To think things have not really improved....

[PessaryPam]

I was talking to DH this morning about this story and we were remembering our GPs, (we are in our 50s), who left school aged 14. All of them had basic education and could read, write and do basic maths.

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9741500/Millions-of-adults-have-maths-skills-of-a-nine-year-old.html

What went wrong?

How do you know that everyone back then could read, write and do basic maths (is that not the level of a 9 year old anyway?).

Interesting article here from 1997.

The author updated his reseach here.

I do wonder how much of it is inability and how much is lack of confidence in their ability.

Either way that suggests that some people are being failed by the education system, and I do think moving to more real life type situations when teaching numeracy skills is important

My dad left school at 15 and he can read, write poetry, has a brilliant hand at calligraphy and has super fast maths skills; he can do sums in his head quicker than me and I've got a degree and masters. What really did go wrong? (I haven't read the article).

Lots of people did leave school unable to read or write. They worked in manual jobs and were pretty much forgotten about.
You're talking about people who would have automatically gone on to university in a different era.

Your dad is cleverer than you?

On the other hand, Fakebook, despite his academic potential your father had to leave formal education at 15 whereas you were able to achieve your potential. So what went right?

I am not convinced everyone good read and write proficiently in the 'good old days'. For many, many jobs, it would not have mattered.

I wouldn't get too nostalgic about the good old days - my mum was a teacher in the 1950s and says that she had children in her class then who obviously had dyslexia or learning difficulties who were just ignored or excluded and assumed to be 'thick' as they didn't know much back then about learning support.

I'd guess that a huge number of children like them left school with very very few skills. At least we're getting something right now.

We need to be cautious of using anecdotes about our own immediate relatives to assume that that was the way it w for everyone she says, doing exactly that

I think it did not necessarily matter if people had lower literacy in those days - there were more jobs, only a small percentage went to university and no-one advertised for street-cleaners to have A-levels (and other qualification inflation).

I am slightly younger than OP and my DF/DM left school at 15 (they just got caught by the raising of the school-leaving age) with a leaving certificate. DF became an apprentice and worked for the NHS in the same place for the next 40 years. DM became a junior civil servant, had a year or so in London, became a SAHM for 12 years and then worked in clerical jobs. My guess is that no-one in the UK does (can do) that these days.

When I was in secondary school (comprehensive, Scotland), 80% of the people in my school left at 16 for jobs. Only about 5% stayed on to S6 and probably less than 10% in total went from school to university. I went to university (vocational degree) and came out with a choice of which job I took. I took a job that involved moving to SE England, changed jobs twice and have chosen to be self-employed for the last 10 years of raising DC.

Now the school-leaving age is (and, effectively, has been for years) 18. The apprenticeship system was dismantled. The government has an idea that all young people should go to university (and about 40% do). My DD will graduate (vocational degree) next year and it will be hard for her to get a graduate-level job. A job in the field of her degree is extremely difficult to get.

The lack of jobs makes it difficult to see why anyone thought that 40% going to university was a good idea - particularly with student loans, it staves off the inevitable and means that the young people are saddled with debt. It has also meant qualification inflation - jobs that previously required a degree often go to someone with a PhD because there are more of them around.

To return to your post: The articles linked by EuphemiaInExcelsis are interesting. They show that there has been a reasonably steady state in literacy (despite government rhetoric). There have always been fewer people who can cope with maths - and government are among the worst offenders. Ofsted saying that all schools should be above average, anyone? One of the problems is that primary school teachers are often not secure in maths, so they pass on their feelings about it. The way maths is taught is not necessarily a good idea. There was a small experiment in the US in not teaching maths until the children were 11. Then they picked it up easily because they were secure in how numbers and maths work in the real world. Many home educators in this country (including me) have done their own small-scale experiment and found the same thing - children who do real stuff in the world do not need to do maths worksheets from age 5 (and set up a fear of what to do and the feeling that they have to memorise when to use specific techniques). When they are ready to do formal abstract maths (perhaps to get a GCSE), they learn what they need for the exam and it is not scary.

Agree with BeckAndCallWithBoughsOfHolly: my anecdotes were intended to be illustrative, not defining.

EuphemiaInExcelsis Interesting reading but my GPs hailed from very early 1900s, so the study is a bit too recent. I do seem to remember my GF saying that all his class could read and write and do basic arithmetic though. He was not a privileged child, he left school at 14 and became a telegram delivery boy on a bicycle. Stayed with the GPO as it was then till he retired at 65.

Yeah, I'm always a bit suspicious of the 'good old days' stuff too. My DSD left school at 14 grounded in the 3 Rs - thoroughly grounded - but that was it. He used to drive me insane 'testing' me in Geography, which was to him reciting capital cities, rather than the way we were taught.

Rote learning works for a lot of people, but it doesn't necessarily teach any other skills. So you have the majority, who learn a small amount of things (arithmetic, basic reading, writing) by very through rote learning, the minority with things like dyslexia who would just be 'thick' and the bright who, if they were poor, wouldn't achieve their potential. I don't think it was a particularly great system tbh.

But to put the opposite perspective: my mum worked for 15 years (IIRC) for a charity teaching adults who were not functionally literate or numerate. Some of those people were young, yes, but many were in their 40s, 50s, 60s or beyond. Many of them, had parents who were also illiterate. They had been failed by the system.

When you look at stats from schooling in, say, the 1950s or 1930s, you're not looking at the total number of children of school age (you're not today either, but you can figure in the number of people who home-school). A huge number of children were put into special schools and taught 'crafts' rather than educated. Even people with perfectly teachable disabilities such as blindness or deafness, were not really expected to do much, and if they didn't have teachers or parents who pushed to get them educated, they might never learn.

