[Mb-civic] Exam Passing

[Alexander Harper]

This article appears in todays Daily Telegraph apropos of the current furore in the UK over the dumbing down of our A levels (the school leaving/university entrance exams). The politicians want better results every year to justify the money that is being thrown at education and just about every independent education specialist in the UK now agrees that the A levels have become irredeemably devalued. Read on..
AlBaraka
 
It's a miracle the young pass any exams 
By Andrew O'Hagan
(Filed: 18/08/2005)

Britain has always loved a moron. We loved Norman Wisdom before he was fashionable, we loved Benny Hill long after he was acceptable, and we made a hero of Eddie the Eagle when other nations were busy collecting medals. I think there might be some charming appreciation of failure lurking beneath the common veneer of national ambition, and yet, whatever the reasons for it, in this country we are comforted by idiocy to the exact same degree that we are almost repulsed by intellectuals.

  
 
Perhaps that's why this year's school exam results - arriving in brown envelopes up and down the country today - will create a fuss only if they show an improvement in the tendency towards success.

There can't be many countries on the planet where moronic behaviour is so rewarded, or where morons have occasion to have such pride in what they don't know. 

In the past week alone, the nation's youth voted a certain Anthony Hutton, a "1970s dancer" from Newcastle (maybe his brown envelope got lost in the post), as not only the most admirable person on Channel 4's Big Brother, but also as this year's overall winner. 

I watched Hutton in action: if he knows his three-times table, he's keeping it well hidden, but that didn't stop people from falling over themselves to declare him the latest national hero and the best British thing since bottled beer.

Meanwhile, Victoria Beckham, whom many of us might have considered the last bastion of penetrating female wit and original thinking, announced, with a very great and proud sense of herself, that she had never read a book in her life. The nation applauded. 

Never having read a book in your life - especially when you are alleged to have written one - might cause most people to combust with shame. Mrs Beckham showed no such embarrassment, which, if nothing else, might demonstrate that, for all her well developed know-nothingness, she knows that the British public nowadays saves a special place in its heart for the shameless and the super-dim.

With these gargoyles fixed around the turrets of national achievement, it is a miracle that young people have an interest in passing anything.

It would be more in keeping if the majority of pupils had spent the spring avoiding maths and physics and limbering up to appear on the new series of The X Factor, the talent show screening again from Saturday, in which the gullible and the desperate get to engage in a modern form of gladiatorial combat for the edification of the British public.

In this context, the fact that so many young people seem to have passed their exams, and passed so well, is a cause for hope as much as celebration.

In respect of achievement, there's a strange alliance in Britain now between the working and the middle class: the former saying they can't be bothered and the latter saying, "Why bother?" 

The alliance, where it existed in the past, used to work the opposite way: each of those classes distinctly believing in the value of effort for its own sake, and seeking to do well so far as they could through the business of facing down difficulties. Different difficulties, mind you, and different priorities. 

But that was how it was in a workaday Britain generally addicted to merit, rather than one increasingly enslaved to notions of entitlement. In the deepest part of themselves, all classes now are devoted to leisure, as if proper and difficult occupation has become one of the enemies of modern selfhood. "The secret of being miserable," wrote George Bernard Shaw, "is to have leisure to bother whether you are happy or not."

Difficulty has become a problem. Nobody much likes difficulty any more and nobody believes in it. Difficult history and difficult philosophy? Gone, so far as the common reader goes. The difficulties of religion? Gone, to be replaced by a happy-clappy brigade of people motivated by "personal growth" and self-healing. 

We live in a society where everything has to be watered down in order to be made palatable for those who dread, more than anything, the deplorable, old-fashioned tasks of having to wait or having to think.

Instant gratification is the poisoning of endeavour, and we live in a society that is either in thrall to the sparkle of know-nothing success - the Beckham creed - or is titillated by the deadpan amiability of failure. When young people consistently believe in those things, above all else, the world goes crooked beneath their feet, and it means we have failed to engage them with a system of values that highlights the forward-thinking and rewards perseverance.

When I was at school, there was always a healthy disrespect for the respectable, an honest instinct to get away with murder, but in the long run no one with ability doubted where the exit was. And those without ability did not, in those days, pretend to themselves that the world was built for their greater ease.

Maybe that's the difference: I didn't grow up and go to school in a Britain that placed such a high virtue on personal fantasy, and any young person now who avoids that very thing has done incredibly well.

I have a feeling that people who say the exams have become too easy are really announcing that they have no faith in difficulty itself. Effort has become sullied at the same time as luck has become glorified: a lottery mentality is threatening to oust the dignity of application and denounce the value of decent effort and the rewards that might result from it. 

Yet the young people smiling as they open their envelopes today have earned their smiles, and only the new-style cynicism can seek to deny them their moment. 

These exam-passers have resisted the temper of the times more effectively than the people who would seek to shout them down.
 
 


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