To think school is just crap

[moanymoaner]

I mean why in 2019 are we still teaching children the same generic subjects , making them choose what they want for a future at 14 when they care about nothing and making them sit exams at 15/16 that they will have to rely on for jobs for the rest of their lives!!

As time goes on the more appealing home Ed is becoming , if nothing else than my children being victims of other people's horrors!

I'm genuinely interested in people's thoughts around it . Also I'm not by any means dissing teachers , it's government policy not teachers .

You’re a parent OP. Life skills are your job. Teach your kids to cook, shop, budget, handle their own pocket money (finances). Take them to open their own bank account. Teach them about the concept of tax returns and household income.

Teachers can’t do it all, ffs.

The above in spades - oh and who said French was useless? Jeez, what an attitude.

Fazackerley I am not sure where you get that from. My point was that school is quite repetitive and boring and oriented around exams and being popular in a very particular way, and both academic and less academic children can find it so. The academic children do 'better' and succeed more within the system, but that doesn't necessarily make it an enjoyable or creative or thought provoking experience. I hated school myself even though I was very 'good' at it. It's a myth that it suits academic children really well and neglects the rest- it's set up in a quite odd way and most children now believe very deterministically what happens at school affects the rest of their lives and if they don't get good grades, it's all over. This mind-set is pretty prevalent on Mumsnet as well!

Talking about education on here is like talking about the NHS. For some reason, some people honestly think that there's no better way things can be done and we ought to be in a permanent state of gratitude about it. I am thankful to the individual drs, nurses, teachers but I'm not blind to the faults of the institution, and mostly neither are they (and many leave because of them).

monkeysox - yes, I see what you mean about accessing GCSE papers. My sons maths teacher did say a very similar thing. Its a shame though as there are plenty of people with a spiky iq profile that really do have skills in one area and not another, that in a different system might shine.

The trend for home educating is , in my view, and on the whole, a step backwards. A return to the days where children were educated in the often narrow and limited views of the parent. Where they were closeted, unsocialised and given little experience of different cultures, social groups and unexposed to different viewpoints. Some parents will educate their children adequately, others won't, and some will use it as a way to hide abuse, push eccentric views on their children and as a tool for shielding their children for enlightenment.

State education, however flawed, strives to give children an equal opportunity. By offering a relatively broad curriculum it provides children with the chance to develop a beginning interest in a particular field. For most, GCSE choices are pretty limited so that they don't specialise too young before they have really developed an interest in a particular area. I think it's important that children continue a broad and balanced curriculum until at least 16.

Saying I've never needed to use algebra since I left school is just a stupid thing to say- it's the sort of thing I hear teenagers say when arguing about why they need to study it. The point is, if you never learnt it then you wouldn't know if it was something you had an aptitude or interest for. And we do a actually use algebra every day, how do you think you calculate the time time a journey takes, or the time required to cook a chicken? Alternatively, it doesn't matter what you are studying at GCSE- whatever you choose, you are developing the ability to study to greater depth, training your brain in the art of learning: how to retain information, recall it, reason about it, problem solve and apply knowledge. Even if you change path in later life and never return to the subjects you studied at school, the skills you learnt in doing so will be able to be applied in new situations.

Life skills need to be learnt too, but we need to put the responsibility for these back on parents so that schools can focus on academic skills.

To all those saying "Teaching life skills is a parents job" Yeah but what do you suggest doing about the kids who don't have parents capable of teaching those skills? Shall we just leave kids without the skills, or should we just raise a few generations of clueless kids?

It is a parents job and those kids whose parents won't or can't teach them either miss out or we have to rely on schools to teach it.
Schools have to go to the lowest common denominator.

Why should my dcs waste their time in school having to learn stuff that I can teach them at home?

I had a miserable time in some subjects. I always struggled at Maths but was still in the top set as the second set was already over full. I have never used algebra, trigonometry or Pythagoras IRL. Working out change isn’t algebra, it’s addition/subtraction/division ; if something is £10 and I give £20 then it’s £10 back. No having to find ‘x’, by minusing 6 from y and finding that equals z plus 2. I remember when we had to do our Year 10 coursework, had a choice of 5 questions. One was that you were given an amount of money and had to work out the furthest you could get using public transport, would possibly have been useful and relatable. We were pretty much told to do either one of two others; design a bedroom or a garden. My friend said she’d used loads of algebra to work out the area and how much paper/paint she’d need. Ridiculous, when we had fitted wardrobes the man came and MEASURED THE FUCKING AREA. He didn’t measure half, call the rest ‘x’ and work it out. The questions bore no relation to what actually happens so I didn’t really bother putting the work in.

My schools idea of teaching Science was great in Year 7; loads of experiments with test tubes, dissolving metals etc. After that it was just endless copying from textbooks/notes from the board. One of my teachers could go twice round the three-part board!

My ‘Food Studies’ GCSE was pretty much 2 years of writing about food safety and hygiene, labelling and advertising. When my parents went to parents evening and DM mentioned I was disappointed at the lack of actual cooking the teacher replied “You can actually do the two years without doing any actual cooking”! Ludicrous.

