Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Quality of students is 'pretty dire' warn British companies

The "dire" quality of many school-leavers threatens to undermine Britain's future success in manufacturing and science, leading business figures have warned. The CBI said thousands of teenagers were turning their backs on studying science because of inadequate teaching and a belief that they can get better A-level grades in easier subjects.

Bosses warned that science and technology firms could abandon British graduates in future and look abroad to economic rivals such as India and China for new staff. Flanked by the UK heads of electronics giant Siemens and pharmaceuticals firm Sanofi- Aventis, CBI director-general Richard Lambert told reporters the Government must act immediately to avert a crisis. "The UK risks being knocked off its perch as a world-leader in science, engineering and technology," he said. "We cannot afford for this to happen."

The call came just days before 250,000 teenagers receive their A-level results. Last week academics warned that physics in particular is in long-term decline in schools and universities as many students pick "easier" courses. Alan Wood, chief executive of Siemens UK, said "embarrassingly large numbers of people" leave secondary school unable even to read and write properly.

Siemens struggles to find well-trained school leavers to work in manufacturing and take up apprenticeships, he said. "We find the quality of people coming out of the secondary education system is pretty dire on the whole," he said. "Naturally the ones who achieve greater success tend to go on to tertiary education and the quality of those coming out of school to an industry like ours leaves an enormous amount to be desired." There is a "very real threat" that firms will look overseas to India and China for new skilled recruits in future unless action is taken, he said. "If we just give up then as a society we are going to degenerate to become a developing country for the second 50 years of this century."

Nigel Brooksby, managing director of Sanofi-Aventis UK, called for reform of the school science curriculum. He said, "We employ just over 3,000 people in the UK. It is not the quantity of graduates, it is the quality. We are having to retrain graduates in laboratory skills. "If we are to continue to be a powerhouse of discovery for innovative new medicines, then we need to address not just graduates but getting science taught differently at school."

The CBI called on ministers to do more to recruit more specialist science teachers to inspire children to study the subjects. The new combined "double science" GCSE, which many pupils now opt for, does not provide the grounding they need to take sciences at A-level, the group said.

One possible solution would be to give all state pupils the right to study physics, chemistry or biology as separate subjects at GCSE - as is the case in many independent schools - rather than the combined science courses, the CBI said.

Demand for newly-qualified chemists, physicists, engineers and lab technicians has been rising consistently. Over the next eight years the UK will need to have found 2.4 million new staff with these skills, the CBI said.

Schools minister Jim Knight insisted the Government was addressing the issue. "Increasing the number of scientists is a priority for this Government," he said. "We are already making significant progress on delivering the actions being called for by the CBI. "Since 1997 there has been a 57% increase in the number of science, technology, engineering and maths graduates, outstripping increases in graduates in other subjects. "Chemistry and physics graduate numbers alone have increased by 24% and 20% respectively. "Science remains a popular subject at A-level, and there has been a 30% increase in the numbers training to teach science since 1997."

Source







History teaching in Australia under scrutiny

Every once in a while, Tony Taylor likes to go back to the coalface. So Taylor, an associate professor in education at Monash University and Australia's leading authority on history teaching, abandoned the ivory tower for two afternoons a week in 2001 and taught a Year 10 modern world history class at a rural Victorian high school. And to find out what his students knew in the first place, he gave them a simple written quiz, including this question: "What do you know about Lenin? How come he was famous? How do you know this?" And here's one of the answers Taylor got back: "Singer in the Beatles. Made good music. Listen to their music."

Taylor is quick to point out that the study of history is not, or ever should be, about memorising facts: facts about Lenin, or Lennon or anybody else. It is about learning "historical thinking", gaining "historical literacy" and "using that understanding to develop an informed moral, political and social view of the world we inhabit". But he concedes that such literacy can barely get off the ground unless students are given "narrative context"; that is, unless they are taught the great periods and events of the past and the great characters who inhabited them, in chronological sequence.

Along with 21 other luminaries, including former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr and economic historian Geoffrey Blainey, Taylor will play a leading role in Thursday's history summit in Canberra. The summit has been organised by federal Minister for Education, Science and Training Julie Bishop as part of the Government's campaign to pressure the state education systems into reinstating history as a compulsory subject in Australian schools.

Federal-state politics aside, the summit grows out of a sense, shared by many teachers on the ground, that the narrative context of history generally, and Australian history particularly, has been lost in our schools and that the subject, to quote John Howard in his Australia Day speech this year, "is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of themes and issues." "Too often," Howard told the National Press Club in Canberra, "history has fallen victim in an ever more crowded curriculum to subjects deemed more relevant to today. "And too often, history, along with other subjects in the humanities, has succumbed to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated."

