A Society Slip or Just a Good System?

I'm at a great age where nothing ever seems to surprise me. I've not seen enough to be able to call myself 'experienced' but at the same time, I've got my senses switched to 'alert' permanently so I'm always aware of change. The reason why I say this is that I had lost faith in kids. I may well be young but (legally - yes it was only a matter of time before I started to do that) I'm an adult and certainly mature enough to look upon minors with a critical eye. I probably started to do this in the last couple of years of high school when I went from 4th year to being grown up in the space of a summer (the same of which can't be said for all of my peers though). You return to school with your shirt and tie on and (especially in 6th year) you feel so much older than all of the younger students. I can only vaguely remember being in 1st year, no recollection of 2nd year and then 3rd and 4th just melted into one big multiple choice exam. The last two years of high school are the ones that mean something to me and one of the reasons is that I was able to 'look down' as it were, on the lower year groups. I flag this because of a news report I saw on the TV last week about the number of modern language assistants in Scotland being reduced to save money. A few students were asked their views on the matter and one of them made me sit up in my seat. He said that his language assistant actually taught him the subject instead of showing him just how to pass the exam - faith restored in a single 10 second clip. In general, we are taught how to pass exams and nothing beyond that: I give you my first 'World on Wednesday' post.

For those of you that have been reading this blog for the last year and a bit, I think it's fair to say that I'm very proud of my achievements at school. This being the case, why am I having a go at the system? Does that not belittle my own achievements? Well yes it does but you have to play the game - if you don't then you lose out in life. I can still remember revising for my Standard Grades, Highers and Advanced Highers in very much the same way. The content may have increased in complexity and the volume of stuff to learn might have been night and day, but the method was very much the same. My favourite method (and it remains so to this day) is doing past papers, learning how to answer different styles of question before sitting down in the exam to do it with different words, numbers, pictures etc. This was exaggerated by the tests that we were given to do in maths to get through the course: we would be given a practice test, we would then go over the answers to that test with the teacher before being given the same test paper but with sightly different numbers - talk about being spoon fed. 

But how can I complain!? If I've said or done anything in the last couple of weeks that has annoyed anyone slightly, I must be slowly pushing them over the edge into hatred with this post. Basically what I am saying is 'I've done well, but it's still crap'. The funny thing is that I'm still doing it at university. In preparation for my first law exams I did past paper work but the funny thing was that they don't give us answers here - they just have a question bank. If you cover enough of the past papers you end up seeing some over-lapping: Alf becomes Andy, Bert becomes Billy and Colin becomes Chris - same scenario, different fictional people. However the difference with university is that we are told that we can think for ourselves. In fact we get very little choice in the matter and I love it. Never have we been asked what we think or how we would approach a question. We've always been told 'this is how you do it and if you do it that way, you'll pass'. Here we get information and then what we do with it is our own choice - it makes more sense.

So what should we call this: spoon-feeding or walking the line? I think that the latter is more fitting because it is more or less what all of us do every day of our lives. Getting told that passing this exam and doing well in that essay will get us a good job is brilliant. From that I understand this: if I learn how to write an exam a particular way and compose an essay well then I'll get a good job - I like it! We all know people that have jumped off the line, realised it's not all that great out there and then watched them stagger back on - but never very well. A simple fact of our society is that if you walk the line and do as your told, you'll generally do well. Some people get away with getting off the line but those are the people that have had the guts to jump so far that they can't even see the line - it just doesn't exist to them. However the majority of us have to do things the same as anyone everyone else otherwise we lose out - it's sad, but it works and for that reason we can't complain.

I don't know if someone made a mistake along the line but somehow I doubt it. Exams are the best (and potentially the only) method of finding out how good people are at something. The only problem is that the more savvy and bright people have worked out that if you learn how to do a question once, you can sit down in an exam hall and do it again with your eyes closed without really having to learn anything - I can remember no Advanced Higher maths but still did well. Maybe this is a study technique that some people haven't picked up on and to those people I say 'start doing it now' - you will pass exams and you will move up the line.

Thanks for reading,

Martin