
20% of UK school leavers illiterate and innumerate. Help my partner change this - petewailes
So, I've just read http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7691919/Fifth-of-school-leavers-illiterate-and-innumerate.html as part of my morning reads (and on a lighter note, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/7673436/Nothing-is-so-harmful-to-our-childrens-futures-as-education.html), and it gave me pause for thought. Firstly, a little background...<p>I'd consider myself a fairly bright person. I have exceedingly diverse interests, and a can talk in depth and with authority on politics, classical and contemporary music, literature from 1600 to the modern day, current theories on psychological development in humans from birth to adulthood and so on...<p>In addition, my partner is currently studying to become a teacher. She has equally diverse interests, and is also extremely bright.<p>Now, with her insight into the British classroom, I've come up with a theory: very few children are incapable of learning to be highly proficient in maths, English and the logical deductive reasoning and research in the quest of knowledge.<p>Where failure comes in is where the child, due to the influence of their peers, parents, or some other social pressure feels that they don't actually care to learn these things. It is not that it is beyond them, it is simply that they either passively don't see the need, or actively resist being taught.<p>This would fit well with the available data, as I can easily imagine (just from thinking back to my own school days) around one in five children believing that what they were being taught would have no relevance in the real world.<p>So the question that I'd like to ask is, how, as a teacher, could my partner try and beat the odds and ensure that the students entrusted to her care are prepared for the world they'll enter as adults as best as possible?<p>Suggestions on the back of a postcard, or in the comments below. Whichever...
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flipbrad
How about yourself gaining an understanding of facts and statistics and not
presenting the findings of a study as you did when it suggests that 17% of UK
school leavers are _functionally_ innumerate (limited to “very basic
competence in maths, mainly limited to arithmetical computations and some
ability to comprehend and use other forms of mathematical information”) and
22% are _functionally_ illiterate (i.e. have "less than the functional
literacy needed to partake fully in employment, family life and citizenship
and to enjoy reading for its own sake"). NOR for that matter does it suggest
that 20% are both illiterate AND innumerate. There may be some overlap but
instinctively I'd guess that the % of people that are both is significantly
below 20%.

For me this is a prime example of the real failings of our educational system
- school leavers have completely deficient bullshit-radars, zero healthy
skepticism, and a complete inability to spot false inferences. Coupled with a
total reticence to go to the source of so-called 'facts'.

The worst thing is that our media (which, in this day and age, you are now
part of, in broadcasting these findings) is amongst the worst culprit (and
thus in my eyes, most educationally deficient), as are our politicians (save
for a few brave souls like Dr Evan Harris, sadly voted OUT of his seat as an
Oxford MP last week), who even if they aren't, are slaves to the media in any
case.

~~~
petewailes
Couldn't fit the word functionally in. 80 letter character limit. If you go
through life assuming that someone isn't being dense or facetious, but that
there's a mitigating circumstance, you'll find people are more responsive, and
that you're more right more of the time.

~~~
flipbrad
you'll have to excuse me for the tone. I realise it was just a straight up
repetition of the original article's outrageously negligent strapline. But
it's still absolutely your duty to set it right rather than help propagate a
very misleading meme. And the same will be true of the generation your partner
is now teaching, bless her. Teach them to set messages right, based on fact
and truth not sensationalism and angst or ignorance. If our generation truly
revolutionised the media, let that be the revolution, not the creation of an
online echo chamber for misleading memes...

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viraptor
I'd go with... try teaching something different that has a real impact on
their lives and work from there.

In reality... a lot of people will forget what they were taught in school.
They really do not care about education as presented by school. And it might
shock some, but yes - they will never need any of their school knowledge per
se and you can live a happy life without being able to read. If you'd like to
make a difference: it doesn't matter if those 20% can pass any maths exam; it
matters if they can read their electricity bill and bank statement.

An old joke comes to mind: "- 5*5? ; - I don't know ; - If you steal 5 pounds
of lunch money from 5 other students, how much do you have? ; - 25 pounds!"

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flipbrad
Give them the internet and a problem to get to the bottom of - then back off
unless they have a question. And if they're not interested in your task, give
them some other problem to investigate. Just because one child doesn't care
about writing a Freedom of Information request to a public authority (even if
it's to ask how much their teacher gets paid, their MP spends on expenses,
time coppers spend filling in forms, times the local power station has been
reported for environmental infractions, or whatever) then find something else
they would - maybe it's looking up new techniques for computer graphics -
introduce them to modelling and show them how maths plays a role in that. Or
show kids the stock market. Get them to read up about how rich people avoid
paying taxes. Whatever.

Just make them feel confident, once they find a direction. Don't forget to
round them out, and teach them to be balanced, skeptical and sustainable.
Teach them to make parallels between systems - e.g. a balanced ecosystem is
resilient to change and challenge, so too is a balanced education, a balanced
portfolio, a balanced diet, a balanced peer group, and a balanced political
sphere.

The idea that we can ram 'knowledge' down young throats through rote learning,
and get anything useful out of the end product, is NONSENSE.