Bishop wants compulsory, stand-alone history subjects from kindergarten to Year 10, with Australian history the focus in the final two years. If the states hear the message, well and good. If not, it will be amplified through the megaphone of the next quadrennial education funding agreement, which will deliver them about $40 billion of commonwealth money. Just as it has with report cards and flagpoles in school grounds, the Howard Government is prepared to micro-manage the way state education systems do history.

To strengthen Bishop's arm, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the confusion of Taylor's 15-year-old student regarding the identity of the leader of the Russian revolution, is widely repeated as far as our own history is concerned. Mike Goodwin, an inspiring and national award-winning history teacher at Mackay North State High School in Queensland, says that while most students come into senior years with some knowledge of the First Fleet and Australia's European origins, their grasp of 20th-century Australian history is skimpy at best.

Far from understanding the complex ways the Australian experience has been shaped by two world wars, for example, many students in high school cannot distinguish between those wars at all. "Apart from what they've learned from Anzac Day, the facts of our role in all conflicts are patchy and inconsistent," Goodwin says. "They don't have a big understanding of the social impact the wars had." It is with a view to conveying that impact, in the most vivid terms possible, that Goodwin has organised three overseas tours with his history students. They visit sites such as the Thai-Burma Railway, where nearly 3000 Australian prisoners of war died in 1942-43; Gallipoli, where 8000 Australians laid down their lives in World War I; and the main battlegrounds of the Western Front, where a further 40,000 fell. Students seek out graves with a Mackay connection and deliver eulogies to the fallen Diggers. It has given Goodwin a rare chance to witness the transforming power of historical consciousness.

"They just grow as people," he says of his students. "Not only does it enhance their understanding of the sacrifices of past generations, but as individuals they become more whole. They start to understand just what is important in life. "If the mobile phone doesn't work, it's not the greatest problem in the world, not if you've just lost your 18-year-old brother to war."

In one of the two papers prepared for the history summit, a survey of how Australian history is being presented now, Taylor provides plenty of evidence of why most schoolchildren, less fortunate than Goodwin's, are historically challenged on facts and understanding. Quite simply, history is not being widely taught, except in a vaguely postmodern sense. Until the two final years of high school and, with the partial exceptions of NSW and Victoria, it has been allowed to dissolve into a pomo porridge that throws together elements of history, geography and social studies into amorphous subjects with titles such as Time, Continuity and Change or Study of Society and the Environment.

So obscure are the outcomes-based descriptions of these subjects, says Taylor in his paper, "It is frequently very difficult to discern in several of the curriculum documents where exactly the teaching of Australian history may be found." What does the South Australian curriculum stipulate about history in senior high school? "Students critically analyse continuities and discontinuities over time," it propounds, "and reflect upon the power relationships which shape and are shaped by these."... What Taylor and history teachers on the ground repeatedly stress is that within such vague parameters it becomes all too easy for teachers without any interest or training in history to avoid the subject altogether.

When he inherited the education levers in NSW, Carr decided he was not prepared to accept the situation and its long-term threat to public culture. Since 1999, all NSW students from years 7 to 10 have been taught history as a distinct academic subject. In years 9 and 10 there are 100 mandated hours of Australian history, assessed by public examination. "I saw history as a superior intellectual discipline," Carr tells Inquirer. "It assesses how human beings have actually behaved in different circumstances, with a rigorous look at the oral and documentary record. "In an information age, the skills produced by studying history are more, not less, relevant. An employer will want a recruit who can go out and find the evidence and then, faced with a mass of it, think his or her way through it. "All of us have got to make decisions based on reports. How well are they written? Can you rely on the footnotes? The whole debate about Keith Windschuttle's criticisms of Aboriginal massacres draws our attention to this challenge of weighing evidence and being honest with readers. Look at the footnotes: do they justify the argument?" ...

To avoid setting off a spot fire in the so-called history wars, Bishop has been careful to convene what she calls the "sensible centre" and has left out hardened warriors such as Windschuttle, author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, and his chief antagonist, Tasmanian historian Henry Reynolds. But Carr remains cautious. "We've got to be careful about specifying content," he says. "It might be useful to recognise some of the choices, some of the spread. I go there a little cautious, however, about embracing an agenda from one school of history writing. I'm not prepared to see the egalitarian strand in Australian history junked in a bit of neo-con spring cleaning." But whatever specific historical narratives people think should be taught, they all seem to agree there should be more of it...

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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