f:\doc\web\98\08\britstw.txt (to nboag, can you tell us more about the old British system, and how it compares to the German and proposed US system?) This is from an affirmative action thread, about the dumbing down of what used to be restricted to the few who worked really, really hard to get an engineering degree in Britain. These are the guys who came up with the Harrier Jump Jet, Concorde SST, the hovercraft, Land Rover, and just about anything else the Americans didn't get around to inventing. The upstream group is normally about un-pc issues like intelligence and race, but seeing as how I've jumped into ed reform from this field, I'd like to invite others to move into the latest frontier of Marxism that seeks to put an end to "educational" classes, and promises that "all will succeed". The British used to follow an a apprenticeship track like Germany - it has since been ABANDONED, like Germany it was also based on using a test to track students NOT hold all students to one "high standard". More evidence that the USA through School To Work seeks to emulate a dinosaur of an age when it was assumed only a few could complete an academic high school program to grade 12 or 13. For those not familiar with School To Work, it is the brainchild of Mark Tucker of the National Center for the Economy and Education who has married the head of the German apprenticeship system with the body of outcome based education. All students will be required to pass a performance-based subjectively scored essay test to get a Certificate of Mastery which insures that "all will meet the highest standards of any industrial nation" at age 16. The passing standard is set by a committee of experts that knows just how high students will be expected to perform. All students will have work experience and academics geared towards a pre-chosen career field, and there will be no more remedial or college tracking. In its original proposal, those who passed would be able to take grades 11 and 12, and get 2 free years of college and live happily ever after with high skill, high wage jobs. If you didn't pass.... well, everybody is going to pass, right? Every person will graduate from high school at the level of the average German or Japanese. Currently school turn out a wide range of ability, and the only tests that really matter are college placement tests like the SAT and ACT which do not set any pass point - each college sets its own "standards". Problem is most states piloting such tests are flunking 50-80% of those who take these tests, and 4th grade tests commonly are filled with middle and high school level problems, the 10th grade tests have been spotted with problems taken from advanced placement college tests. Most states and school districts have adopted this model even though there is no evidence that it works even as well as what we have, and the German model has produced massive unemployment as youth are all trained for the same 10 job categories (construction, janitorial work) that immigrants will do without any training for 1/3 the money. No one is aware that national standards in Germany and Japan do NOT specify a universial proficiency level, but they use testing to sort students between high schools for the academically incompetent, the merely average, and those good enough for university, and even the Japanese and Germans turn out stupid people who can't write. Lots of them. But nobody bothered to check Marc Tuckers homework. Here's the passage of interest: ... Although it has been since abandoned, the British had a system whereby, at the age of eleven, the children were required to take what amounted to an IQ test. Those who passed went on to seven more years of rigorous academic training, the best of them subsequently admitted to university, depending on the results of national examinations. ********THIS WAS BRITISH STW ************************** The students who didn't pass the 'eleven plus', as it was called, were given five more years of school and left at the age of sixteen to pursue apprenticeships in the trades. ***************************************** Streaming was continued in high school, with gradations of the difficulty of the subject matter being dependent on which of three streams the pupils were assigned to. ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date forwarded: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 13:14:31 -0400 (EDT) From: NBoag@aol.com Date sent: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 13:06:22 EDT To: upstream-list@cycad.com Subject: Re: [Upstream] Fw: affirmative action Forwarded by: upstream-list@cycad.com Send reply to: upstream-list@cycad.com So what else is new Patricia? The piece by Mr. O'Connell is remarkable inasmuch as he seems to have just discovered what has been going on in American academia for the last fifteen years. I am a fifty-eight year-old engineer who graduated from a middle-of-the-road British university with a degree in mechanical engineering, nearly forty years ago. This was in the days before solid state anything, most particularly handheld calculators. We used a slide rule for calculations, and, if the answer was to be defined with any degree of accuracy, four or six figure logarithmic tables were used. Before I was admitted to the university, I had to pass very rigorous examinations; this also was before the spread of radical egalitarianism, conventional wisdom being that only the most intelligent ten percent of the population were capable of attaining an engineering degree. My freshman class consisted of about eighty students, my sophomore of about thirty-five. The first year coursework and examinations were the hardest, a very effective way for the school to cull potential failures at the earliest opportunity. I think that about twenty-five of us finally graduated. There was a reason for the university to be so selective -- the government, for four years, paid all of my tuition, bought all of my books, paid for my traveling expenses, and gave me a small stipend to live on. It wasn't much, and I ate a lot of beans, but when you are working that hard and sleeping that little, you don't care what you are eating. There were no elective courses, one was given a syllabus at the beginning of one's admittance to the university, and that was what you were going to be studying for the next