I went through uni in the early 80s, and my degree was one of the hardest things I've ever done, second only to a two week exercise in mid-summer in the mountainous terrain at the Singleton infantry centre. It was rigorous with added rigour to eliminate the weak and stupid, which it did.
But anyway...this is all infuriating, because engineers build things. Cars, bridges, roads. In my case, missile fire control radars. If engineers can't do maths and apply it to the world then cars crash, bridges fall down and missiles blow up ships.
If this shit continues then we will lose our civilisation, and that would be terrible because I like indoor plumbing, brought to us by the poor bastard civil engineers who do pipes and stuff.
I dunno how to solve this, but I hope someone does, otherwise we start going backwards, and that would be a very bad thing.
I must add that high speed digital sampling (ie A/D conversion of RF waveforms) was a big part of my professional career, as was the subsequent fast Fourier transformation of the data. The straight line cosine story simultaneously amused and saddened me as one of the best example of sampling frequency induced aliasing problems Ive ever heard of. An entire undergrad (Or maybe postgrad, these days by the sound of this shit) course could be built around that story. Meanwhile, Harry and Claude are in Valhalla, crying in their beer.
I'm going to get back at this but just wanted to say that this was obvious in our school system in the 1990s: ticking boxes and going through motions was replacing studying, learning and researching.
Then, it was a growing but still fringe trend in the fuzzier subjects. So no decision-maker wanted to listen since too many political holy cows would have had to be slaughtered.
Now, we have anything from 150 000 to 300 000 illiterates in the population. Percentage-wise, that's higher than rate of illiteracy was in the 15th century. A lot higher.
But here comes the worst, I think you skipped that point? Anyway:
Every teacher under age 40 is a product of this failing system. Think on the meaning of that - teachers who do not know and can't teach, but can only follow by rote what's in the course material handed down from on high.
I've been asked what it'd take to get me back in the classroom - as in I've been getting "elbow-invitations" as we say here, about part-time. My reply has been "Full autonomy in my classroom, where I am the one sole arbiter of how and what gets done. I say someone's out, they're out. No quibbling, no "but hesheit has a diagnosis comes from a foreign place whatever"-BS, no special pelading or cases."
I've spoken to other retired teachers about this and they have for the most part the same experience: tentative prodding from school leaders (because we can't say Rektor nowadays) about the Old Guard making a comeback, then immediate withdrawal of non-offers when people state their terms.
Part of me is sad, but the part of me that screamed about this 25 years ago?
There is, I think, a serious problem. It's part and parcel of the 'feminization' of things which prioritizes things like 'participation' and 'feeling good' over actual achievement and competition. If everyone 'succeeds', nobody does.
I first noted things were a bit on the wonk when my eldest daughter was trying choose her subjects for A level. These are subjects (usually 3 or 4) taken at the ages 16-18 which are taken to a higher level. Grades at these A levels determine university acceptance.
So I went to an 'open evening' put on by her school for the kids and parents to help them decide. Although physics wasn't really one of the things she was interested in I got talking to a physics teacher - the Head of Physics no less. He rather proudly told me that much of the mathematical content had been removed from the physics A level.
He probably twigged something was going a bit wrong as he was talking. I've never been very good at controlling my facial expressions and I must have been looking at him like I was listening to the village idiot.
When I finally said, so you've dumbed everything down, he got really quite annoyed. He tried to convince me that studying *more* things superficially was superior to studying fewer things at some depth. I was having none of it, of course.
I'm glad my daughter didn't choose to do physics 😂
Our dearest Provost (yes, THAT one: https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/blongleflipping-in-nardle-throbbleswitch) built his entire career on promoting the idea of "inclusive excellence", which helped him make our university into an even bigger joke than it already was. I'm still trying to figure out what, exactly, inclusive excellence means. You're either excellent or inclusive, no?