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barry-cotter
Given that ~26% of the British population will definitionally have IQs of 85
or less I think that's a pretty creditable result. They can mostly read, write
and do arithmetic; given what the teachers have to work with they're doing
pretty well.

 _Academics said that literacy skills had also failed to improve since the
late 1980s._

And what happened then? They got rid of streaming. They'd probably hit the
point of diminishing returns by then anyway but seriously there's only so much
blood you can squeeze out of turnip.

 _“People at this level can handle only simple tests and straightforward
questions on them where no distracting information is adjacent or nearby,” the
study said. “Making inferences and understanding forms of indirect meaning,
eg. allusion and irony, are likely to be difficult or impossible._

I don't think that's a problem with their ability to read, but to reason, and
to discriminate.

Anyway the only thing I can see as having some chance of reaching those with
these difficulties would be Direct Instruction or something similar, like
Kumon. This has the small problem that teachers will not stand for it. It
makes a stressful, demanding job a boring, stressful demanding job.

~~~
tokenadult
_Given that ~26% of the British population will definitionally have IQs of 85
or less_

Your percentage is incorrect. I think you were confusing what percentage would
be in either extreme range (low or high) with what percentage would be more
than one standard deviation below the mean.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Normal_distribution_and_sc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Normal_distribution_and_scales.gif)

~~~
barry-cotter
True. 16% not 26%.

------
yesbabyyes
I think that your insight, while simple, is profound. Yes, I think it's the
mind state, to a large degree.

With that insight, what does a teacher have to do? She has to find a way to
change their minds. She has to make it feel interesting also to them, and most
of all inspire them. She has to be a leader for that class, in an exploration
of the world.

Anytime a student asks why (anytime! In any context) that's an opportunity to
take that student, and her question, seriously. Have a discussion on why, the
reasons, perhaps the history of the subject matter.

Create a special environment. Let the student's know that even if the rest of
the school is boring, with teachers that just don't understand or seem grey
and dull, this is not that, it's different. Spark curiosity.

Don't argue with those who say they're not interested, cater to those who are,
and make it easy to join in.

But most of all, take the children seriously, create a culture of trust in the
class, and read the six lesson school teacher by John Gatto:
<http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html>

~~~
FluidDjango
Thanks so much for that. I printed and highlighted the pee out of that.

I've been hearing about Gatto for a while but have yet to pick up one of his
books.

I can quibble about some points, but most of it fits with my experience: the
abilities that I retain are the result of my _resisting_ the educational
system. So I expand the traditional maxim of, "1) Those who can... do; those
who can't... teach." to include:

2) Those who can't teach... administrate.

3) Those who can't administrate... design educational systems.

4) Those who are concerned only with controlling deviance (aka creativity)...
run for school board.

Disclosure: My UC-Berkeley diploma is validated by the signature of a movie
actor. [No, not Arnold; think early pleistocene era.]

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kierank
I'd suggest not lowering exam standards year on year as well as allowing
respected qualifications like GCSEs to be replaced with vocational GNVQs or
similar.

Also what's very important is a work environment conducive towards learning at
school and at home.

~~~
petewailes
Whilst we'd both love to see the former done, as someone who's not yet in a
position to influence government education policy yet, that's not a
particularly useful answer.

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jdietrich
Every reply so far has missed out on one crucial fact: it is not possible to
deviate from the officially approved method of teaching and keep your job. I
urge everyone to closely scrutinise the National Curriculum and the National
Strategies, bearing in mind that you will fail an OFSTED inspection for
deviating from either.

<http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/>
<http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/>

Teaching at KS1 and KS2 is completely micro-managed, with statutory
requirements set through the National Strategies on a day-by-day basis. Under
the guise of "disseminating best practice", the system forces teachers into
lock-step. If a child needs a little more time to grasp a concept, forget it.
You've got to move on to the next unit, and the next one, or you won't be able
to complete your Teacher Assessments. If they are lucky, the child will busk
it and nobody will notice that they never learned appropriate use of the
apostrophe; If they are unlucky, they will receive the mark of Cain - the
Statement of Special Educational Needs. It is a near-certainty that they will
never recover from this, and will be treated as a dunce for the rest of their
school career.

At Secondary level, matters are worse still. Almost all secondary schools are
surfing wave after wave of exam-driven panic. The abolition of the KS3 SAT has
helped matters, but continuous assessment has kept the pressure on to a great
extent. KS4 more closely resembles a death march than anything else; The whole
school becomes a machine for getting those all-important marginal students
those essential 5 A*-C grades. Any student too far ahead or behind the pace is
completely ignored. All other school functions become a tool for pushing up
that magical number. Student engagement matters only as much as it affects
those marginal students.

The primary function of school is not to teach, and anyone naive enough to
believe otherwise will quickly be corrected. A school is a bureaucratic
machine and the role of a teacher is to follow the Approved Procedure. Your
success or failure as a teacher will be measured entirely in terms of how
closely you imitate the State Approved way of doing things.