four years. I say four years, because failing any of the final exams at the end of each year would most likely mean transfer to a less demanding course which would not result in the conferrence of a degree. There was no such thing as a 'five year degree' -- either you completed it in four years, or you did not complete it. There was nothing but hard science courses during the entire four years, and the concept of 'remedial reading' or 'remedial arithmetic' would have been unthinkable. Liberal arts majors may look askance at the lack of any humanities courses, but the attitude of the university was that if you wanted to study English or history, or sociology, do it somewhere else because four years is hardly long enough to cover all the subjects matter that comprised an engineering degree. During my first year I studied the following subjects for the entire period; chemistry, physics, electrotechnology, mathematics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, strength of materials, and metallurgy. I should note here that this was also before the invention of the word processor, which meant all lab reports notes, etc., had to handwritten, with fountain pens, no less. I had to learn to type in my late forties when it became apparent to me that it was necessary for both my work and my personal correspondence. I have always been amused at the American passion for sports that extends into the university, entailing the arrangement that students can be admitted on the basis of their athletic prowess, and take the place of a more academically gifted student. At the university that I attended, there were student associations, but the engineering students rarely joined them, being usually distinguished by the heavy bags under their eyes. Two of my fellow classmates had nervous breakdowns during the four years that I was in attendance, and they never acquired their degrees. Obtaining that degree was the hardest thing that I had ever done in my life, and looking back I have never regretted it. During the intervening years of working in the US, I have observed that the few good engineers that I have worked with have been very good, whereas the majority have been fairly mediocre. The most noticeable thing about the mediocre ones has been the lack of basic knowledge, the fundamentals of engineering and applied mathematics, and the more recent their graduation date, the more pronounced the deficiency. During conversations with my younger contemporaries at work, it is most apparent that there have been two major causes most responsible for the decline, i.e., the 'dumbing down' of courses, and the use of the handheld calculator. (Television comes a close third -- my fellow engineers all know who the actors are on 'Baywatch,' but very few of the them have heard of Rene Descartes or Daniel Bernoulli.) I have just finished a short course teaching at a private junior college, and my observations regarding 'dumbing down' were confirmed during the initial assessment of the educational level of my pupils. Although all of them were high school graduates, their level of arithmetic knowledge was where mine was at the age of thirteen or fourteen. The worst of them had an understanding of arithmetic that equaled mine when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I had to resist the impulse to correct them when they referred to the coursework as 'mathematics', which to me means the calculus of variations, analysis, and more advanced topics. My students constantly had to refer to their calculators to perform the most trivial arithmetic calculations that really belonged in the realm of mental arithmetic. None of them had any facility for mental arithmetic, and if their calculators displayed, due to an erroneous entry, the most ludicrous answer, they would blithely accept it without any ability to judge as to whether it was even close to a realistic solution. Another result of the de rigeur egalitarianism that pervades our educational system is the elimination of streaming. Although it has been since abandoned, the British had a system whereby, at the age of eleven, the children were required to take what amounted to an IQ test. Those who passed went on to seven more years of rigorous academic training, the best of them subsequently admitted to university, depending on the results of national examinations. The students who didn't pass the 'eleven plus', as it was called, were given five more years of school and left at the age of sixteen to pursue apprenticeships in the trades. Streaming was continued in high school, with gradations of the difficulty of the subject matter being dependent on which of three streams the pupils were assigned to. I was fortunate enough to pass the eleven-plus, and by the time I left high school, I was fluent in French and German, had studied Latin, English language and English literature as well as the sciences, for five years. My parents were not highly educated, (in fact I was the first one in memory to go to college) nor were they wealthy. By current standards I grew up in abject poverty. I think what differentiates my childhood with that of a child of the nineties is that I lived for the first twenty-six years of my life without a television set in the house. During those dismal British winters, there were only three major diversions, the pub, sex, and reading. I was too young for the first two, and so I did a lot of the latter. What did make a major difference in my upbringing was the urging of my parents to obtain an education, the discipline and rigor of the schools that I attended, and a system that operated solely on merit. None of my instructors ever shied away from calling me stupid if that is how I seemed, and my psyche suffered not one whit. How on earth could I learn to think intelligently, if I didn't know when I was thinking stupidly? So here I am, hacking away on my WP, sounding like a sclerotic petrified old fart, bemoaning the passing of the 'good old days', knowing full well that some of them were bloody awful. But when I have to dumb down my speech in order to make myself understood, and when I remember my innumerate class of 'high school graduates', I know that some of those 'good old days' were bloody good too. --- This is a message from the Upstream mailing list. 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