In a way, I can have a twinge of sympathy for the guy. He's been through the system, he did all the right motions, said all the right things, made obeisance to the gods of pedagogy and supplicated himself as a poppy that'd never grow too tall.
And then you come spoiling his self-image!
Yeah, we both understand the problem with teachers like that. Wanting to be wrong is essential in learning, I came to understand.
I've had so many arguments/bloody rows with friends in the field over this, the complete lack of ambition or interest in anything than just sermonising the words of the text.
"It's unfair to those without XYZ"
"We're not teaching facts, but understanding the subject"
"If we let the children do their own research, they will become little researchers!"
"The stress put upon kids these days is unimaginable to us!"
And so on and on and on - whatever excuse works for not having to /do the bloody job of a teacher/! My rebuttals were usually something along these lines:
"Unfair? So what? "Be all you can be", "Can do" and "He who dares, wins" are among the most fair morality/philosphical theses you can have. No matter your starting position, by following those you will improve, always."
"Understanding? If you don't have any facts then there's nothing to understand in the first place!"
"No, they will slack off and lose interest and put in the minimum acceptable level of work unless they have parents pushing them, because that is human nature!"
"Stress? Oh, I guess when grandma had to get up at 0400 to do chores before walking 5km to school in any kind of weather up here in the Sub-Arctic, that was a doozy compared to what inbred mongrel celebrity Y said about trashed-out fuck-hole celebrity X on InstaTok!?"
If you imagine foaming at the mouth and blodshot eyes on my part at this point, well it's not too far off.
Speaking of teaching and schools. One of my younger cousins is a teacher at the age 10-13 level. Her summary: "I'll stay at it until my youngest is out of compulsory school, and then if our economy allows I'll drop down to half-time work/half-time retirement."
Not a word on actual education, course content, et c. Her entire being just roared of "Stay the course, last it out".
Meanwhile, I'm having to help the younger doctors when I'm having my check-ups. I read a page while they are mouthing through the first paragraph, and I'm not talking about immigrant doctors behind on their Swedish. Oh, and national average IQ is at 90 now, if 1990 is set as base year with 100 IQ.
Too true: "No, they will slack off and lose interest and put in the minimum acceptable level of work unless they have parents pushing them, because that is human nature!"
The path of least resistance means there is a very fine line between efficiency and laziness. I have observed exactly this phenomenon in a non-state school setting - if teachers accept any standard, kids (most) will default to lowest acceptable level.
The irony is that overcoming difficulty provides the most fundamental learning.
If a dog gets a treat without doing the trick, next time you try to have it perform the trick, it'll refuse or do it sloppily, because you taught it a treat is coming anyway.
I said something to that effect when at the Teachers' College and was almost kicked out for it.
But look at dogs and their owners. The guy who trains every day - and 15 minutes is plenty enough for a domestic doggo - has a well-adjusted, calm and alert dog.
And the woman who doesn't has an unsufferable yapping little beast that's barely housebroken, if that.
And teaching humans is no different, really, it just comes with more steps.
I don't say that I have a solution and/or that the very opposite, a centralised well thought out strict curriculum for each subject and all with zero leeway for teachers to stray from it and from how its being taught, works better in practice (in theory it certainly does), but I have always had an outcome problem with your and most teachers attitude in that regard, not least through personal experience: you/most of them think that they are above average and therefore you/they think and want that total discretion.
But the obvious and negative outcome of this clearly flawed assumption and attitude is that education then becomes a total lottery, individually and for society: if you had a really good teacher+/=curriculum in a certain subject you win, if not and/or in other subjects, you, and society, lose.
I guess we have always had this conundrum, various mixes of discretions and more or less lottery-like outcomes, which of course also lead to the growth of and were embraced by private schools and universities, but with the standards just getting ever lower at all institutions and us/parents resigning to and parents now even demanding it as the quick fix, we should soon be at the limit of what society can cope with and see a thorough discussion and real, sensible reforms leading to higher standards and, ideally, less lottery-like outcomes again. If not, we're toast.
