My grandson graduated a couple of weeks ago. He wore a gown and mortarboard, collected his certificate, the lot. “So?” you say. “Lots of people graduate. Big deal.” Yes, but what age were they? My grandson was four and he was graduating from nursery.
This seems to me totally daft, not unlike the way some people like to dress up little girls in gowns and high-heels and lipstick. Or fake tan and wig for some little Irish dancers. But the kids seem to enjoy it – I’m told my grandson particularly enjoyed the bit where he threw his mortarboard in the air. He then snatched the mortarboards of three colleagues and threw them skywards as well. In the old days, I seem to remember little girls walking around the house in their mother’s high-heel shoes and having a whale of a time doing so.
But this tendency to give children things that normally belong to older people has reached a dangerous point in British schools. The Guardian this morning reports that “in the first six weeks of the new school year, four- and five-year-olds in nearly 10,000 schools, about half of the primary schools in England, will be taken out of class and asked questions for the new reception baseline assessment (RBA).”
We shouldn’t be too surprised. For decades now, children at schools have been tested to death. Key Stage One, Key Stage Two, Key Stage Three, Key Stage Four. And of course GCSEs and A Levels.
What happens when you have exams and tests is that teachers start teaching to the test. In other words, anything that won’t get the children a higher score is ignored, everything that will give them a higher score is fastened on and hammered home. Education =Test. All that stuff about the joy of exploring (the most natural thing for even the smallest baby) is set aside, and the child’s ‘education’ is reduced to numbers on a score card. A good school is one where all the score cards have big numbers, a poor school one that has low numbers. Teaching the love of reading, the delight of drama, the sweetness of music, the glory of art, the fascination of history’s odd by-roads : all that must be left aside. It doesn’t show up in the test, so it can’t be worth learning.
And notice that bit about the kids “being taken out of class”. Put children (or adults) in a different setting and you’ll get notably different results. If s/he feels they’re being examined, they tend to button up. If they’re with their mates or even simply comfortable, they’ll put in an entirely different performance. In short, RBA is, by its nature, highly unreliable.
I’m minded of the marvelous Adrian Mole who, you’ll remember, was forever measuring his male member, in the hope that it would have grown. Whoever was the tool who dreamt up RBA should be dropped in one of those colourful vats they used to have on Swap Shop, then a lid screwed firmly on to keep them there.
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