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?

Firstly, how the hell did your GF know everyone could read and write well? Secondly, what about all the children who were institutionalised for LDs or behavioural issues or MH stuff? They might be in a mainstream class now. Thirdly, anecdote is not the singular of data.

I do think there is an issue with people leaving school without basic skills. I don't think this never happened a hundred years ago.

I am sure I was told that our local big city newspaper had a "reading age" of 9-10yo. That was back in about 1975.

For that matter I imagine my grandmother only has ever had reading-writing skills of about a 9yo. She's lovely, but just not a brainy person. She was born in 1925.

My Grandparents left school at fourteen. My Grandad is the only one still alive so he is the only one I can ask! He is functionally literate, he can read and write but he would struggle to read anything complex (a broadsheet newspaper or a great work of literature). He freely admits his writing and numeracy is fairly limited.

All of my uncles and aunts left school at fifteen without any qualifications. My parents were the only ones to go to university. My Mum says they were taught in classes of 40+ and streamed so she never saw the children who struggled, so I suppose if your parents or grandparents were in the top stream you would struggle to remember other children not doing so well because they did not mix.

My husband left school in the past ten years and he also struggles with his literacy.

I don't know if anything has changed tbh.

I am glad this is being discussed because I was curious about these generations. They are so close to us and still so unknown.

'On the Move, One the Move, We're on the Move again...'

Does no one else remember that TV programme (with Bob Hoskins!) aimed at helping illiterate and innumerate adult who'd been failed by school? The programme was aired in the mid 70s, so was probably aimed at people who had been at school in the 1950s and earlier.

So it was recognised at a national level that school had failed large numbers of people - the ones that sat at the back, or never turned up. People would be too ashamed to admit it and could probably 'get by' in those days, but the world is a more competitive place now.

Education was very different in the 1920/30s and even the 40s.

There was a lot of learning by rote and the three Rs. Not a lot else. No investigation type learning, no exploring literature.

There are other factors at play as well.

Unions offered education, the Quaker chocolate makers offered education.

In may places, in the 1930s libraries were full of unemployed people just keeping warm. But while keeping warm would pick up a book.

People generally learn the skills they need for life, things like meal planning were essential in the war.

Until the late 1980s it was quite normal to leave school without qualifications.

I sometime struggle to explain things to do with education to my mother because she has no experience of university learning. To her an essay is something you are given a title for and told to write in one evening and hand in the next day, not something you take a number of book out of the library and reference.

One of my grandparents went into a primary school (many years ago, she has been deaf for years) as a 'guest speaker' to talk to primary children about school and for them to ask questions about what school was like in her day. That is the kind of experience that was not available in her day, for 6 year olds who have been doing history or their town it was like asking an historical figure.

A couple of people have mentioned the children who did not go to school or who were 'sent away' and forgotten about. That did happen.

My other grandmother had a cousin who was described at the time as 'simple', now I think we would say she had a mild learnig disability. She did go to school with my grandmother, but she never left what would now be reception class.

Strangely enough she did learn things after she left school. When her (grandmother's cousin) died her sister used to draw a picture of the clock before she went to soerk and say "when the clock looks like this put the dinner on and I'll be home when the clock looks like this"

Within a few weeks she had learned to tell the time. She then went out and got herself a job as a cleaner.
She left school illiterate and inumerate. I don't think that would have happened these days.

A third of adults born 1952 & before were found to have poor reading comprehension skills. Sorry, exactly when was this great decline in British education supposed to have occurred? Obviously as early as 1960, yes?

I don't understand what the OP thinks is worse now than then, even within her own anecdote.

The "basic maths skills" with which her GPs left school may well have been the same level as the "maths skills of an average 9 year old".

On the other hand, people who are capable of going further in maths are no longer leaving school at 12 and 14 to go down the mines.

Sounds like it's going right.

Thank you!

MrsTerrysChocolateOrange Firstly, how the hell did your GF know everyone could read and write well?

I don't know MrsTerry, shall we have a seance so we can ask him?

The "basic maths skills" with which her GPs left school may well have been the same level as the "maths skills of an average 9 year old".

That as well.

Maybe my GPs were abnormal, seems likely looking at the rest of the family!

I think that's actually very important.

Right now we are saying that is is terrible that a number of people have maths skills equivalent to that of the average 9 year old. I'm going to guess that the average nine year old can add and subtract quite big numbers, and do at least a little bit of multiplication and division (I have 6 jaffa cakes, there are 3 people, how many jaffa cakes do we get each?)

The grandparent in question says that "all his class left able to do the basics" and so everything was fine.

We may be talking about the same level of achievement, except grandad says "everyone could do the basics and that's fine" and now we're saying "lots of people can only do very basic things and that's not fine because we expect more"

I think that is a lot of it, trills.

Someone mentioned upthread that her grandparent was literate in the basics but not able to read a broadsheet newspaper. Reading a broadsheet newspaper is used as a rule-of-thumb measure of basic literacy quite often these days. It does depend what you expect people to need in life.

Changing expectations also make us look back and be impressed by people knowing something we don't, while it's harder to recognize that we also know things they didn't. For example, my parents can do all of those complicated calculations with funny units of measurement, because they used to need those. You used to need to be very quick with your 12 times table when we used base twelve money. We don't now. But children are taught to use calculators and computers, skills some older people didn't learn.

when we talk about educational attainment in the past, I think we have to keep in mind the sometimes major disruptions to schooling which resulted from the wartime experience. I could well imagine that a sizable number of children who would have been of school age during the war, did not attain the same levels as those a few years older than them as a result of the stress of bombing raids, evacuation, bombed out schools, any number of other contributing factors. As adults then, they would still have these educational deficiencies which would find their way into the statistics. However, the reason for lack of attainment would not have been necessarily poor teaching or an inappropriate curriculum.

I used to work in the customer services department of a building society. I received letters from a lot of old people (I knew their ages from the database about them and their accounts). A great many of them were very badly written, almost illegible and not displaying much understanding of basic grammar and sentence construction. Some of them were beautifully written with handwriting that hardly any younger people use today - but they were often still very poorly spelled and constructed. Of course there were also letters from older people that were good, excellent even - but they were in the minority. I do not believe that past literacy standards overall were anywhere near as good as they are today for the majority of people.

Good point ZZZen. My grandpa was a whizz at carpentry as his class were taught to build their chemistry room when they were evacuated. Not sure how much chemistry he learned!