I would first draw a distinction between university and school. Although I was cast very much in the role of teacher at university I never really considered myself as one. At this level the school teaching model is not, in my view, appropriate. A sharp distinction needs to be drawn between school and universities. A university should not (again in my view) be seen as merely an extension of school, albeit at a higher level.
Above average? Oh yes definitely in terms of research capability. In terms of teaching ability? Not a chance.
Trying to force a bunch of super-nerdy geeks who have an intense passion and obsession for their subject and the expertise to advance knowledge in that subject to be some sort of 'super-teacher' is nuts. What we *can* do, however, is to give a stellar roadmap of what needs to be learned and to what level.
I don't know what the answers are here. I don't think you can build a 'system' that's going to work for everyone. There are always going to be winners and losers - and sometimes that's not going to be 'fair' or be the best for some specific student. Perhaps if we had infinite resources and an army of teaching assistants to assist us we might do better.
Agree on higher studies - they cannot be modelled the same way school is for young people.
1) Uni and such is voluntary, and this needs to be reinforced in discourse and debate - it is voluntary, it is on your dime and your time and you - the private individual - do not matter in the slightest to the tutors. You screw up or slack off or come unprepared? Your problem, sink or swim - this attitude must be brought back to academia, and that means de-feminising it. Think more football league-style competition, less village knitting circle equality.
2) School need to return to some roots: 5-7 is more about laying down the basics and having the kids learn to behave. Sit down, be quiet, raise your hand and wait your turn - and that's about all you really need. 7-15 is when you start cramming as much of each subject into them as you can. And for pity's sake, re-introduce scholarships based on achievements, for poorer kids.
3) Re-introduce practical subjects. Home economics, basic knowledge-stuff such as not mixing an Ammonia-based cleaning agent with a Chlorine-based one. How to dishes manually. How to cook and clean - and why! Et cetera.
4) Tie behaviour to privileges. Misbehave, and lose the privileges. F.e. introduce traffic law and driving theory at age 13, and driving lessons at age 14, and tie it to attendance and behaviour. Let the dross sort itself out, but:
5) Re-introduce a school for those kids (read: boys) who simply can't, won't or don't fit in normal school and make it a separate place. But do not use it as a dumping ground: use it as a reservoir for potential, but have these kids learn practical physical stuff. If they discover a need for study they can always go to remedial school for adults, which is point 6:
Remedial school for adults. So you bungled school and now you can't land a job counting ducks? Come to remedial shool. You get your dole for going and you get to learn a trade (including getting necessary licenses).
---
I could go on, but those are some things I do know work - because all of them are things that were removed from our school system from the 1960s to present and every time one of them was removed, the system stuttered and tottered even worse.
Oh, and no "migrants learning their mother tongue"-courses. Extra hours learning the language, history and culture of their alleged new homeland, yes. Anything to do with their "racial background" is for their families to care about. Natives learning their regional dialect-languages, yes - and make that mandatory. Compulsory Welsh may sound like a cruel and unusual punishment (if you think Welsh sounds 'special', you ought to hear Gutemål or Listerländska) but if a people loses its language, it ceases to exist.
Which of course is the point of /not/ letting migrants keep theirs, unless they do it on their own dime and time, which they generally speaking won't - this is using the "path of least resistance" for a good cause, pedagogically speaking.
I need autonomy in my teaching, because no school politician or board of educators or somesuch is as competent in my subjects (barring individuals with actual and relevant expertise in said subjects), nor have they any teaching experience (barring the odd exception) and none of them have to face a class of today's young on a daily basis - and I'm including parents in the above.
As I often tell non-teachers who think they know how to fix education: I don't tell my dentist how to do his job. But I do ask him about anything I feel I need to understand.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Certainly ask and challenge and engage - it improves teaching and teachers (and people who object to parents doing that aren't fit to work in education), but don't ever assume your personal experiences as a student amount to any real knowledge of what teaching is like, not anymore than having bad teeth make you a dentist.
