Like most eighteen year olds I am waiting for my A-level exam results. There is so much anticipation and worry of waiting for exam results, but the most worrying thing is not if I have done enough, well maybe part of it, but it is the exam grade boundaries because the labour government are trying to cut down on people gaining A/B’s because A-level’s have become ‘too easy’. Tell that to any student “Your grade A or B is not worth as much because it is so easy to get that grade.” Yeah right. How much effort and tears are put into A-levels hoping you get the grade? In any case A-levels are getting more difficult.
There are many different reasons why we are cleverer than before, there’s debating over this. The most important reason is that there is more of a meritocracy in the education system than ever before. This has happened as many sociologists have researched the education system and come out with alarming results that the government has spent much money on to get rid of class room inequality and teachers negatively labelling pupils, which creates the self full-filling prophecy effect. As a result of the self for full-filling prophecy many students live up to a negative label that means that they end up failing their A-levels. However, if young people don’t receive a label (normally given depending on your parent’s jobs) then working class young people can aspire to be doctors and teachers whereas previously they wanted to leave school and get working class jobs.
With news that the Tory’s have pledged to change the A-level curriculum again and are most likely to win the election again, it would mean a newer curriculum would be put in place that would simply make schools jobs harder. Do the Tory’s not realise that no political interference is going to make exams more difficult and A/B grades any lower?
This is clearly something that David Cameron has not thought about with his desire to make the education system better by returning the education system back to the Technical school of the 1950s. That would consist of discrimination and prejudges in the classroom. Also, this would have large financial cost as they plan to cut more education spending. Why mend something that is not broken?
However, according to Cameron it is broken; after research conducted by the party claimed that the education system is too easy. Such research was done by the party itself as part of their propaganda campaign that is likely to have a low validity and to be extremely flawed. I wonder were he got his ‘research’ evidence from?
Maybe David Cameron should go back to school. He has not learnt and mastered a basic skill from studying history - which politicians always think they are better teachers than actual teachers when they are not? He and other politicians are not qualified to make any decisions about education.
They should stop messing with the education system and let the teachers teach. After all it is what they are paid to do instead of having to mess with the syllabus. That wastes valuable leaning time for pathetic courses and inset days, were they spend the whole day discussing things they learned during teacher training. It’s like an A-level maths students going back to reception learning 1+2=3.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Education, In The News, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.