Discuss the following questions.

1. How do you understand the expression ‘to become second nature?’

2. Why is ‘being at home not a soft option’?

3. What are the pros and cons of home education?

4. Are you in favour of home education? Why?

5. What problems can you face educating children at home?

‘Examinations exert a pernicious influence on education’

We might marvel atthe progress made I every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationalists have still failed to deviseanything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude. As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of viciouscompetition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of ‘drop-outs’: young people who are written offas utter failures before they have even embarked ona career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rateamong students?

A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorise. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enablehim to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprivethe teacher ofall freedom. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.

The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark the stacks of hastily scrawled scriptsin a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after the examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. It is cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiteratemessage recently scrawled on a wall: ‘I were a teenage drop-outand now I are a teenage millionaire.’

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1514