I for one am certainly up for giving teachers exams in their subjects on a regular (bi-annual?) basis, and have said so numerous times, to the consternation of colleagues. Especially when I've pointed to textbooks from a century ago and how they correspond to textbooks on the same subject today. What was taught to ten-year-olds in 1925 is today at the 15-20 age level.
Or this: in the 1970s and 1980s, giving a student (say age 10) two weeks to read a novel and write report was normal. Anyone failing to do that was either retarded or lazy. And I mean one novel every two weeks per semester. Now, one novel per semester is asking too much.
So - autonomy in my classroom, and a set of fixed goals or bars for entry too, plus scaled and relative grading, on a national level, including for teachers, and a ban on people without a solid background in education - i.e. "ten years before the catheder" - holding any kind of decision-making position when it comes to schools. Make it six-eight years of compulsory state schooling (not as today's DEI-inoctrination obviously) with 2-4 years optional, either vocational/professional or prep for academia/higher studies, and include a two-year option for starting to work at age 15 as a kind of sabbatical while hormones and such work themselves out. Because I think mucking about doing real labour for a spell sorts out the mind wonderously for most teenagers, especially the boys.
Now take everything you said, multiply it by 10xE9 and you have teaching in the ChatGPT era. Trust me, I miss the good ol' days when students only over-relied on calculators. Now you can type in almost any standard college level math(s) or physics question and get an immediate, mostly decent answer with zero human intervention. At least back in the day the students had to know what numbers to put in the calculator. We are still trying to adapt but it's like an arms race.
And don't even get me started on rampant cheating made possible with smart phones, smart watches and Google glasses.
As we say : Artificial intelligence is no substitute for natural stupidity. Or is it?
Oh heck - I hadn't appreciated it was being used to answer physics problems. Not sure why it wouldn't be - a kind of blind spot on my part.
This is very worrying. I suspect the only answer will be to go full-on medieval and require everything to be handwritten (feather quills just for style) in the presence of a stern adjudicator carrying a flail.
Which is, incidentally, exactly what we do (sans feather quills - hard to get and rather messy, and flail - strictly illegal albeit highly desired at times). They find ways around it too. These bastards are smart when they want to - if only they put this much effort in studying!
A bit shocked not even STEM seems immune. Do your colkeagues at UK unis report similar declining standards or less pronounced? How about your alma mater and your own studies, how does 1985 compare with 2025?
A complementary post (yesterday) on horrors of AI in american(?) universities
At my old undergraduate university they have done (still do?) an assessment test for every new intake. The test was given in the first 2-3 days after you arrived at the university. This is not part of any final grade, it's so that they can get an idea of any weaknesses they need to address in the first couple of terms.
This test hasn't changed for decades. I don't know whether they still do it.
When I was some way into my career I returned to my alma mater to give a lecture on some of the research I'd done. One of my old lecturers, who had become the department head by that time, told me that the marks on this test had been steadily declining over the course of 3 decades and certain sharp jumps (downward) could be correlated with specific changes in educational policy. Correlation is, of course, not causation, but it certainly makes you think.
His view was that student standards had greatly declined. This was over 20 years ago so I dread to think what's happened if this downward trajectory has continued.
I hope it is the case you were simply looking in the wrong place for future scientists and engineers. The "loss of trust in institutions" is widely discussed and the public schools and the university systems are definitely in the "loss of trust" category. I do have to wonder exactly where they are going to learn calc II, but for topics of that sort--that have been skillfully taught for many, many decades--there are pretty good lectures on YouTube. I hate to think that YouTube is where the next generation of engineers is, but who wants to bet whether an 18 year old will learn that topic better at university or on YouTube?
Well Jesus Fucking Christ, I'm pissed and amazed.
