulity that Scotland and the United Kingdom should have allowed itself to be dragged so low in its own and the world's estimation by the likes of R. F. Mackenzie, the idealists and the muddle-heads. Is it too late to redeem ourselves? Are there enough hard-headed Scotsmen of the old school left to bring Scotia back to its former glory? To paraphrase Burns; 'But och! I backward cast my e'e on prospects dear! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear'.
 

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The Scotsman - 20.05.83
Letters Page

Kilquhanity House
Castle Douglas
May 12, 1983

Sir, - One can be sorry for a person whose cri de coeur is as extreme as that of George K. McMillan in your 'Education Forum' of May 10. At the same time that sympathy should not prevent us pointing out the faults of his case.

In general he is romantic and almost wholly unrealistic and seems to me consumed with nostalgia for the pre-war days and the school system he remembers.

For a start, I doubt if he is recounting his own experiences when he talks of the junior secondary schools. Like so many of those who were naturally successful at school, he has forgotten - if he ever knew it - the lot of the non-achievers. He talks of the 'dunces and no-hopers'. (We all know the pupil's he has in mind, but that phrase in his mouth tells us much of his approach.) Does G. K. mean there were none of them before the war? Or will he tell us where they were catered for?

In the next place, his argument is muddled: he blames 'inspectors and advisors, central committees, and Government departments.' But is was R. F. Mackenzie he set out to demolish.

Then, the case Mr. McMillan presents is hopelessly over-simplified, quite simplistic. He remembers the 'Strong spiritual values of the Scottish people of 50 years ago,' and 'the pure gold of the Scottish education system' which produced 'men of integrity and common sense, both feet on the ground, no-nonsense, down-to-earth,' etc., 'An insistance on the 3 R's and a rigid examination system worked admirably before 1939.'

This, sir, is sentimental nonsense. In fact Scotland and Scottish schools between the wars presented a sorry picture. Hundreds of thousands of G. K.'s honest tradesmen had to emigrate and only a war 'solved' the unemployment problem. Vital statistics, like those for infant mortality, for instance, showed Scotland's social conditions about the worst in Europe: more people behind bars, more children in care than in other countries the size of Scotland.

People should not be boasting about an education system without taking note of facts like these. Mrs. Thatcher, whom Mr. McMillan mentions, and her recent call for a return to Victorian standards in society, comes readily to mind.

But Mr. McMillan admits defeat, failure. I quote: 'I just fair to understand how the present crisis could have occurred.'

We could suggest a few reasons to him. He is talking of the crisis in schools of course. Simplistically he does not connect that with the crisis in the wide world. If he thinks two world wars can be waged in a lifetime and that schools can remain as they were, he is very foolish. Neither honest adults nor thinking adolescents will be fobbed off with that.

We are in a mess - admitted. And maybe things will be worse before they are better - in schools as well as in society. But this call from G. K. to go backwards is without any inspiration whatever. We require vision, we require imagination; and in education possibly more than anywhere. We were not savages in Scotland before compulsory schooling came in just over a century ago.

G.K.'s 'training and teaching in the arts of living in a civilised society' were almost wholly by-passed by the arid so-called down-to-earth schemes of schooling which have largely characterised Scottish education since 1872.

The efforts to change things - actually to have schools more civilised places - came, significantly, after both wars. Primary schools have been transformed (and for the better in spite of what G. K. says) because the approach and the methods embrace the needs of his 'dunces and no-hopers'. (There were 'no-hopers' only because of the old rigid insistence on the 3 R's and examinations.)

As to the honest joiners, masons and farm-workers of the past (and present) . . . I think they are the salt of the earth. But while they are at school, our tradesmen-to-be, in every developed country in the world especially, require the kind of education that will encourage them not to accept the madness of world wars and the injustice that can have a third of the world's people starving while the rest of us spend our substance on armaments and stand by to protect mountains of food. The youth of today have very few examples, from world leaders, of civilised behaviour. Who are the real vandals?

R. F. Mackenzie has been honest enough to look at the facts and propose something that would liberate teachers. And of course he is not proposing doctors with no qualifications. There is a difference between education and training. Let our schools educate.

The church, the law, the medical profession, could all have their own examinations and training. Why should our schools be elimination centres?

John Aitkenhead
Headmaster.