If your partner has an ounce of intelligence and decency, I'd advise her to
quit right now and do something else with her life. There's a lot wrong with
FE, but at least you've got some freedom to teach. In the private sector, you
won't be teaching anyone who actually needs your help, but at least you won't
come home crying. There are some real opportunities to actually engage with
young people in the voluntary sector. The pay is awful and funding erratic,
but at least you get a chance to actually do some good.

<http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue2.htm>

~~~
flipbrad
'Deschooling Society' by Ivan Illich is by far the best book on this topic
I've ever read. Old, and somewhat dated since it presages the Internet but
never experienced it - but still as fundamentally brilliant

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nopinsight
I am leading a team working on an AI-based learning game that should help with
literacy issues. The software implements several cognitive science principles
including those in lionhearted's comment:

> (1) at the edge of their current capabilities, which is to say doable but
> slightly challenging, (2) interesting, stimulating, and relevant to them.

We are pretty close to launching. If you're interested, please just get in
touch. (My email is in my HN profile).

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ippisl
I would look onto game design. game designers has plenty of techniques to
create a lot of motivation with people. just look at farmville , leading
millions of people to spend a lot of time in an inherently boring game. A good
book about game design: <http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004195.php>

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tokenadult
The failure begins in most cases with appallingly bad reading instruction in
school. See

[http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-
Invent...](http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-
Invention/dp/0670021105)

and the earlier sources it cites for research on what to do about that.

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Tichy
Just wondering, is she stuck to the British classroom, and how flexible are
the rules for what happens in the British classroom? What if the traditional
system simply doesn't work at all? How do alternative school systems like
Montessori compare?

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AN447
Incentivise and Inspire the students to care about what she's teaching. I've
been through the British system, it absolutely diabolical, if you want more
information follow me on twitter @ajrajanathan - send me a DM we can talk over
that

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lionhearted
People need to be studying things that are (1) at the edge of their current
capabilities, which is to say doable but slightly challenging, (2)
interesting, stimulating, and relevant to them.

Classrooms fail at this. Some kids are good at math, but do not like writing.
And vice versa. A little boy might be doing algebra very early, but does not
like nonfiction. Give him time! Let him work out his math and progress with
it, perhaps he'd get interested in reading a biography of a mathematician or
scientist at some point.

Likewise, maybe another boy is reading and writing at an advanced pace, is
devouring classic works, but is behind in math "for his age" - that's okay!
Give him time. If he needs more time in arithmetic or doing long division by
hand, let him spend time there while reading at a high level. He'll get there.

Subdividing based on age is asinine and crazy. It means a majority of people
will be studying at a skill level incorrect for them in an important
discipline. That's before even considering how boring school is for most kids.

Me? I loved physics, liked chemistry, and hated biology. Because the way it
was taught, physics was cool with acceleration, chemistry was interesting in
terms of mixing things, but biology was a bunch of boring memorization of
genome and species and things like that which didn't seem very important to
me. So, I really enjoyed my Freshman "introductory earth sciences" (physics,
chemistry, and a little geology if I remember correctly) and had a fun and
enjoyable time, but then I was forced to move into rote memorization biology
my sophomore year... I tried to skip ahead to physics, but they said no. Long
story short, I wound up dropping out of two high schools, and got into a
university despite that before dropping out of there too. Was a great decision
for me! The school system is broken - it doesn't meet kids where they're at or
where they want to be. Instead, it forces a strict curriculum that requires
memorization and obedience to pass.

Look at home schooling if you want inspiration. There's a big community
devoted to it, and home schooled _destroy_ mainstream teaching methods on
almost every metric except for social interaction/emotional maturity. (A big
problem for homeschooling, parents need to be diligent in getting their kids
representative social experiences if they're home skilled, at least enough for
them to relate to other people their age)

But that's really it - on just about every other metric, home schooling wrecks
on mainstream teaching methods. I think the biggest problem is that mainstream
schooling instruction is bureaucratic centrally planned with age being the
overwhelmingly important decision on what the kids learn.

How asinine! Everyone goes through cycles of being interested in different
things. If a kid has a knack for language and is doing hardcore immersion,
learning the Chinese characters that will let them read/write Mandarin,
Cantonese, and Japanese, and they're learning Mandarin and Japanese at a high
level and starting to read literature in the native languages... do you really
want to break that up because now it's time for geometry?

You introduce the kids to a little bit here and there, when they're ready for
it they learn it. Learning is one of the most exciting and coolest things in
the world. The fact that schools somewhat make learning dreadful and boring is
one of the most laughable things in the world. But again, you've got to meet
the student where he is at. Statistics can be taught via sports, or via census
data, or via business, or via hard science experiments, or... y'know? You've
got to find one that stimulates the pupil. One training going 100 kilometers
per hour towards another one going 180 kilometers per hour isn't going to get
it done for the vast majority of kids.

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santacruz
Leave it - this is the way it needs to be

~~~
santacruz
More detailed answer:

There is no correlation with what you about to teach them and their happiness.