I went through uni in the early 80s, and my degree was one of the hardest things I've ever done, second only to a two week exercise in mid-summer in the mountainous terrain at the Singleton infantry centre. It was rigorous with added rigour to eliminate the weak and stupid, which it did.
But anyway...this is all infuriating, because engineers build things. Cars, bridges, roads. In my case, missile fire control radars. If engineers can't do maths and apply it to the world then cars crash, bridges fall down and missiles blow up ships.
If this shit continues then we will lose our civilisation, and that would be terrible because I like indoor plumbing, brought to us by the poor bastard civil engineers who do pipes and stuff.
I dunno how to solve this, but I hope someone does, otherwise we start going backwards, and that would be a very bad thing.
I must add that high speed digital sampling (ie A/D conversion of RF waveforms) was a big part of my professional career, as was the subsequent fast Fourier transformation of the data. The straight line cosine story simultaneously amused and saddened me as one of the best example of sampling frequency induced aliasing problems Ive ever heard of. An entire undergrad (Or maybe postgrad, these days by the sound of this shit) course could be built around that story. Meanwhile, Harry and Claude are in Valhalla, crying in their beer.
I'm going to get back at this but just wanted to say that this was obvious in our school system in the 1990s: ticking boxes and going through motions was replacing studying, learning and researching.
Then, it was a growing but still fringe trend in the fuzzier subjects. So no decision-maker wanted to listen since too many political holy cows would have had to be slaughtered.
Now, we have anything from 150 000 to 300 000 illiterates in the population. Percentage-wise, that's higher than rate of illiteracy was in the 15th century. A lot higher.
But here comes the worst, I think you skipped that point? Anyway:
Every teacher under age 40 is a product of this failing system. Think on the meaning of that - teachers who do not know and can't teach, but can only follow by rote what's in the course material handed down from on high.
I've been asked what it'd take to get me back in the classroom - as in I've been getting "elbow-invitations" as we say here, about part-time. My reply has been "Full autonomy in my classroom, where I am the one sole arbiter of how and what gets done. I say someone's out, they're out. No quibbling, no "but hesheit has a diagnosis comes from a foreign place whatever"-BS, no special pelading or cases."
I've spoken to other retired teachers about this and they have for the most part the same experience: tentative prodding from school leaders (because we can't say Rektor nowadays) about the Old Guard making a comeback, then immediate withdrawal of non-offers when people state their terms.
Part of me is sad, but the part of me that screamed about this 25 years ago?
Is laughing like a hyena.
There is, I think, a serious problem. It's part and parcel of the 'feminization' of things which prioritizes things like 'participation' and 'feeling good' over actual achievement and competition. If everyone 'succeeds', nobody does.
I first noted things were a bit on the wonk when my eldest daughter was trying choose her subjects for A level. These are subjects (usually 3 or 4) taken at the ages 16-18 which are taken to a higher level. Grades at these A levels determine university acceptance.
So I went to an 'open evening' put on by her school for the kids and parents to help them decide. Although physics wasn't really one of the things she was interested in I got talking to a physics teacher - the Head of Physics no less. He rather proudly told me that much of the mathematical content had been removed from the physics A level.
He probably twigged something was going a bit wrong as he was talking. I've never been very good at controlling my facial expressions and I must have been looking at him like I was listening to the village idiot.
When I finally said, so you've dumbed everything down, he got really quite annoyed. He tried to convince me that studying *more* things superficially was superior to studying fewer things at some depth. I was having none of it, of course.
I'm glad my daughter didn't choose to do physics 😂
Our dearest Provost (yes, THAT one: https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/blongleflipping-in-nardle-throbbleswitch) built his entire career on promoting the idea of "inclusive excellence", which helped him make our university into an even bigger joke than it already was. I'm still trying to figure out what, exactly, inclusive excellence means. You're either excellent or inclusive, no?
In a way, I can have a twinge of sympathy for the guy. He's been through the system, he did all the right motions, said all the right things, made obeisance to the gods of pedagogy and supplicated himself as a poppy that'd never grow too tall.
