When?a Minister of Education and former teacher confuses pillars with pillows – no matter how jokingly he explains it away – it gongs resoundingly of concern.
No such arbiter or overseer of our education system is permitted that kind of licence into foolishness.
I will be berated for saying this. So what? Good is good; and bad is real bad!
We have a tendency of pretending that what is actually is not, though its bareness stares us in the face.
Take the Common Entrance Examination phenomenon, for example. Every politician remotely associated with education in the last two decades has been touting this notion that all secondary schools are “equal”.
That they all have virtually the same facilities; that they all have equally qualified teachers; that their students come from the same pool.
The last wanders from the truth. If by “the same pool” the proponents mean from all primary schools, well, yeah, kinda. But the hard cold fact is that the traditional grammar schools – Harrison College, Queen’s College, Combermere, Lodge, St Michael, Foundation – get the cream.
They do so by sharing in those primary school pupils earning the highest marks in the Common Entrance Exam. A very small percentage of the non-high fliers will they get.
Obviously, those pupils at the bottom of the marking scheme could preponderate a number of the “newer secondary” schools.
This is one of the things some educators and others opposed to the one-time Common Entrance Exam point to. It is one of their cases for continuous assessment at primary stage.
Truth be told, continuous assessment has its merit.
It could engender in a child an appreciation for continuous learning and formal education and self-appraisal, but the assessment could be subject to manipulation by the unscrupulous – and the debate on it will surely continue.
After all, the one credible flaw of the Common Entrance Examination, intended to offer a level playing field to every primary pupil, is that it assesses the student in one single day, within a few hours on a written test – one time only. You blow your chance; that could be it.
Still, the system might be better now than hitherto when the traditional grammar schools set their own respective entrance requirements, which had brought charges of social discrimination.
But even in the light of what is presented as common quality, the allocating of the highest achievers to the traditional grammar schools and the lowest to the newer secondary unendingly must defy logic.
I am not recommending the abolition of the Common Entrance Examination. I have no alternative.
Nor have I seen any other outstandingly worthwhile one.
But I have an idea for a more plausible homogenous mix.
It baffles the mind that our Ministers of Education can continue to be smitten by the delusion that all secondary schools are on the same level, while supervising the allocation of students receiving 30 per cent or less to prescribed insitutions of less than stellar achievement.
There is no doubt that some pupils destined for the not so stellar schools have excelled by dint of hard work and perseverence in the ensuing years after the Common Entrance Exam. But life in school ought not to be so uphill.
If we will stick with the Common Entrance Exam, and keep dreaming of equality in education we might consider allocation of the bright and not so bright to every single secondary school, so the initial better group might be an inspiration to the other; so both groups might have their self-esteem sustained because they share a common institution of which they can both be proud.
Perhaps we will obviate the circumstance then where the majority of a single institution will be disinclined to be the protectors and practitioners of standard English.
Perhaps in due course the greater number of us will come to acknowledge that we do not have the right to assault the ears of others with jagged noun and verb disagreement or compromise the sight of others with our crude constructions and inverse spelling.