Fresta I calculate how long a journey takes by dividing the rough amount of miles by the average speed on the road I’m using. When I visit my hairdresser 30 miles, average speed 60 mph (mostly on mway) means it will take half an hour. It’s basic division, there is no unknown that I have to find. Even if it’s a new journey, I look at roughly how far it is and the roads I’ll be on.

Totally agree. I never felt good at anything at school, was too busy feeling self conscious and worrying about what everyone thought about me. I still think life skills should be taught at school like how to manage taxes and credit etc.

miss Algebra isn't about the unknown, it's about variables.

My precious little Johnny got a detention just for expressing a different point of view! Hold my glass while I call the head teacher and write to my MP

Little Johnny didn't get detention for politely expressing his contrasting view.

Little Johnny got detention for being an arsehole.

@LaBelleSauvage i rest my case .
"Little Johnny got a detention for being an arsehole"
Or simply doing or saying something that was somewhat deemed as not conforming and making them stay in at lunch or after school is certainly the answer to fixing it

Lol Charley that iS algebra. If you're embarking on a new journey, the unknown is the distance and you're using algebraic methods to work that out!

Fun fact - all Mathematical expressions, functions etc can be described in terms of addition. Apparently. My maths nowhere good enough to explain!

Actually little Johnny threw a chair through the window and called the teacher a fat cunt.

Ahh sorry Charley - the time it'll take is the unknown

But we have to respect little Johnny's viewpoint that the teacher is a fat cunt

And just because chair-throwing doesn't "conform" doesn't mean he should have his human rights violated with a detention

Funnily enough, a link just popped up on my FB feed showing that Dutch teenagers are the happiest in the developed world, and ranked 1 for education- but their education system places the least pressure on them for exams and they feel very well supported by their peers.

The UK was ranked 24 out of 29.

I don't think the system is unfixable, but pressuring students to get better grades to the point that many start cracking (and the teachers too) isn't the way to go (especially as these paper grades don't indicate better learning!) It's worse than when I was at school when people worked hard, but it was't the exam factory that my children's schools are now.

Public understanding of probability and risk is abominable. And that is something all of us use, for example when we react to a report that some activity or foodstuff increases the risk of getting a particular disease. (Percentages is another commonly misunderstood thing, which appears in everyday life). Or people who say "you can't make it that everyone's income is at least 60% of the median because as soon as you start increasing the incomes of those at the bottom it will increase the median".

Algebra is a way of a) using letters as shorthand b) giving a recipe that will apply whatever numbers you plug in, so that you don't have to keep working things out from scratch

So maybe you don't use algebra or statistics in your everyday life, but maybe your life would actually be easier if you did?

It's not that mathematics is irrelevant that is the problem (it's highly relevant) - it's that 1) we seem to teach it in a way that scares many people 2) it's socially acceptable to be bad at it and not want to learn it

Little Johnny was just expressing his emotions. It’s not good to keep them bottled up.

The data/ league table/ fear of OFSTED culture has a lot to answer for and has worsened in the last couple of decades, particularly with the threat of forced academisation. By my final year of teaching, the progress and assessment culture meant we spent a ridiculous proportion of curriculum time, about a 3rd of it on assessment cycles. Far less content of subject knowledge was actually taught as a result. The way depths of skills are valued means gaps in general knowledge particularly if feeder primaries have a strong coach to the test mentality.

I feel like the system has gone backwards from the breadth of knowledge I got in the 90s, and the increased vocational outlook of the 2000s until Gove came in with his narrow minded priorities. My final GCSE group had a large core of students that one year earlier could have thrived in practical vocational GCSEs, but instead were herded into a restricted choice of subjects they had no aptitude and critically no interest in and set unrealistic targets based on SATs completed years earlier in different subjects after much teaching to the test.

I worry about DS1. He's very curious, retains facts and makes connections. A natural scientist/ engineer/ mathematican type. Can't cope with rote learning of times tables, but does understand the process of the relationships of the numbers. Struggles to write. Hated the y2 SATs phase and struggled with frustration for months even though school kept them quite low key. He's very much a square peg type with enormous potential if his interests are captured well, and I do worry about the effect on him from the uniform round peg mentality in education at present. My experience of primary education was very carefree. There is too much pressure too early now.

I find this thread really depressing. So many people in favour of “dumbing down” and no value beng placed on education.

Is that what we want? A small elite learning history, algebra, etc and the rest learning budgeting skills? Yep, that really will lead to an equal society...

I worked bloody hard at school and got brilliant GCSEs. It was pointless.

The kids I knew who didn’t ‘do’ school have all gone into trade based self employment (tree surgery, beauty, hairdressing, construction) etc. They earn bloody well, way more than I ever will and are doing just fine.

Academia is not the be all and end all.

First aid, cookery and how do a tax return is weekend stuff or work it out from a book/video.

I took maths, English, art and sciences. Now I do marketing for a tech company so I use English, art, maths ( budget) and some high level tech.

The best thing my school taught was that women could have just as much a career as men, and to ignore anyone who said “you can’t.....”