And then you come spoiling his self-image!
Yeah, we both understand the problem with teachers like that. Wanting to be wrong is essential in learning, I came to understand.
I've had so many arguments/bloody rows with friends in the field over this, the complete lack of ambition or interest in anything than just sermonising the words of the text.
"It's unfair to those without XYZ"
"We're not teaching facts, but understanding the subject"
"If we let the children do their own research, they will become little researchers!"
"The stress put upon kids these days is unimaginable to us!"
And so on and on and on - whatever excuse works for not having to /do the bloody job of a teacher/! My rebuttals were usually something along these lines:
"Unfair? So what? "Be all you can be", "Can do" and "He who dares, wins" are among the most fair morality/philosphical theses you can have. No matter your starting position, by following those you will improve, always."
"Understanding? If you don't have any facts then there's nothing to understand in the first place!"
"No, they will slack off and lose interest and put in the minimum acceptable level of work unless they have parents pushing them, because that is human nature!"
"Stress? Oh, I guess when grandma had to get up at 0400 to do chores before walking 5km to school in any kind of weather up here in the Sub-Arctic, that was a doozy compared to what inbred mongrel celebrity Y said about trashed-out fuck-hole celebrity X on InstaTok!?"
If you imagine foaming at the mouth and blodshot eyes on my part at this point, well it's not too far off.
Speaking of teaching and schools. One of my younger cousins is a teacher at the age 10-13 level. Her summary: "I'll stay at it until my youngest is out of compulsory school, and then if our economy allows I'll drop down to half-time work/half-time retirement."
Not a word on actual education, course content, et c. Her entire being just roared of "Stay the course, last it out".
Meanwhile, I'm having to help the younger doctors when I'm having my check-ups. I read a page while they are mouthing through the first paragraph, and I'm not talking about immigrant doctors behind on their Swedish. Oh, and national average IQ is at 90 now, if 1990 is set as base year with 100 IQ.
Too true: "No, they will slack off and lose interest and put in the minimum acceptable level of work unless they have parents pushing them, because that is human nature!"
The path of least resistance means there is a very fine line between efficiency and laziness. I have observed exactly this phenomenon in a non-state school setting - if teachers accept any standard, kids (most) will default to lowest acceptable level.
The irony is that overcoming difficulty provides the most fundamental learning.
If a dog gets a treat without doing the trick, next time you try to have it perform the trick, it'll refuse or do it sloppily, because you taught it a treat is coming anyway.
I said something to that effect when at the Teachers' College and was almost kicked out for it.
But look at dogs and their owners. The guy who trains every day - and 15 minutes is plenty enough for a domestic doggo - has a well-adjusted, calm and alert dog.
And the woman who doesn't has an unsufferable yapping little beast that's barely housebroken, if that.
And teaching humans is no different, really, it just comes with more steps.
I don't say that I have a solution and/or that the very opposite, a centralised well thought out strict curriculum for each subject and all with zero leeway for teachers to stray from it and from how its being taught, works better in practice (in theory it certainly does), but I have always had an outcome problem with your and most teachers attitude in that regard, not least through personal experience: you/most of them think that they are above average and therefore you/they think and want that total discretion.
But the obvious and negative outcome of this clearly flawed assumption and attitude is that education then becomes a total lottery, individually and for society: if you had a really good teacher+/=curriculum in a certain subject you win, if not and/or in other subjects, you, and society, lose.
I guess we have always had this conundrum, various mixes of discretions and more or less lottery-like outcomes, which of course also lead to the growth of and were embraced by private schools and universities, but with the standards just getting ever lower at all institutions and us/parents resigning to and parents now even demanding it as the quick fix, we should soon be at the limit of what society can cope with and see a thorough discussion and real, sensible reforms leading to higher standards and, ideally, less lottery-like outcomes again. If not, we're toast.
Interesting questions.
