Dear Education,

Every year, regardless of whatever kind of summer has been had, you begin anew: calling to attention the leagues of students in your care, and for what? So a year can be wasted pondering over coursework — that may well turn out brilliant and be a more accurate measure of an individual’s intellect — only for it to be overshadowed there, in the usually cold exam hall, where one is not tested on their understanding of a subject, so much as their retention of key facts. In short, it is a memory test, where those students who can more easily pluck out information in the highly stressful, time-constrained situation, often fare better than those who cannot. This would be all well and good, except for the fact that this is then certificated, stamped on their identity, as a mark of their intelligence, for prospective employers and the general populace to judge forever.

How dare you!

Our educational institutions — school, college, university (college in America)––seem to serve solely as governmentally-sanctioned conveyor belts to the workplace. It is as a result of these factories of the mind that people commit suicide: in 2002, it was reported by a survey that 70% of those teenagers who had turned to self-harm, and who had thoughts of taking their own lives, blamed the stress caused by the education system and, in particular, the exams. We hear all the time that our generation has it hard, but no one seems to be doing anything about it! In fact, I’d say that the work being done to ‘reform’ schooling, is actually reversing the progress made so far.

I myself have been pretty fortunate: I’m able to write articulately enough to meet mark schemes’ needs — not to the point that I’ve gotten As in exams, but well enough that I’ve passed my subjects, even if they are only low passes, such as a D at A2 level (the higher qualification that combined with the lower AS level, gives the British A-Level qualification). That D, for reference, came as a result of a lengthy absence on my part, not of intelligence, but a genuine medical absence which led me to a less confident knowledge of the materials I needed to study — further proof that the exam system we follow is nothing more than a memory test: I had to know quotes, off by heart, for Tess of The D’Urbervilles, a large selection of Blake poetry, and another selection of pastoral poetry from an anthology. I refer to the D grade I received in literature, because in the coursework at least, I received 100%, full marks, and was expected to get an A in the exam too. I came out of the exam feeling horribly ashamed of myself, not because I had done anything wrong — of course not, why would I have? It was just an exam — but because after talking to my teachers, they were so sure that I was going to do it, I was going to get an A, and I knew that I hadn’t: I felt guilty, like I’d let them down, like I’d let me down.

Yet these feelings of guilt that I, and I assume many others feel, wouldn’t be so bad if everyone and the neighbour’s cat didn’t press upon us the importance of our schooling: we are so often told about how much we need maths in our lives, but I can honestly say, in the short while that I’ve been away from education, I haven’t used it much, except the occasional time I’ve taken measurements of pasta or I’ve worked out the decimal (on a calculator, not in my head) of a portion of something for my diet app, but certainly not the square root of something, or algebra. Doesn’t this just make you question all that you are taught? Is there any point of learning any of it if we’re not going to use it at all? My maths teachers constantly rebuked us saying that we’d never use the things we were taught there, promising that it would not only be those few of our class who would become mathematicians that would end up using algebra and trigonometry. I think the aforementioned calculator work above squarely proves that my maths teachers, if not all the other teachers, were wrong: I have never used trigonometry, and the closest thing to using Pythagoras’ theorem is when I’m walking the dogs and thinking of how ridiculous the whole “A² + B² = C²” is, like seriously, why is not just A + B = C? And what does anybody get out of working out what those base values are, other than wasting several minutes of their time: minutes that could be spent learning something that is actually useful, such as how to file our taxes (which is something we will no doubt have to do), or how to get ingrained tea stains out of a wonderful mug that you love to use— that last one’s a joke, but you see, there are better things that we could be learning.

I should probably point out here that this isn’t an attack on those people who get As in their subjects, because in those particular cases, it was a mix of intelligence and a good worth ethic that delivered them that grade. This is an attack on a system that has created what I’m calling a ‘Grade Complex,’ a feeling of superior intelligence solely based on grades.

Education, you could see this ‘letter’ as an angry rant about a system that, year upon year, fails its many students, or you can see it as a call to action, to improve yourself and those students within your care, celebrating their strengths rather than bringing them down: of course you are doing that in some respects, the child whose ‘intelligence’ has been based on their excellent recall of facts and figures, or studies as was the case for someone I knew in my English Language class, they’ve done well, haven’t they? But what about the person that is clever, but just not good at the recall part? They’re the ones that are being brought down by your failure to teach the child, not the children — what I mean here, is that rather than teaching each individual child to the best of their ability, you would rather teach all the children in the class as though they have exactly the same abilities, which just isn’t the case. Education has turned into an environment, where a teacher teaches something, and the student’s response is to regurgitate it back to whomever, whether the teacher or an examiner, word-perfectly. But this is not education, what we learn should seek to be challenged: if nothing was ever challenged, our knowledge would not be as vast as it is now and we’d still be reliant on the model of an atom as a plum pudding and drinking untested and unpasteurised milk, likely filled with dangerous bacteria: we’d be a stagnant race, with no accomplishments to our history.

Education, as it stands now, is hopelessly behind on things that have a real impact on us, both as young people, ignorant to the world, and hopefully, as future involved members of society. Again, we are expected to understand taxes, when we haven’t learnt anything about them, but we know what ‘x’ is, or how to work it out if we don’t. We are expected to stay safe sexually, but any education that is actually relevant to us is on the internet and not in the classroom: homosexuality is only just touched upon — bisexuality and transgender issues, zilch. Education, have you seen the bumbling readers in your classes? Not the shy pupils, but those outgoing pupils, who are confident and create comedy in the classroom, and for the record, are very intelligent: I knew of one such person, and when it came to reading, he would be sloppy, constantly changing words in a text into different ones that didn’t make sense — and then blaming the book for his mistake! Yet the teacher didn’t correct him — imagine if he read a legal contract like that! (He wants to do law.) Yes, when these issues are brought up at a later date, we’re expected to find answers ourselves (as I was when I used to misuse the semicolon in place of a colon until a retired teacher taught me what I needed to know).

I can only hope that this letter brings with it the important discussions that need to be had, sooner rather than later, regarding education. Stop failing the students and everybody wins.

Yours Sincerely,

Kenneth