Coffee Lover has a brilliant rant on Media Studies and other so-called “Mickey Mouse degrees”. The thing is, as far as I could ever tell, Media Studies is exactly the same as English, except that it uses film and television instead of books. Yet Media Studies is a Mickey Mouse course, while if fewer people take English it’s the end of civilisation as we know it?! What is it if you pass an English degree anyway? Proof that you like reading novels? A-woo hoo for you!

If you’ve ever wondered why more and more pupils are passing exams, yet the British public remains as boneheaded as ever, you need look no further than this report.

Too many schools are “teaching to the test” in mathematics, stifling genuinely stimulating thinking about the subject, a report suggests.

The report is wrong. In actual fact, every school “teaches to the test” in every subject. There is no genuinely stimulating thinking about any subject going on in schools. That is the inevitable consequence of having exams.

I am going to use the example of one subject here, but you could talk about all of them. Looking back at school, none of us learned any physics. We were all taught how to pass a physics exam. And when you’re being just about constantly tested from the start of school to the end that can take up a lot of time. It took up so much time that there wasn’t any time to actually learn physics. All our effort was geared towards passing the exam at the expense of actually learning something.

I’m not complaining. As I said, it’s inevitable when all that matters is not what you learn but the grade that’s printed on a piece of paper. As a result, pupils only want to pass the exams and teachers only want the pupils to pass the exams. It is not at all unusual for a pupil (or a student at university) to ask, “Do we need to know this for the exam?” And it’s not unusual for a teacher to say, “You don’t need to know why this is the case. You just need to remember it for the exam.” You can’t blame pupils or teachers for that.

It might not be such a problem if there was only the summer exam to worry about, but some wise guy invented the Unit Assessment, which are spread out across the entire year. And then there are prelims. The whole school year is geared up towards these peaks of activity and there is no time to worry about anything else.

It’s not just about drumming home the parts of a subject that are in the curriculum. There is the dark art of question spotting. At my school the Modern Studies department seemed particularly fond of this, but they all did it. Teachers study past papers and try to find patterns. They’ll work out which questions are most likely to be asked. If a question wasn’t asked last year but has been asked on a few previous occasions, the question is likely to come up again. Questions that were asked last year are unlikely to come up this year unless they are asked every year. And so on. This is the stuff we were taught at school!

And then there are appeals. Never mind if you mess up the final exam — we have enough prelims and coursework to appeal for an increased grade! My old school is number one in the country for appeals. It made 800 appeals for Standard Grades and Highers in two years. I had my Computing Higher grade raised from a C to an A, even though I underperformed in Computing all year and I can’t remember ever getting an A in any Computing exam.

But until some really clever person can devise a way of proving that people have learned a lot about a subject without having to examine them, this sort of business is inevitable.

I haven’t bothered reading very much about the Power Inquiry because I’ve heard from some that it’s pretty much predictable stuff (“a bit like a reformers greatest hits album”) and from others that it’s not actually that good. Besideswhich, there have been several reports that have made obvious common sense suggestions for electoral reform which have all been ignored by Labour, so there’s no reason to believe why this new one should be any reason to get optimistic.

But I was interested by this post on Jawbox about the votes at 16 idea. Ben Phillips is, if I remember correctly, not yet old enough to vote (please correct me if this is wrong) and it is intriguing that he is not in favour of lowering the voting age.

Before I hit 18 I was in favour of votes at 16, but now I’m not so sure. (And the steady journey to becoming an old Tory codger continues apace.) Of course, it all looks very different when you’re on the other side of the barrier. I know little about it, although I guess fewer men than women were in favour of women’s suffrage, and so on.

Ben is worried that sixteen year olds are more likely to vote BNP or just vote for who their parents tell them to because they’re more impressionable. It’s a good point, although I would have thought that people will always tend to vote the way their parents did, often because of shared heritage, socioeconomic reasons and so on. I probably began disagreeing with my parents at the age of about 14, and today at 19 I probably spend more time disagreeing than agreeing with him. But we’re all different. It’s difficult to believe, though, that people will turn 18 and all of a sudden at the click of your fingers they will no longer vote BNP or just blindly follow their parents.

By the same token, though, there is no reason why that should be the case at 16 either. I also agree with Ben that if a youngster is going to be interested in current affairs and politics, he’s going to be interested anyway, regardless of whether they get to vote at 16, 18, 21 or 6.

18-year-olds are pretty impressionable as well though. There are many who think that the voting age should be set at 21, and at times it’s easy to see why. At university it is difficult to encounter anybody who isn’t busy trying to have the most trendy and right-on political views. Indeed, Edinburgh students have just voted in that enormous bore Mark “Who? (Green list MSP)” Ballard as rector, presumably because he’s a Green, and that’s trendy and right-on.

Does this make their opinions worthless though? Of course it doesn’t. So where should the age limit be set? I really don’t know. I would probably still say 16. But I think the age itself isn’t so important. Growing up, it’s difficult to know when you become an adult. At 16 you can get married (in Scotland at least), are expected to be responsible enough to raise a child, make the decision to smoke yourself to death, and be sent off to fight a war by a government that you haven’t voted for. At 17 you’re let loose on the roads. At 18 you can vote, but there are still many rights yet to be granted.

Moreover, sixteen-year-olds are unique because they have direct experience of one of politics’ greatest hot potatoes, education. By that age, people take their education pretty seriously, so it’s fair to say that they would vote sensibly on the issue according to what they perceive to be their best interests. These are the people that are really affected by education policies, so why are they given the right to vote as soon as they leave school?

That’s why I think 16 is probably right on balance. But who am I to say that the age limits for marrying, smoking, etc, shouldn’t be raised to 18? I’m not all that fussed about it any more — but then it’s easy to say that standing on this side of the barrier.

The Scottish Executive’s Fucking Stupid Initiative.

Somebody has written an open letter to the Kansas School Board.

I am writing you with much concern after I read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design [Biblical Creationism tarted up in scientific dress] to be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design..

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him…

Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power…

Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia…

But, as they say, “read the whole thing”!

Via Boing Boing.