Much more is now required by way of basic literacy/numeracy than it was even 30 years ago. My mum would get people who'd worked in skilled manual jobs for their whole careers, but who were now struggling because suddenly they had to fill in a sheet for Health and Safety and they couldn't do it. I'm not saying that's wrong they should have to do that, but it shows how much less formal literacy/numeracy used to be required of people who had perfectly good jobs and whom you'd probably never have known were not very literate/numerate if you'd met them in the street.

FWIW, the number of people she used to teach who admitted they used the old 'I've forgotten my glasses, love, you'll have to read it for me' is staggering. There were people whose own children never realized - or never discussed - the fact their parents couldn't read. I think there is now less stigma about admitting you have had problems in education and that is also a good thing. There's more awareness you might be able to get help as an adult, instead of the assumption it's 'too late' and you're best off hiding it.

But they seemed to have basic reading and writing and maths as a given, which meant they could build on their skills later by reading and self teaching. The old Labour moment was very big on helping the working man to self improve by evening classes and libraries. Education used to be an aspiration, now it is perceived as a chore to be avoided by many. Think it's a real shame.

Who's 'they', pam, sorry? Do you mean your grandparents, or everyone?

If you mean everyone, that is certainly incorrect. It may have seemed that way but I promise it wasn't. It can't have been, or people like my mum would have been out of a job! And there are thousands of people whose business it has been, for decades, to do remedial education for adults.

I agree with you that there used to different sense about 'self improvement', but I know loads of people who do night school or who've gone back into education as adults - it is seen differently, more as a career-based thing, and of course it isn't as cheap as it used to be which is a huge issue. But if you go look at the MN student parents section, you'll see loads of people who've worked their way back up through qualifications they didn't get at school.

LRD my GF who went to school from 1907-1916 told me all his class left able to do the basics. I don't know much more than this. I think he was living round Paddington area at the time.

I can't ask him for more details as he is long gone sadly. I wonder if any figures were ever collected for those times.

So if everyone left school fully literate and numerate, then why do we get the constant complaints about children who grow up unable to read because their illiterate parents don't encourage them? And why weren't they in turn encouraged to learn by their parents?

I have worked with many adults whose literacy and numeracy was poor. Where did they come from, then? They must have been young once, mustn't they?

Otoh my 15yo has excellent numeracy and literacy. Proves nothing.

I think that's such a small sample. And frankly, I would take it with a pinch of salt myself. My mum taught loads of people (sadly, none that old, but many who would have been in school from, say, the 1930s onwards and some from the 1920s), and many of them never let anyone realize how little they knew. There was not a culture of admitting you couldn't read or write.

I think figures will be difficult - you could get figures for the (tiny) number who did school cert (the equivalent of A Levels now), but you couldn't I think know how many learned to read and write.

However, if you were interested, you could find out how many children in a district there were by looking at the census, and you could then see how many of them attended schools teaching reading and writing. I remember looking at my own village when we did a project on life in the 1930s and realizing that even with so few children, several were not sent to the proper village school as they weren't considered able to be educated.

I do not mean to offend or cause distress with my following post.

Don't forget, when we are talking about yesteryear we forget advances in medicine. For example, extremely premature babies, or those with congenital conditions whould have died either at birth or very soon aferwards. Therefore nature had a way of dealing with some of those we might want to describe as having learning difficulties today. Obviously that is very simplistic, but those people are alive today and have an effect on statistical data.

Even when I look back at school, there were no people with obvious physical or learning difficulties - they were put in homes because there was shame attached/parents were advised to forget about the child - so we can hand on heart say - oh it never happened when we were at school.

I think the level of teaching was better in those days. Even my brothers who are now in their 40's have better numeracy than my sister and me. They were taught Latin and were punished with a ruler on their hands if they were naughty.

My sister and I are younger than them, and school was much more laid back when we attended. We had bigger classes too. There wasn't much focus on languages.

Something changed in the early 80's to 90's. maybe the national curriculum being introduced? I have no idea about the politics in those days but something definitely changed.

My GFs also left school at 14 and could also read and write and do arithmetic. But my grandma told me about friends of hers who basically didn't go to school. And my grandfather taught several colleagues how to read when he was in the airforce (which was why he decided to become a primary school teacher when he left).

I suspect that most people who went to school until they were 14 could read and write because those that didn't left for one reason or another or never attended in the first place.

But Pam, not everyone went to school in 1907! It therefore follows that those who did, learned some skills. But children went into service at 11 and 12 and were working in mines etc at that age - I bet they didn't have any literacy skills at all.

I'm in my twenties OP and my grandparents all left school at 15 (as was quite normal then) and they're mid 70's now. All of them are perfectly literate and numerate. YANBU

I believe I was more than slightly literate and numberate (okay maybe not the latter) by age 9. Unless there are special educational needs involved it really is just laziness.

*numerate FFS

'All of your grandparents' aren't exactly a representative sample though, are they? My DGD left school able to read and write, as did my DGM, but they both left school around 14 - he to go down a mine, her to go into service. Their parents (my great-gran) were barely educated. My great-gran especially didn't have more than a few years of schooling. And she would have known children with no schooling at all, who were down the pit age 7.

I think there's a generation who are just in living memory who were the first to benefit from universal, compulsory education. As such, they were rightly proud of their achievements. But it doesn't mean that there weren't illiterate people around, or, as I said up-thread, that much more than the basics were taught.