I would first draw a distinction between university and school. Although I was cast very much in the role of teacher at university I never really considered myself as one. At this level the school teaching model is not, in my view, appropriate. A sharp distinction needs to be drawn between school and universities. A university should not (again in my view) be seen as merely an extension of school, albeit at a higher level.
Above average? Oh yes definitely in terms of research capability. In terms of teaching ability? Not a chance.
Trying to force a bunch of super-nerdy geeks who have an intense passion and obsession for their subject and the expertise to advance knowledge in that subject to be some sort of 'super-teacher' is nuts. What we *can* do, however, is to give a stellar roadmap of what needs to be learned and to what level.
I don't know what the answers are here. I don't think you can build a 'system' that's going to work for everyone. There are always going to be winners and losers - and sometimes that's not going to be 'fair' or be the best for some specific student. Perhaps if we had infinite resources and an army of teaching assistants to assist us we might do better.
Agree on higher studies - they cannot be modelled the same way school is for young people.
1) Uni and such is voluntary, and this needs to be reinforced in discourse and debate - it is voluntary, it is on your dime and your time and you - the private individual - do not matter in the slightest to the tutors. You screw up or slack off or come unprepared? Your problem, sink or swim - this attitude must be brought back to academia, and that means de-feminising it. Think more football league-style competition, less village knitting circle equality.
2) School need to return to some roots: 5-7 is more about laying down the basics and having the kids learn to behave. Sit down, be quiet, raise your hand and wait your turn - and that's about all you really need. 7-15 is when you start cramming as much of each subject into them as you can. And for pity's sake, re-introduce scholarships based on achievements, for poorer kids.
3) Re-introduce practical subjects. Home economics, basic knowledge-stuff such as not mixing an Ammonia-based cleaning agent with a Chlorine-based one. How to dishes manually. How to cook and clean - and why! Et cetera.
4) Tie behaviour to privileges. Misbehave, and lose the privileges. F.e. introduce traffic law and driving theory at age 13, and driving lessons at age 14, and tie it to attendance and behaviour. Let the dross sort itself out, but:
5) Re-introduce a school for those kids (read: boys) who simply can't, won't or don't fit in normal school and make it a separate place. But do not use it as a dumping ground: use it as a reservoir for potential, but have these kids learn practical physical stuff. If they discover a need for study they can always go to remedial school for adults, which is point 6:
Remedial school for adults. So you bungled school and now you can't land a job counting ducks? Come to remedial shool. You get your dole for going and you get to learn a trade (including getting necessary licenses).
---
I could go on, but those are some things I do know work - because all of them are things that were removed from our school system from the 1960s to present and every time one of them was removed, the system stuttered and tottered even worse.
Oh, and no "migrants learning their mother tongue"-courses. Extra hours learning the language, history and culture of their alleged new homeland, yes. Anything to do with their "racial background" is for their families to care about. Natives learning their regional dialect-languages, yes - and make that mandatory. Compulsory Welsh may sound like a cruel and unusual punishment (if you think Welsh sounds 'special', you ought to hear Gutemål or Listerländska) but if a people loses its language, it ceases to exist.
Which of course is the point of /not/ letting migrants keep theirs, unless they do it on their own dime and time, which they generally speaking won't - this is using the "path of least resistance" for a good cause, pedagogically speaking.
Excellent stuff 👍
We need both.
I need autonomy in my teaching, because no school politician or board of educators or somesuch is as competent in my subjects (barring individuals with actual and relevant expertise in said subjects), nor have they any teaching experience (barring the odd exception) and none of them have to face a class of today's young on a daily basis - and I'm including parents in the above.
As I often tell non-teachers who think they know how to fix education: I don't tell my dentist how to do his job. But I do ask him about anything I feel I need to understand.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Certainly ask and challenge and engage - it improves teaching and teachers (and people who object to parents doing that aren't fit to work in education), but don't ever assume your personal experiences as a student amount to any real knowledge of what teaching is like, not anymore than having bad teeth make you a dentist.
I for one am certainly up for giving teachers exams in their subjects on a regular (bi-annual?) basis, and have said so numerous times, to the consternation of colleagues. Especially when I've pointed to textbooks from a century ago and how they correspond to textbooks on the same subject today. What was taught to ten-year-olds in 1925 is today at the 15-20 age level.
Or this: in the 1970s and 1980s, giving a student (say age 10) two weeks to read a novel and write report was normal. Anyone failing to do that was either retarded or lazy. And I mean one novel every two weeks per semester. Now, one novel per semester is asking too much.
So - autonomy in my classroom, and a set of fixed goals or bars for entry too, plus scaled and relative grading, on a national level, including for teachers, and a ban on people without a solid background in education - i.e. "ten years before the catheder" - holding any kind of decision-making position when it comes to schools. Make it six-eight years of compulsory state schooling (not as today's DEI-inoctrination obviously) with 2-4 years optional, either vocational/professional or prep for academia/higher studies, and include a two-year option for starting to work at age 15 as a kind of sabbatical while hormones and such work themselves out. Because I think mucking about doing real labour for a spell sorts out the mind wonderously for most teenagers, especially the boys.
Now take everything you said, multiply it by 10xE9 and you have teaching in the ChatGPT era. Trust me, I miss the good ol' days when students only over-relied on calculators. Now you can type in almost any standard college level math(s) or physics question and get an immediate, mostly decent answer with zero human intervention. At least back in the day the students had to know what numbers to put in the calculator. We are still trying to adapt but it's like an arms race.
And don't even get me started on rampant cheating made possible with smart phones, smart watches and Google glasses.
As we say : Artificial intelligence is no substitute for natural stupidity. Or is it?
Oh heck - I hadn't appreciated it was being used to answer physics problems. Not sure why it wouldn't be - a kind of blind spot on my part.
This is very worrying. I suspect the only answer will be to go full-on medieval and require everything to be handwritten (feather quills just for style) in the presence of a stern adjudicator carrying a flail.
Which is, incidentally, exactly what we do (sans feather quills - hard to get and rather messy, and flail - strictly illegal albeit highly desired at times). They find ways around it too. These bastards are smart when they want to - if only they put this much effort in studying!
What will happen with AI? If you think they're stupid now, just wait.
Thanks for this post.
A bit shocked not even STEM seems immune. Do your colkeagues at UK unis report similar declining standards or less pronounced? How about your alma mater and your own studies, how does 1985 compare with 2025?
A complementary post (yesterday) on horrors of AI in american(?) universities
https://open.substack.com/pub/iainmcgilchrist/p/quantity-kills
At my old undergraduate university they have done (still do?) an assessment test for every new intake. The test was given in the first 2-3 days after you arrived at the university. This is not part of any final grade, it's so that they can get an idea of any weaknesses they need to address in the first couple of terms.
This test hasn't changed for decades. I don't know whether they still do it.
When I was some way into my career I returned to my alma mater to give a lecture on some of the research I'd done. One of my old lecturers, who had become the department head by that time, told me that the marks on this test had been steadily declining over the course of 3 decades and certain sharp jumps (downward) could be correlated with specific changes in educational policy. Correlation is, of course, not causation, but it certainly makes you think.
His view was that student standards had greatly declined. This was over 20 years ago so I dread to think what's happened if this downward trajectory has continued.
I hope it is the case you were simply looking in the wrong place for future scientists and engineers. The "loss of trust in institutions" is widely discussed and the public schools and the university systems are definitely in the "loss of trust" category. I do have to wonder exactly where they are going to learn calc II, but for topics of that sort--that have been skillfully taught for many, many decades--there are pretty good lectures on YouTube. I hate to think that YouTube is where the next generation of engineers is, but who wants to bet whether an 18 year old will learn that topic better at university or on YouTube?